Hasta La Creative!

This is a brilliant and unusual campaign to promote Israeli Pessek Zman chocolate bar (which means Time Out in Hebrew) that wittingly expresses the brand’s idea and slogan to “take a time out”.

The campaign uses posters that look like regular fashion ads, however the fashion models are missi…

Microsoft wasn’t willing to pay a premium for Yahoo, a company that would have helped them compete against Google, but the Redmond software titan still intends to move aggressively into online advertising.

BusinessWeek has the story :

It may be impossible to catch Google in search advertising. The company dominates the market, taking in 77% of the revenues from those little text ads that show up alongside the results for Internet search queries. Microsoft, after years of trying, is at 5% of U.S. search revenue, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier.

But Microsoft has a fighting chance on several other fronts. Perhaps most important is display advertising, the colorful banner and video ads that run at the top or along the side of Web pages. Microsoft is among the leaders in the fragmented field, while Google is a bit player. Although the display market is smaller than search, it’s expected to grow faster over the next few years because of a surge in video ads. Market research firm IDC (IDC) figures that by 2012 the display market will double, to $15.1 billion; revenue from search will reach $17.6 billion.

“We’re very persistent,” said Ballmer at a wireless conference last year, “If we don’t get it right, we’ll keep coming and coming and coming.”

Engagement Mapping is one of the better tools in Microsoft’s shed.

The technology anonymously tracks cookies, those digital footprints left on PCs by Web sites, to see if a consumer saw display or video ads within a month of making that ultimate click. Then it places values on each related online ad, weighting things like videos more heavily, since they’re likely to have more impact.

Ben Winkler is a believer. He’s director of interactive media at the Ingenuity Media Group, part of ad firm The Martin Agency. He’s been testing the Microsoft technology for one of his clients, wireless provider Alltel. The technology, he says, shows that display ads have an impact that had never been clear before. As a result, he plans to advise clients to spend a greater share of their ad dollars on display vs. search ads.

(TrendHunter.com) This is a brilliant and unusual campaign to promote Israeli Pessek Zman chocolate bar (which means Time Out in Hebrew) that wittingly expresses the brand’s idea and slogan to “take a time out”.

The campaign uses posters that look like regular fashion ads, however the fashion models are missing. Pl…

(TrendHunter.com) There is a man who has been contacted by the Iraqis, the Chinese, and several other world powers. Why? The German inventor, Werner Nickel, has developed a paint that can make whatever it coats invisible – at least to radar.

Located somewhere in the United Arab Emirates deserts, Nickel somehow inve…

(TrendHunter.com) Who knew Gothic architecture could be so unbelievably funky and hip? Kruisherenhotel, located in Maastricht, Netherlands proves that it can be. We’ve seen renovated churches as homes, but this 15th century monastery is a beautiful example of how the ancient old world architecture can thrive today an…

(TrendHunter.com) What do you get when you put together a bug and an old watch? Don’t know? Mike Libby solved this riddle by creating works of art from a combination of the two.

It happened when the discovery of a dead beetle left him wondering how it would look if it were mechanical inside. Out came an old watch a…

ABC has launched a new initiative in conjunction with several US universities that would be every journalism student’s dream. They are setting up on-campus broadcast stations in which students can work with ABC directly to gain hands on experience.

The company is committed to getting younger dem…

With the never ending increase in gas prices, people have started to think about fuel alternatives. E-Fuel Corporation, a company in California, has introduced the EFuel 100 MicroFueler, a device that weighs about 200 pounds, that uses 110 or 220 volt power supply and a wastewater drain that is jus…

My favorite TrendHunter, Lourdes recently shared a truly disgusting and troubling (for anyone with insect phobia) campaign with us that illustrated the importance of hand sanitizers through the use of insects. These new print ads for Carre Fresh follow a similarly disgusting, but less creepy formula…

Our San Francisco office has been growing quickly. When I visit I often get the strange sense I'm going back in time to the early days of the agency when we were building everything from scratch. The really cool thing about a second office is that you get to answer the question, "How would I do things differently?" Or, "Have I learned anything at all in the last 10 years?" A few observations.