Cocktail partners with The Mall
Posted in: UncategorizedLONDON – Community shopping centre operator The Mall is looking to partner with lifestyle brands to target 4.5 million weekly shoppers in 23 shopping centres throughout the UK.
LONDON – Community shopping centre operator The Mall is looking to partner with lifestyle brands to target 4.5 million weekly shoppers in 23 shopping centres throughout the UK.
LONDON – Emap’s Yours magazine, a lifestyle title aimed at over-50s women, has launched a new bookazine called “50 Years of Everyday Fashion”.
LONDON – Titan Outdoor has secured a campaign for Gran Canaria tourism across its rail, road and shopping centre portfolio, as part of a marketing campaign worth around £448,000.
OMFG! WTF? We don’t know what drugs they use over in Sweden but, damn, we want some now!
GSD&M has created a couple of new spots for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. One is pretty ordinary, showing a couple of teens who are burning their possessions, having apparently burned out themselves. The second one is a bit trippier, showing a teen building—and then encasing himself inside—a large and pretty snuggly-looking marijuana cocoon (with a street value off the charts). But the fun doesn’t last: He soon emerges from his fuzzy lair, looking at least a decade older, chubby and balding. Apparently, smoking pot can turn you into Kyle Gass, minus the talent.
—Posted by Tim Nudd
LONDON – TNS is to extend the reach of its interactive research division into South America, with the launch of an online access panel next week.
While this scenario is, at best, a bit of a stretch, the commercial in which the scenario plays out does a pretty good job commanding one’s attention.
LA Times sent a reporter to DomainFest, the annual get together of domain name speculators, brokers and developers.
Two of the biggest practitioners, Oversee.net and Demand Media Inc., are based in the Los Angeles area and have collectively received more than $450 million in venture capital investment to fuel domain name buying sprees.
The bidding paddles flew Tuesday and Wednesday in the hotel ballroom at DomainFest. Individual speculators and deep-pocketed companies snapped up domains such as Porn.net for $400,000, Bookmarks.com for $300,000, Alimony.com for $75,000, Butcher.com for $50,000 and Satinpanties for $10,000.
The more than 600 people who paid as much as $995 to attend the conference also got to hear from one of the “domainer” idols: college dropout Frank Schilling of the Cayman Islands, who started buying Internet addresses with credit cards and eventually amassed 300,000 addresses valued by some would-be buyers at more than $100 million.
Schilling works out of his beach house, where he watches what was until recently the largest TV in the world, and clears about $20 million a year from sites as varied as Homeforeclosure.com and Crosswordpuzzles.com.
Golfer Phil Mickelson and family have launched a nationwide search for people to appear in an upcoming ad campaign for Crowne Plaza Hotels
We’ve reached the zenith—or is it the nadir?—of Web 2.0. You can now visit the Dunkin’ Donuts channel on YouTube. Of course, there’s a UGC contest going on there. Explains Dunkin’ honcho Frances Allen: “Our loyal customers regularly tell us stories, both heartwarming and funny, about how they keep this country running. We’re pleased to launch our new YouTube channel to give people a chance to tell their unique stories in their own creative way.†Oddly, I have seen folks at Dunkin’ tell “stories†in “creative ways†about how they “keep this country running.†Scary stuff. Anyway, I enter all marketing-related contests here on AdFreak, and this one’s a no-brainer. Rachael Ray walks into a shop with a cup of joe from Starbucks, and Fred the Baker takes his doughy, caffeinated revenge. That’s how I keep America running. Here’s Fred in a classic ’80s spot. Bakerman, this French vanilla’s for you!
—Posted by David Gianatasio
The block’s getting hot in Akron, Ohio, right now, at least for Kristen DeGroat and the horse she was trying to sell. The Saginaw News goofed up her classified ad, which ran under the header “Good Things to Eat†instead of the one for horses and stables. Responses, which were numerous, ranged from people asking her how she sleeps at night to people warning her about PETA to people—no joke—making offers on horse meat. The mind reels. Kristen and others were quite upset by the whole thing, which makes sense, until you take a step back—at which point you’ll realize that when our world syncs up with the one in David Lynch’s head, you just have to laugh.
—Posted by David Kiefaber
LONDON – The UK’s newspaper websites suffered a significant fall in unique users during December, with Telegraph.co.uk being hardest hit and losing more than 2m users, which pushed it below the Times Online, according to the latest ABCe newspaper website figures.
LONDON – Countyweb.com has appointed Jason Dummer as data sales director at its data sales arm Listlocator.
LONDON – Data marketing company Blueberry Wave has expanded its senior team with the appointment of James Dickens and Natasha Parker-Coughlin as account directors and Simon Richards as a developer.
Evey year there are advertisers who don’t want to shell out the big bucks for Super Bowl commercial prices. They try to find ways to associate themselves with the big game – which doesn’t usually make the NFL too happy – which is why there are constant references to “the big game” instead of using the real name of the event.
According to MediaPost, the newest advertiser to take this route is KFC. Their tactic? To try to get a scoring player to perform the so-called chicken dance in the end zone.
The Yum Brands-owned company will pay $260,000 in the name of the dancer to its Colonels Scholars, a charity providing college scholarships. That sum could very well entice a grown football player to flap his wings.
The NFL is not amused. “This has nothing to do with us,” spokesperson Brian McCarthy grumbled. “This is Super Bowl Ambush Marketing 101. Everyone looks to draft off the excitement for the game.”
If KFC succeeds, that quarter million dollars will be chump change compared to the reported $2.7 million going rate for 30 seconds of air time. Rob Frankel, a branding expert based in Los Angeles and no big fan of Yum Brands, says: “If they pull it off right, it could be good. I mean, it’s a motherhood issue, giving money to charity. And it’s not a humiliating thing they’re asking a player to do.”
Frankel says restaurant chain El Pollo Loco (The Crazy Chicken), with units in California, Arizona and Texas, is identified with the chicken dance. “If I were El Pollo Loco,” he joked, “I’d put out press releases, saying to watch the Super Bowl for the player doing our chicken dance and save myself a cool quarter million.”
Rick Maynard, a KFC spokesperson, tells Marketing Daily that the company is reaching out to those players most likely to score during the game to “let them know about the offer.” KFC also is approaching half-time entertainer Tom Petty with the same deal. “There are lots of ways to advertise,” he says. “We think this is unique, and will get people talking about something that might take place during the game itself.” He calls the dance the “domain of bad wedding reception music nationwide,” but still thinks viewers will connect the dots from chickens to flapping wings to KFC hot wings, which is the focus of this promotion.
Just to be safe, KFC has lined up former Atlanta Falcons player Jamal Anderson, who was known for his “Dirty Bird” end zone dance, to be on site prior to what KFC refers to as “the big game.” “We think this is a fun and creative marketing concept that both fans and the media will be interested in, and we’re spreading the word through an online digital campaign,” Maynard says. PR is being handled by Weber Shandwick. The company is also e-mail blasting the nearly million who have signed up to receive news at kfc.com.
KFC is also running a consumer promotion wherein people can upload videos of themselves doing the chicken dance and win “the ultimate big game party,” including a flat-panel TV, a limo to bring in the guests, cheerleaders to fire up the crowd, a spread of KFC and a cleaning service for post-party tidying. Entries are made at showusyourhotwings.com, with the winner announced on Monday.
KFC isn’t the only company we’ll see doing this. In fact, there are probably too many to count that jump on the “Big Game” bandwagon.
Don’t know what this mysterious chicken dance is? Watch the video below from The Lawrence Welk Show where they teach their viewers how to do this god-awful dance.
LONDON – Kia Motors Nigel Unwin has left his post of events, promotions and sponsorship manager to help market rival Korean car marque SsangYong in the UK.