Archive for the 'advertising' Category

I like this: HP Let’s Do Amazing

Up there with some of the most unimaginative slogans that advertising wankers have come up with, Let’s Do Amazing doesnt sound like it’s going to be all that amazing. In fact if it weren’t for Rhys Darby I probably wouldn’t find it funny at all. I imagine that his comedy might even be lost on a great number of Americans?

Smart Energy – Junk Ballet

smart_energy-junk_ballet-zoetrope

I haven’t posted anything advertising related for a while. But GPYR has made a couple of corkers lately, this one in particular impressed me.

This is a new ad for Spring Valley Smart Energy called Junk Ballet -- featuring a rather large and precarious looking 3D stroboscopic zoetrope. Wikipedia describes a zoetrope as a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

A 3D stroboscopic zoetrope is something a little different. Using what looks like an old merry go round, they constructed a scene from junk that is 5m in diameter and spins at around 40km/hr. They then use strobe lighting to bring it to life with the end result being an animated 3D scene that is really quite spectacular.

Unfortunately, Patts werent the first to come up with the idea of using a zoetrope in a commercial. You might have seen the huge 10m contraption for Sony Bravia. While Sony is using this 174-year-old technology to draw attention to some new features of the Bravia, Spring Valley are using it to suggest that drinking Smart Engery will give you amazing brain power? Or something. Never mind how silly the Creative Director sounds, he’s actually quite bright.

It has irons flying in and out of washing machines, TV’s, flying books, toilets… what’s not to like!? Not sure exactly how my girlfriends cousin got himself into the ad yet but it doesn’t surprise me huhuh.

Without further ado:

Full credits:

Creative agency: George Patterson Y&R Melbourne
Executive Creative Director: Ben Coulson
Copywriter: Simon Bagnasco
Art Director: Chris Northam
Producer: Luisa Peters
Group Account Director: Mathew Cummings
Account Director: David Shekleton
Account Exec: Damien Miller
Production Company: Revolver
Director: Kris Moyes
Executive Producer: Michael Ritchie
Producer: Pip Smart
Post-Production: Fin Design
Editor: Stuart Reeves at Guillotine
Sound/Music: Simon/Michael Nylon Studios

The making of:

Defence Force – The Paper Baron

So the Air Force / Defence has come out with a nice little flash paper airplane game. The Paper Baron.

At first glance it might seem like every other paper plane flash game out there but on further investigation it is a little different.

give it a shot! The Paper Baron.

Affiliate Marketing

Many of you would have heard of affiliate marketing, even if you haven’t you can probably figure out what it is. Basically it is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

So as an affiliate, you find a product that you think you can sell of behalf of the products creator, and if successful you will receive a sales commission. These commissions are generally in the are of 1% to 100% of the price of the product, usually 50% or 75%. If selling a recurring billing product as a subscription, affiliates will earn commission for each rebill. So as you can see, it can be an extremely lucrative business.

There are a few tactics that affiliate marketers will use in order to drive traffic to the products sales page, the main one being Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords, or Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Recently Google has changed their rules a bit and you can no longer link directly to an affiliate link on your ad, however there seems to be quite a bit of that going on today. So in order for your PPC ads to work, you will need to create some kind of landing page from where prospective customers can then click on your affiliate link. One such was it to create what is called a review page.

Here is an example of a review page for some weight loss products.

http://www.reviewcb.com/remedies/lose-weight.html

As you can see, it is a simple page with two product reviews. The point of this is to attempt to convince the user to click through on the affiliate link to the sales page of the product. Once they have done that it is totally out of your hands, so obviously it is important to chose a product with a great sales page.

Chris McNeeney or Chris X as he like to be known, has just released a product called Google Nemesis. This is attempting to help wannabe affiliate marketers get ahead of the rest by implementing some clever keyword tracking technology, along with some ready made review page templates. That page i linked to up there was made with this product. He has demonstrated a number of pages he created using Google Nemesis that are pulling in well over $1500USD a day.

Once you have this review page setup, you can then start your Adwords campaign and see how convincing you have been with your reviews. This could end up costing you a fortune for nothing, as all those clicks are costing you money and if they do not complete the process you have lost that lead forever.

Another way is to build a list of subscribers that you can market directly to again and again. This is not easy and takes a great deal of time to build a list of substantial size. If you have a huge list of say, 50,000 subscribers, and 10% of those buy the product you marketed directly to them you can see the huge amount of commissions you will receive just from sending one email.

In order to build a list you need what is called a ‘squeeze page’. This is a page that is used to grab peoples attention with a free offer of some sort, then convince them to put a name and an email address in to get said free offer. It could be an ebook or something like that.

Here is an example of a squeeze page.

www.milliondollarcommissions.com

What you see is it is offering a free ebook and has an ‘opt in’ form at the bottom. This way you can get the visitors information and it is yours to keep until they unsubscribe or the email dies etc. You can probably somehow work these two techniques together then that would be very beneficial to you indeed.

I am interested in this business so will come back to the topic again. In the meantime here are some links you might be interested in:

www.djknemesis.com
www.affiliatemarketershandbook.com
Brad Callen’s Adwords Made Easy

The Luck Factory

New Intralot spot by George Patterson Y&R called The Luck Factory. It’s pretty strange and it is also pretty adventurous for a new advertiser, but i kinda like it. Take a look!

The real true history of Australia?

You probably know of this ad for the AFL from a couple of months ago. Well a bit of a piss take has popped up on youtube done by the AKTIFMAG dude.

The true history of Australia – AFL 150 Years

Here is a new ad for you all. This is The True History of Australia. Never mind the history books!

Enjoy!

The making of Schweppes: Burst

Check it. no sound.

Download Title

carlton draught – skytroop

So those advertising dudes famous for groundbreaking beer adverts such as The Big Ad and Flashbeer, have come up with yet another similarly outrageous advertising campaign for Carlton Draught. As we have come to expect from these guys, probably Ant Keogh and Grant Rutherford, the ad is very ostentatious and will, i am sure, sell quite a lot of booze to yobbos. Since leaving George Patterson Y&R and following Creative Director James McGrath over to Clemenger BBDO quite a while ago now, i think this might be the first major campaign for Carlton Draught they have done. I could be wrong however, no one really tells me anything hah!

Anyway, here it is. In great viral tradition i think peeps over at Clems must have just been told today to release it to the masses.

or to see it in all it’s Vividas glory head to the official site.

EDIT:

Full credits:

Agency: Clemenger BBDO Melbourne.
Executive Creative Director: James McGrath
Creative Director (& Writer): Ant Keogh
Creative Director (& Art Director): Grant Rutherford
Agency Producer: Julie Rutherford
Film Director: Paul Middleditch (Plaza films)
Producer: Peter Masterson (Plaza films)
Editor: Peter Whitmore (The Editors)
Digital SFX: Animal Logic
Flame Artist: Angus Wilson
Sound: Park Road Studios. Nigel Scott/Michael Hedges
Fosters Marketing Director: Cameron McFarlane
Account Director: Paul McMillan/Phil Baker/Helen Fitzsimons
Strategy Planner: Paul Reese-Jones

the million dollar website re-opens!

So! After yonks and yonks of just sitting there quietly and very slowly making me a millionaire (hah!) with Google Adsense ads, I have decided to relaunch the Million Dollar Website.

As many of you may recall this is a site i created to blatantly ride the coattails of Alex Tew, who on August 26 2005, created a website called The Million Dollar Homepage. This sparked a media frenzy in the months to come. I myself was almost a part of this frenzy after i was contacted by a reporter for the Financial Review for an interview, but alas for reasons i can’t recall the the interview fell through.

The idea was simple, and it worked exceedingly well, taking only 5 months for the last pixel lot to be sold. This last lot was actually auctioned off on eBay for a total of $38,100.00 USD. He had made a grand total of $1,037,100 USD by the end. Amazing. I have made… a smaller amount, not by selling pixel space but purely by advertising revenue. It has actually paid for the hosting of all my sites for the next 2 years! Quite good i think haha!

So, head on over and hit me up for some free advertising for your website!