Viral Ad Network

Disappointed to have missed Match of the Day on Sunday evening, I thought I’d give the Superbowl a try to quench my thirst for football.

I thought I quite enjoyed American football; it is violent and exciting enough to keep my attention! However, I was soon fed up with the stop and start nature of the show. I think my mistake was watching it on the BBC where most of the program was pundits explaining the basics of the game and desperately trying to fill the time.

In the US, these gaps would have been ad breaks. The Superbowl is famous for its ads, so maybe this was what I was missing! With CBS charging about $2,700,000 for a 30 second ad, I was expecting the ads to be pretty high quality. Here’s a couple of my favourites…

$2.7m is a lot of money for an ad space. However, the Superbowl has an estimated 100 million viewers, so it works out at $0.03 a viewer – Pretty good value?

Perhaps on the surface, but are these viewers all engaging with the content? These viewers could be making tea, paying the pizza delivery guy, or if they are female, completely disengaged by the huge number of male-orientated ads!

To counter this drain of U.S. ad spend, here at the Viral Ad Network we are running a special offer. For February only, we are doing a deal on U.S. targeted campaigns. We’re giving 2500 away views for free when you spend $999 on 5000 views through the network.

Check out our offer here

Great campaign to start the week off…

(by Del Campo, Nazca Saatchi and Saatchi via Adverblog)

Following on from my previous post on how your profile can be used as a marketing tool, I have recently encountered an interesting use of this…

http://oneideaaday.tumblr.com/

A job-hunting junior strategic planner will be posting an ‘idea a day’ on his tumblr until someone hires him. This is a great example of someone marketing themselves as a brand. It shows that he gets social media (each idea is under 140 characters so can be tweeted) and the ideas vary between medium so potentially appeal to lots of different branches of advertising.

I am looking forward to following his plight. It will be interesting to see if his ideas stay at a similar standard, get worse if he loses his inspiration for the project, or if they get better as he gets feedback and finds a more efficient creative route!

Good luck Nathanael!

(thanks to Indi.Ca on Flikr for the photo)

There has been a growing chatter surrounding the idea of people as brands. Be it ‘Brand Tiger’ and his recent form of brand deception (see Jim Prior’s Mad Comments), or people selling themselves to get ‘the best job in the world‘.

I think that this is an interesting notion. Platforms such as facebook open us up to reconnaissance research into each other: be it for job interviews, university places, or even just to ‘Link In’, we now need to be aware of our public facing persona.

This makes me wonder about the recent appearance of http://niccageaseveryone.blogspot.com/

This site is (possibly) a clever new Viral Campaign promoting Nic Cage: the Brand! It shows his diversity in the roles that he would have been perfect for, and his versatility.

It’s also a good way of losing 10 minutes. Fair play to Nic though, it does seem to be picking up momentum – there have already been 98 new additions this year!

thanks to Eric Verkamp for his Nic Cage as Hurley

I just got sent an interesting request from a friend of mine – he’s applying for a job and as part of the application process he’s been asked to film a job interview talking about the company, put it on YouTube, and drive traffic to it to see who can get the most views.

The result is that thousands of people will be getting emails from friends asking them to watch a video of one of their  friends recommending the company (great way to mix viral marketing and word of mouth!)

You can seem my friend Alex telling the worst joke ever here. (it’s worth it – it’s about dwarfs)

As we all count the days until the ribbon is cut on Cabot Circus, Harvey Nicols have unveiled an adorable series of print ads featuring the Aardman creations dressed in designer attire from the department store.

Though it won’t convince me to splash out on an Alexander McQueen dress or Christian Louboutin shoes as modelled by Lady Tottington, having the well-loved Bristolian duo Wallace & Gromit front the campaign for the upmarket chain is definitely going to prove popular with consumers and their children.