Advertisers heart the interweb

Everyone knows that advertising people love flooding the internet with our crap and opinions. In that vein, here’s a couple new ad-related sites to consider.

Advert Lover is a community site where people do exactly what it sounds like, they post their favorite ads.

After These Messages is the first site where morality is taken into account when evaluating work. Great idea from the folks at Green Team.

I like my movies like I like my chocolate

Dark. Or at least that’s what M&M’s is hoping people will say when they visit their mini-site. To promote their new Dark Chocolate M&M’s, Mars has put up a surprisingly fun and addictive game in which you have to find “dark movie” titles that have been coded into a painting. Conveniently timed around Halloween. Doesn’t sound nearly as cool as it is. Check it out.

Probably your only chance to interact with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders

CMT is promoting its new reality TV show “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders” by allowing its viewers (and everyone else) to log onto makingthecommercial.cmt.com and do just what the URL says, make a commercial for the show. The best part? Interacting with the cheerleaders through the website could lead to interacting with the cheerleaders in person. The winning spot creator gets flown to Texas to meet the girls.

Flippin Sweet

Ok, so this post is a long time coming. And it’s gonna be long because it’s about 3 or 4 months in the making. Basically, while watching my intern partner in crime at Ogilvy this summer (let’s call her…Jenny) blog her heart out I told myself, “Self, you must begin to blog.” To which I replied, “But whatsoever shall I blog about, self?” And, “Why am I talking to myself in the third person?” I quickly resolved both issues with, “Cool shit” and “Because this is an interior monologue,” respectively. So here it comes, all the cool shit I’ve accumulated since probably June-ish. It’s not everything, I had to pare down some, but it’s still pretty extensive. I’ll be brief on this stuff but hopefully a bit more detailed in the future.

1. First up is TXTual Healing. Very cool idea. Basically these guys travel the world with a giant projector. They set up next to a building of some kind, usually a housing structure and project a thought/talking bubble onto the wall, pointing to a window. Then people get to text in whatever message they think want to show up in the bubble. Sounds simple, but it’s a great experiment. It’s amazing how creative people can be, and it’s also amazing how dumb they can be. Great look into culture on a macro and micro level.
2. Mark Jenkins is a genius. Some of my non-Adcenter friends aren’t exactly the art type. Our generation grew up with media at our fingertips, and as a result traditional visual arts such as painting and sculpture have fallen by the wayside and labeled as “boring.” Mark Jenkins is trying to break that stereotype by taking sculpture out of the museum and into public spaces where you’re no longer viewing a piece of art, you’re interacting with it. Phenomenal idea and an ongoing project…he does a lot of his work in Washington, DC and I’m hoping to run into it sometime.
3. Cool little microsite for the Nokia N91. Basically it was supposed to be their big mp3 phone…mp3’s equal music, music equals dancing. Which leads us to a pretty addictive dancing-man-in-a-green-spandex-suit game thingy. Nothing earth shattering here, just a decent example of creating engaging content for the consumer.
4. The future of TV? People have been predicting it for years, and it’s slowly starting to happen now that broadband is beginning to saturate. TV on the web. And I’m not talking shot-in-the-nuts home videos on collegehumor.com, I’m talking about legitimate engaging television created independent from TV studios. Pretty funny show, definitely had me watching for a few weeks this summer.
5. This isn’t going to do anyone much good now, but during World Cup this was pretty friggin cool. An ASCII feed of the action from the World Cup. If you don’t know what ASCII is, it’s basically all the characters that are available to use on the web. I’m sure we’ve all seen those images made up of letters and numbers that people tag onto their emails sometimes. Well, this was live video done the same way. Pretty sweet.
6. More non-revolutionary stuff here, but at least this one is still usable. The D1g1tal F1lm Fest1val (don’t blame me for the 1’s in there…I suppose it makes them feel more digital) created an awesome site to promote their festival. The festival is for digital shorts, so they decided to give people a quick peek into that world. The site lets you make a short film with your own dialogue, characters, plot and everything. Pretty entertaining. This definitely kept Jenny and I busy for a day or two.
7. I’m not going to start a riot here and try to argue whether or not Jackson Pollock is a genius or a hack, but the website bearing his name is sweet. So you can decide which side of the argument this site falls on.
8. Awesome article from my first time following the World Cup. I was always under the impression that it was the Irish who were the drinkers. Apparently they learned from the English.
9. Funny ads. Trunk monkey. Classic.
10. Another funny ad, but for a completely different reason. Who knew AYDS could be so beneficial to your health?
11. I saw a statistic today that said people spend 30% of their media consumption time online. Pretty impressive. I know I spent a metric shit-ton of time online, but sometimes I exhaust my cache of websites faster than planned. Enter StumbleUpon, the social website for finding and/or recommending great websites. Cool idea.
12. So with the whole iTunes 7 thing going on, album art has become a big deal again…I think. Or at least that’s what Apple and some bloggers say. Anyways, if album art is your thing, you know that iTunes isn’t exactly the best way to view it. Coverflow can help. It lets you browse through your music library like everyone used to way back in the day (which was a Tuesday by the way…not sure if everyone knew that but “the day” was a Tuesday) by flipping through your crate-o-records. There’s a link there for a better icon, too.
13. If this is an exaggeration, may the good Lord strike me down immediately. The Ogilvy interns, and subsequently as many Adcenter people as would listen to us, laughed at this video for at least a month. Where would streaming video be without hilarious asian content?
14. Ok, there’s a lot going on here. This pretty much sums up everything that’s great about this country. First, we have a person saying how excited they were that they may have gotten extra money out of the ATM. Then we find out it’s actually promotional money for a website dedicated to raising funds to get girls breast implants. At the end of the day, it’s also a pretty sweet non-traditional use of media. I heart America.
15. Classic advertising-themed spoof of the “When I grow up” spot from a few years back.
    
16. Crying. That’s how hard I was laughing at this. Laughing so hard I was literally making a scene in the middle of an ad agency.
17. I spent a good 5 or 6 hours trying to remember the name of this video over the summer. At the time it was somehow pertinent to a concept I was trying to explain to Jenny. No idea what I was talking about, but I still think this is funny. Some people don’t. Whatever.

That’s some of what I found. As I said before, that wasn’t everything, but it’s a lot. Hopefully I’ll be finding more webtastic coolness. Until then, that should do.