The Answer

THE FIVE SECOND COMMERCIAL ARRIVES....BRIEFLY

Good morning:

METACAFE "FIVE SECOND COMMERCIAL" Interesting article (Here) in AdWeek this week about Metacafe, one of the several user-contribtor video sites offering a five second video commercial during the pre-roll of videos they serve. Their thinking is that five seconds is below the "irritation threshhold" for visitors, but still enough to get some kind of message across. Click on any of the top videos, and you'll see an example of the "five second spot" : Metacafe

IGN "VIDEO ADS" Game network IGN has decided to pull banner ads from its sites and focus instead on video and rich media ads. (Forbes has an overview of this move: Forbes article) IGN's thinking is that their gaming customers are so overwhelmingly on broadband connections, the time has come to scrap the static of .GIF animated banner, and use video and Flash to push higher-quality and more interactive ads. Could be the beginning of the tipping point. Here's a sample of IGN's sites with the new video ads--BTW, they just got bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp: IGN site

REEBOK "THE ANSWER IX" Allan Iverson of the NBA's Philadelphia 76'ers is to basketball what 50 Cents is to Rap-- a very public example of a dangeorus man. Of course, he's got a shoe to sell, in his case the Reebok "Answer IX," after Iverson's nickname, which is "The Answer." This is year number nine, or IX, and Reebok celebrates with a very cutting-edge website that features a masterful blend of interactivity and video. The whole site is beautiful, stuffed with slick, high-end video accompanied by a music soundtrack. But count the number of places and choices where a visitor can control the experience---right up to downloading special mixed versions of commercials and interviews to the SONY PlayStation. (Iverson, of course, also has a SONY PlayStation game he endorses--the guy is a conglomerate) But this site is the next answer to the question "how does video get interactive?" The Answer IX

SONY PICTURES "THE DaVINCI CODE" This summer's biggest blockbuster could likely be the movie version of The DaVinci Code, starring Tom Hanks, and directed by Ron Howard. (Avika Goldman, who won the best screenplay Ocsar for "A Beautiful Mind" wrote the film adaptation) The website has all sorts of fun codes and puzzles, and viral features, which are updated in complexity every day. Interesting marketing note is that the site is deeply integrated with Google, and you need to use Google's many products---search, maps, etc--to solve many of the puzzles. Google will be doing more of this, integrating their products into marketing campaigns to make them interactive. (HBO just built a "Sopranos" map of New Jersey, using Goggle maps: Sopranos Map) The DaVinci code site raises the bar on what make's a great movie website: Official Davinci Code Website

NORELCO / PHILLIPS "SHAVEEVERYWHERE.COM" Welcome to marketing in the 21st century! Norelco jumps on the trend of "man-scaping" with their new electric BodyGroom razor, designed to shave a man really, really close, uh, well...pretty much anywhere. Some may get squimish about the details, but here's an (R-rated) website for the "BodyGroom" shaver that's got some genuine belly laughs---A suave MC (in a bathrobe) touts the virtues of (what Calvin Klein would consider) a close shave. BTW, the production values on this site are great, because it uses tricks and tools availavle in Flash 8, and shows off some of the cool video interactivity we can now do. And what you see here can be done not only in Websites, but in rich media banners, too. This same site could just as easily be served up as an expandable online ad: Shaveeverywhere.com

Here's another shaving pitch from Madison Avenue, circa 1950:

"The Whale put Jonah/
down the hatch /
but coughed him up/
because he scratched...
...Burma Shave!"

Thanks--RJ