Friday, January 28, 2005

A9 - Virtual Yellow Pages


Big Mama's & Papa's Pizzeria Posted by Hello


This is very cool.
A9, the search engine owned by Amazon, is now offering a virtual yellow pageas service. What this means is that you can do a search for a local service, and then see it's position on a map *see photos of the store, and virtually 'walk' up and down the street*
Try it for yourself:
Go here
Sign in, using your amazon login.
Search for a service (e.g. Pizza) in a location (the Zip code 90210 always works)
Click on the top rating result, Big Mama's & Papa's Pizzeria.
On the 'Block View' navigate round using the left and right arrows. Sunset Psychic Gallery is to the left, an intersecting street is to the right.
Amazon do this by driving vans round the streets of certain US towns with digital cameras and GPS macines, so the information should be always kept up to date.
Can't wait for it to come to the UK!

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Volkswagen Polo - A Selection of Views

Whethere it was officially sanctioned or not, the Polo viral certainly seems to have got a lot of coverage.

In roughly chronological order:

New York Post - first off the blocks

The Guardian - first major UK paper to feature the story

Digital Bulletin - UK trade press

The Observer - moves the story on a bit

The Mirror - gets lots of the details wrong

Mediapost - puts it into a marketing context

Jerusalem Post - very in depth semiotic analysis

Monday, January 24, 2005

Great idea, but...

Here's a great idea.
General Motors are launching a new service, with a US teaser campaign.
They are revealing their message, hangman-like one part at a time, on billboards all across the US.
Every day a different billboard is revealed, and all revealed words so far are shown on their site:

They've even created a forum for people to report new billboards, and brainstorm what the whole sentence could be:

Except...

They cocked up. It's possible to read the full sentence in the flash source of the page, so it took precisely no time at all for the answer to be cracked.

More at Adrants

Monday, January 17, 2005

New Polo Ad - Allegedly...

Surely VW wouldn't ever have seriously commissioned this?

(Original link has been removed - but film is still available here)

If so, it's a very risky strategy to get 'edgy' PR. My oney is on a couple of chancers making a fake film to try to get a name for themselves

EDIT - 3rd November 2005 - the film has moved location - it is now here

Friday, January 14, 2005

French Online Awards - Clic D'Or

Winners Here

Of particular interest should be:

Renault Modus ad campaign by Publicis (Bronze in launch campaign)

Renault Modus microsite, also by Publicis (Silver in brand sites category)

Durex Mix by Chewing.com (Bronze in the Interagir category)

Orange 3G by Euro RSCG (Gold in the brand sites catagory)

Friday, January 07, 2005

New GM Blog - Fastlane

A new corporate blog from General Motors - Fastlane

More at Adrants

Volvo XC90 V8 Site - Online Competitive Comparison

Volvo have launched a new site to promote their new XC90 V8 SUV, prior to a full TV campaign etc.
The site itself is not all that innovative, but one area allows you to make a direct comparison with other SUVs.

This is something I have also seen on another US auto site - Saturn also allows you to compare with other marques.

Interesting examples of manufacturer sites impinging on the territory of the 3rd party sites (Autotrader etc)

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Google Zeitgeist

Google Zeitgeist is the Google's end of year summary of the most popular search terms for the year. It makes fascinating reading, not least because they have included Froogle, the price comparison site, this year. So we can see that iPod was the most commonly searched for item on Froogle over the year, followed by digital camera, and that Ugg Boots beat both adidas and Nike in the footwear section.

But there's more - we also get a chance to see the Zeitgeist around the world, broken down for 16 markets.
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