For the Infected and their Infectors. About Brand Infection.

Pez Mp3 Player
Under a recently granted licensing agreement with Pez Candy, a gadget design company Lincoln West Studios will soon begin selling MP3 players modeled after the big-headed plastic treat sleeves. It should be released in early Summer ‘05. The gadget will be built around a Samsung chip and will have 512MB capacity, as well as an LCD screen. The device will look exactly like a traditional Pez dispenser from at least two sides and will come in a variety of colors. Pezmp3.com

iPod Shuffle with Display (Fantasy)
iPod Shuffle with Display. A fantastical invention and analysation of the popular player. With Flash-Demo explaining the possible navigation structure. It would be cool to release this device although it cuts away some of iPod’s market share.

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eBay has launched classified ad websites in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. The sites are all branded Kijiji - Swahili for village. They slightly resemble CraigsList sites, in which eBay bought a 25 per cent stake in last August.

Apparently eBay says its new service does not compete with Craig’s List, though the Kijijis do overlap with Craig’s existing listings in Berlin, Montreal, Paris, Rome and Tokyo. Read more »

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Sega USA brings us the true adventures of Chad, a guy who was so into Super Monkey Ball Deluxe that he decided to live in a ball.

The viral marketing campaign consists of a 6-part mini serie getting showcasted on mybigball.com. Absurd but fun and surely cheaper than airing this on tv or in newspapers.

Credits: Sega of America, Agency: Mekanism

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Today, Sony has launched its new website for the do everything device PSP, created by webdesign agency Zugara. The site highlights the gaming, music, photo and video capabilities. A second site, also developed by Zugara, is a tutorial site with female talking head.

Check out the new PSP Website

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Rich media ads are becoming more and more important in the marketing mix, as the new 44 customers acquired by Doubleclick’s DART Motif confirm.

And in rich I really mean rich. There is a whole new trend of completely branding a publisher’s website with background color, two (synchronized) banners and additionally a contextual Ad.

The iPod Shuffle’s SuperFX method consists of “shuffle-arrows” moving from the right side to the top of the screen while painting the site’s background in brand green.

Companies like Audi and Deutsche Telekom have used this new kind of AdFormat already to present their products on Spiegel.de (currently showing the iPod Ad, be quick!) - with Audi it was the new SUV Q7 and a massive background picture of the sahara, Deutsche Telekom had a pink background.

Read more »

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According to an article on ClickZ, a study was done in which about 19% of the respondents astonishingly reported they would tattoo themselves with the logo of their favorite brand.

The most-favored brands were:

1. Harley-Davidson
2. Disney
3. Coca-Cola
4. Google (!)

I understand some bikers might brand themselves with a Harley-Davidson tattoo in order to brag in front of their rocker-friends but … Google? The search engine surely is loveable. So is their logo suitable for a cool tattoo? I don’t think so.

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Three of the biggest newspaper publishers in the United States, the Gannett Company, Knight-Ridder Inc. and the Tribune Company, are joining forces to buy 75% of the news aggregator Topix.net, a Web site that monitors more than 10,000 online news sources.

Each publisher will own 25 percent of the company. Topix.net, based in Palo Alto, Calif., will retain the rest and continue to run the site. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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MSN has just reveiled its new search advertising service and hopes to hook advertisers with extra tools that will help them select which keywords work best at luring target customers. For example, the list of available keywords for a certain product will show which ones work better with men or women and specific age groups and income levels. Advertisers will be able to purchase keywords for use only at certain times of the day or on weekends in order to target a specific group (=demographic targeting). After an ad campaign has ended, MSN will provide customers data on the types of people who clicked on ads.

More Screenshots

The service will put MSN in competition for ad dollars with similar products from No. 1 US search engine Google Inc and No. 2 Yahoo! Inc. Based on the list of features and just generally speaking the MSN AdCenter could be a very valuable alternative for marketeers.
MSN AdCenter will begin testing in two markets - France and Singapore. Microsoft is vague about when the test will begin, saying only that it will be within the next six months.

Search engine marketing will generate €1.4 billion of spending in Europe this year, according to a report on DMAsia.com. The UK has Europe’s largest online advertising market - expected to generate more than €1 billion by 2010.

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Flickr, a popular online photo management service in the world wide web, will be acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. This is the third high profile Blog/RSS related buyout of 2005. Live Journal was bought by Six Apart, while Ask Jeeves snapped up Bloglines. Read more in the official Flickr Blog

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Japanese designer Yugo Nakamura has launched Amaztype, an eye-candy flash application to visualise the broad product database of Amazon.com. I created an example showing the word “Brand“. Besides the visual outcome the user can click on a book or CD and then gets more information about it. Creative, Intelligent, Different. Useful?

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Anarchy Online players will soon see advertisements on billboards stationed in central regions of the game’s futuristic landscape. Online game developer and publisher Funcom, based in Sweden, announced today that it has inked an exclusive deal with New York City-based Massive, one of a small number of companies creating a viable market in in-game advertising.

As consumers spend less time watching television and more time playing games (as indicated by numerous studies, including one from Nielsen), the game industry is turning its attention to understanding the potential to drive additional revenue from in-game advertising.

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Chris Busch writes:

Take Evian ?? origins in the French Alps, mountain aquifer, special bottling process. Feel fresh, young, and beautiful with Evian, the original beauty product. The story tells of the Cachat Springs located in the quaint town of Evian-les-Bains on the southern shore of Lake Geneva in the Haute Savoie region of the French Alps. Suddenly I’m having a European experience through the bottle of chilled water I just procured at the c-store with the filthy floors. I feel healthier. I’ve redefined cool. It’s not just water, but water from the French Alps. It’s superb water. Beyond all other waters. I feel smarter. I look better. You’ve lifted me out of my mundane, middle-class existence. Thanks, Evian. I love you. I need you.

And for those still not getting the point: It’s just water. Simple but expensive water. You can solve your thirst problem by running into the bathroom, for free. A customer astonishingly buys bottled water because of the way it makes him/her feel, because of the impact the story has on a person’s mood, not because you need the fluid. Don’t like Evian? Try out Volvic.

Story by Seth Godin, Pictures by Brandinfection

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The Austrian art collective Monochrom attempts to evaluate the actual power of brands by making people draw a total of twelve logos from memory, 25 people per brand. Their website Brandmarker shows quite interesting results.

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Axefeather is a website created to promote the deodorant Axe (Lynx in the UK) among young people. Feather is part of a series of brand building executions aimed at a male target audience of 16- to 20-year-olds inviting them to tickle an attractive girl lying on a bed with a feather. Depending on where she’s being tickled the girl responds with a variety of wriggly reactions. The site recorded over 2 million visitors in two weeks(!) and has just won The Guardian monthly interactive showcase. Sexy! The executing agency is Dare Digital.

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