For the Infected and their Infectors. About Brand Infection.

Last night, Adweek Magazines celebrated the winners of its inaugural Buzz Awards at The World Bar in New York City. Recognizing that branded entertainment has quickly become one of the hottest trends in targeting consumers, Adweek Magazines created this awards program to honor excellence in the integration of brands and media.

More than 170 entries were judged by Liz Carboni, Senior Manager Media Buying, Kraft Foods; Peter Gardiner, Partner/Chief Media Officer, Deutsch, Inc.; Pat Jones, Director of Development, Carat Entertainment; Jarrod Moses, CEO, Alliance; and Frank Zazza, CEO, iTVX.

Momentum Worldwide took home the grand prize for “Best Overall Program,” in addition to its “Sports” category win for “American Express - Live at the U.S. Open.”

• Best Advertainment: GM Planworks for Pontiac/General Motors
• Best Content Sponsorship: Fallon for Lee Dungarees
• Best Film/Movie Product Placement: Walt Disney/Buena Vista/FirstFireworks for Visa
• Best Internet: The Martin Agency for Olympus America
• Best Music: Translation for Hewlett-Packard
• Best Print: Young & Laramore for The Delta Faucet Company
• Best TV Product Placement: GM Planworks for Pontiac/General Motors
• Best Wireless Promotion: Fox Mobile Entertainment
• Best Integrated Campaign: McKinney for Audi
• Best Branded Location: deutschMedia, lead agency among several IPG agencies, for Bank of America

From Inside Branded Entertainment

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Vienna, Austria - A popular shopping street in the heart of the city.

The Starbuck brand is covered by bright, yellow fabric and plastic. So are the placards outside a bakery, a jewelry shop, a bank and all other businesses along the street.

The coverings are part of the 2-week art project dubbed “Delete!“, created by artists Christoph Steinbrenner and Rainer Dempf to spark public debate about just how much advertising society can take.

“You can’t see the landscape anymore. It hurts the eyes.” Still, the artists did not set out to just conceal the ads — they want to create awareness about them.

“It was important to us to have a bright, highlighting color. Not black or white … that would have made the signs disappear,” Steinbrener said. “Aside from the visual impact, we wanted to create a discourse about the environment in the public space, that’s happening now.”

The two artists then sought sponsors for the project but they were met by skepticism. City officials did not believe that they could get business owners to agree to have their brands and signs covered up temporarily.

Had we used artistic arguments, we would never have succeeded.

But Dempf and Steinbrener succeeded, using economic arguments. They said the project would spark curiosity, attracting more shoppers to Neubaugasse, which intersects with Mariahilfer Strasse, one of Vienna’s busiest shopping districts. The two were so convincing that the Chamber of Commerce became the main contributor to the project’s $245,000 budget.

More Pictures on Delete! project page

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Malthe Sigurdsson, from Skype, did a talk at Reboot 7 about how they built the brand and the basic principles behind their way of working: do simple things really well; release all the time (ie keep updating the application in small bites); evolve; open up; and viral features. A good illustration of the idea of simplicity is their preference for plain language - so talk about sharing and calls, not peer-to-peer and VOIP or telephony.

Skype has about 45 million registered users without advertising. People got to know the brand and functionality through word-of-mouth, nothing else. So it shouldn’t take long till the verb “to skype” will be as frequently used as “to google”, depending on how many users still adopt the software in the future and what the big telecoms have planned in order to compete.

• Talk about the Skype Brand (mp3)
• Presentation Outline (pdf)

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According to Apple News, in a recently published report, Vivaldi Partners and Forbes magazine showed Apple has increased its brand value by 38 percent in the last four years, largely on the popularity of its iPod digital media device. Vivaldi Partners estimated Apple’s overall brand value for 2005 at US$5.3 billion. Google and Blackberry tie for second, while Amazon is in fourth place. The ranking was determined by taking the compound annual growth rate of each brand over a period of the last four years.

Vivaldi Partners sees the biggest possible growth rate for Apple in the mobile-/tv-market and in car stereos.

• Top20 Brand List
• Expansion Opportunities

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Working out is healthy.
But teens and younger men don’t care much about health when practising the new Jackie Chan moves. They just want to be cool.
Along this assumption the agency J. Walter Thompson created a print advertisement for the S.R. Monza Karate School.

Found at AdBlather

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