With the ‘Got Milk’ print campaigns forever emblazoned in our heads, new strategies to promote the positives of the beverage—and embrace new technological avenues in the process—have been long overdue.

Thankfully, the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) has come around with this issue, and in doing so, has infused its product into the world of advergaming. With “Get the Glass,” the Board has enlisted Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners to create a TV/online narrative based around the concept of a world without milk. “The idea was we basically wanted to make milk valuable, so we created this fantasy world where there’s only one more glass of milk left, and secured it in this glass case sort of like a crown jewel,” campaign creative director Feh Tarty tells ADOTAS.

Launched merely two weeks ago “Get the Glass” features seven TV spots—’The Trailer,’ ‘The Glass,’ ‘The Window,’ ‘The Gum,’ ‘The Straw,’ ‘The Sip,’ and ‘The Case’—which feature a fictional family known as the Adachis, who are on a quest to procure the last glass of milk in order to cure their various ailments. The TV ads, which are targeting the California market specifically, are the traditional complement to the online board game, which allows consumers to step into the Adachis’ disguised plumbing van and help the family find their version of the Holy Grail.

“We wanted to make sure the TV spots didn’t just end right there,” says Tarty. “Just the way advertising is today, [the CMPB] wanted to put viewers in the driver’s seat where this family is not going to get the [milk] on their own. They’re going to need your help. That was just begging for a game where you can actually help this family get this glass of milk, and you can solve their issues.”

Milk and board games don’t ideally go hand-in-hand, but “Get the Glass” does a worthy job in melding the two to create a fun, role-playing adventure. Once users arrive at the landing page and click through, they are given virtual dice (which you use a mouse click to maneuver) to steer the Adachis through hostile territory—in this case, a dense, Flash-intensive, heavily-guarded outland that holds the valuable glass of milk. “You try to avoid security and getting sent to Milkatraz. If you make it all the way through and get to the end, then you get the glass,” adds Pat McKay, Tarty’s creative partner at GS&P.

With a firsthand view of the road, players encounter several action and trivia-based challenges with practically every roll of the dice as they work their way through five levels to get to “Fort Fridge.” In doing so, players each step of the way have to overcome physical handicaps caused by milk deficiency. “As you go through the game, you are constantly seeing all the things that milk helps with, whether it’s cavities, PMS symptoms, stronger nails, muscles and all that,” Tarty explains. “We made those challenges fun, but at the same time you’re getting educated on the benefits of milk.”

Of course, (re)selling the value of milk, arguably the most common of fridge items, was the big hurdle of the campaign. “Milk is such a tough thing to sell because everyone has it,” Tarty concedes. We tried to get people to drink more of it, and the way to do that is educate them on how milk can actually help. It seems like boring information, so we had to start to recreate worlds that are entertaining.”

Apparently, despite the hurdles of peddling the values of something so commonplace, the edu-tainment combination is working, according to Tarty. “A lot of the blogs have been saying it’s the best Flash game site they’ve seen. It’s getting a lot of repeat visits. It’s had 3 million impressions already, and it’s only been up for two weeks. That’s great, especially for a product that’s California-based. That’s who we’re advertising to, the California Milk Board. But it’s getting response from all over. Some of the biggest hits we’re getting are from the UK. It’s pretty wild.”

With a target audience of teenage girls and households, “Get the Glass” TV spots will run through 2007, while GS&P states that the online board game will run for two years. Currently, sites like Nick.com and TheOnion.com, as well as several gaming sites are playing host to teaser banners leading to the site. But if the numbers and the content itself prove anything, word-of-mouth should be enough of a tool to drive a bigger audience to milk.

Founded in 2001 by 3 brothers with a couple grand and 1 server, the Silver Springs, MD-based company has taken the model of Geocities several steps further, allowing the average user to play publisher through unique photo-sharing, blog formatting, and profile-building tools. But in recent years, the service has evolved from a simple, free Web publishing platform and community hub into a new, viable marketing outlet for major brands like Reebok, Paramount, and New Line Cinemas—due much in part to the implementation of widgets.

With widgets, Freewebs is turning its users into brand evangelists by allowing them to embed specific branded applications into their profile pages, providing yet another revenue funnel for marketers. Exclusive promotions for films like “Freedom Writers” and “The Number 23″ as well as new Reebok lines have all burrowed their way into the Freewebs community thanks to the emerging platform.

It’s all part of the next phase of advertising, according to Freewebs’ President Shervin Pishevar, who recently spoke at length with ADOTAS about his company’s history, concept and strategy. Named “Bill Gates’ Worst Nightmare” by the Financial Times, Pishevar was both affable and forthright when explaining why advertising power is now in the people’s hands.

Hi Shervin, so briefly tell me about the Freewebs backstory.

The company was basically started with $2,000 and it was running in the basement of one of our co-founders, Zeki [Mokhtarzada]. Haroon [Mokhtarzada], the other co-founder, was at Harvard Law [School] running it off the Wi-fi. I guess it hit a nerve with users around the world because it was providing a really easy way of creating your Web presence, your Web space. That was the beginning of it.

It just started growing virally without any marketing. So at this point now, we’re at 14 million active users, active sites, and we’re adding a million new users every 60 days, which is great. Right now, we’re second after Yahoo’s Geocities in terms of Web publishing, and we’re about to surpass them in terms of page views.

Tell me about what Freewebs is doing with widget advertising.

What we’ve started to innovate and what we’ve invested a lot in is building a platform that allows users to basically personalize their web spaces with widgets. We’ve been able to sell this vision to advertisers and brands that we think banner ads are a very static way of communicating and interacting with users. If they could take on the vision of advertising widgets, they have some kind of utility that has some kind of value to users, that the users themselves will begin to speak for the brand through their own voices by actually tagging their own sites with these widgets. So, all of these widgets have to be shareable and publishable.

What are some of the ways users can deploy widget ads?

One of the things we do is we allow people, with one click of a button, to change their whole website—the look and feel of the template—to take on the persona of the movie or the brand.

Can you explain persona?

It’s actually the whole interface of your site. If you clicked on the “Ghost Rider” [film widget] on the [Freewebs] site and you go to that page, once you create an account, you can actually choose a Ghost Rider website template. You can do the same thing with a bunch of the other brands. Tens of thousands of people have actually changed their entire website template to look and feel like the “Ghost Rider” ones or some of the other ones.

Speaking of the other ones, what about “The Number 23?”

For “23,” we built a whole algorithm to figure out how whatever information you put in about your life, we can compute how 23 is actually connected to your life. Everything kind of adds up to “23,” which is the whole [focal point] of that movie. [The studio] loved it.

While mashups are now the norm amongst DJs and producers in the music world, it’s only as of late that the concept—blurring disparate, familiar audio or video files to create a whole new production—has been embraced by Hollywood.

A prime example of this is Paramount’s new movie trailer mashup campaign for its upcoming Mark Wahlberg vehicle, “Shooter.” With the online/mobile video editing technology of partner Eyespot, the Viacom-owned studio is providing users with a virtual editing suite to create their own customized trailer for the film, the best of which wins its creator an Xbox 360.

According to Laurie Racine, Senior VP of Strategy and Business Development for Eyespot, Paramount is helping set the trend for a new wave of movie marketing. “I think this is the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way that movies engage audiences early on as they ramp up,” she tells ADOTAS. “As you allow fans to almost recreate or interpret different aspects of the movie based on the content and the assets that are released to them to play with, does it change the length of time that they want to really play, and does that bring other people into the theater? [Obviously], we think it allows buzz to be created early on in an engaging way that gets fans very close to the filmmakers and the actors before things ever open in the theater.”

With the “Shooter” promotion, which Racine claims took ten days for Eyespot to execute, Paramount has provided contestants with more than 20 exclusive film clips, as well as the official promotional trailer, sound effects, still photos, movie dialogue and music from the film’s original score. As an added bonus, contestants can also upload personal music, photo, and video clips to mix in with studio content to enhance their mash-up. Once the user has the mix down, they can share their piece de resistance via social networks, mobile phones or other online video sites.

“We’re giving them not just typical trailer assets, but other things where there’s music and photos, etc., that they can manipulate,” Racine says. “It’s something that Paramount and certainly Eyespot see as the future for…developing social relevance to events, activities, movies, etc. that are happening along the cultural zeitgeist.”

To enter in the “Shooter” contest, users must submit their entry by March 26th, three days after the film’s nationwide release. Throughout the entry phase, Eyespot members can watch submitted mash-ups and cast their vote online for the most artistic and creative film. Along with the Xbox 360, the user with the top-ranked “Shooter” video will also win three video games to go with it, “Call of Duty 3,” “Gears of War” and “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas.” Additionally, four runner-ups will receive official “Shooter” materials autographed by Mark Wahlberg.

Though this isn’t the first foray into the UGC arena for Paramount, Racine says the “Shooter” push marks a big leap forward for the studio. “I actually think Paramount is at the vanguard here, because it’s not that they’re saying we’re going to give you just Paramount assets and you can mash them up against Paramount assets,” she says. “They’re basically saying, you can take your own stuff, true UGC stuff, and integrate it into our assets. That’s huge. It’s very dynamic, very visionary and forward-thinking, and I am truly impressed. I think they’re publicly one of the first studios to do this, if not the first. And from a conceptual perspective, it’s huge. It’s not premium content versus premium content. It is premium content with UGC in an environment that is condoned, encouraged and sponsored by the studio.”

While the gaming community is a likely target for “Shooter”, Racine counters that there wasn’t a specific target market going into the launch. “As someone who doesn’t fit the demographic, but loves this kind of movie, I would suggest there is not a specific demographic,” she claims. “I think that this is about people who consider themselves to be creators and movie fans in general, people who are specifically fans of the director, and fans of the star of the film. It’s pretty much all-encompassing, and we will know once this over what the [true] demographic will be.”

Two years after its infamous Paris Hilton ads (briefly) smattered the airwaves and roused some controversy in 2005, fast-food chain Carl’s Jr. is back with a new—albeit, slightly less controversial—ad campaign for its new Buffalo Chicken Sandwich.

While inexorable socialite Paris is nowhere to be seen on this go-around, Carl’s Jr is once again using the “sex sells” approach for its broadcast/online effort, this time enlisting the services of model/actress Ashley Hartman. Leveraging the TV promotions already in place, interactive agency of record Spacedog created a viral-focused microsite, Spicybuffalo.com, which is only the second one ever made for Carl’s Jr.

“Mendelsohn/Zien, the traditional agency that does all [Carl Jr's] TV and radio, had crafted a strategy that already sold through three spots,” Wayne Robins, Spacedog’s creative director, explains to ADOTAS. “So, what we did is we worked with the same actress that they’re using in their first launched TV spot, Ashley Hartman. So, she was going to be the virtual host for our microsite. We needed to aesthetically keep everything true to what had been established for the brand, very clean, very minimal, and almost like [they're] the luxury of the fast-food/QSR category…the way they position themselves as ‘the $6 burger.’

Skimpily attired, the fetching blonde guides visitors through her variety of poses and moods, giving them the opportunity to “make a lunch date” with her, and send personalized greetings to friends asking them to tag along for lunch at a Carl’s Jr or Hardees, marking the first tim.

“That’s our viral component,” says Robins. “With ‘Lunch Date’, we ended up shooting just a little bit under a thousand video clips. Nine-hundred of them [feature] names, so we took the most popular names in North America with some different ethnicities and really try to tailor to our audience, both male and female. So when you send this lunch invitation to friend, it’s speaking directly to them. What it does is it really just invites the individual to lunch, it shows them the sandwich, and there’s a little bit of comedy and entertainment injected in the middle there and through the copy so hopefully the utility doesn’t override the entertainment.”

Adding to the mix is not only Carl’s famed burger drop visual, but also a guy maybe not familiar by name, but definitely known through his voiceover work, Phil Buckman, who has been the voice of the brand for the last several years and serves as the site’s narrator as well.

The “Spicy Buffalo” interactive site, which was initially conceived in November, launched just prior to the Oscars telecast last Sunday, and according to Robins, is a direct digital extension of Carl’s Jr and Mendelsohn/Zien’s traditional vision. “Our primary goal was to sell the sandwich, first and foremost,” Robins insists. “It’s front and center, and it’s really the star in scale on the site. It’s the first thing you see, it’s the set-up, and it’s the color palette for the entire site.”

Also included on the site is a store locator and more interestingly, a ‘$1 off ‘downloadable coupon, an element that Robins feels is missing in many similar microsites these days. “A lot of interactive advertising, some of the stuff we’ve seen, while it’s compelling entertainment, sometimes they’re missing the direct marketing call to action. We’ve got this medium where you can have these one-to-one interactions, yet sometimes we forget to push that direct message. It’s the coupon, and we can actually track it, track the sales of the sandwich, and see how effective our communications are.”

It’s this communicative approach that drove Robins and his creative team, which laid down three goals for Spicybuffalo.com. “We do pepper coupons through everything that we do in hopes that it actually does monitor our primary goal, which is to sell the sandwich. Secondary is creating a compelling, entertaining rich media experience online that can hold the audience captive for more than thirty seconds. We’re not limited by time constraints of the broadcast medium, and if we can create something that can engage their imagination for longer than 30 seconds, then that’s a home run. The third goal was [making] a viral. It’s a buzzword that’s always thrown out there, but it’s really just peer-to-peer file sharing.”

Externally, online, expandable banners (below) on major sites like Yahoo, AOL and MSN featuring some eye-opening, alluring imagery are being implemented to drive traffic to the site. “Our banners are teasers in the sense that they’re expandable,” says Robins. “Ashley walks out in the white background, blows a kiss, drops something, and bends over to pick it up. That’s our positioning.”

No pun intended I’m sure, but it is the sexual innuendo that is Carl’s Jr’s MO and something that’s ideal to reach its core audience. “They use sex to sell burgers,” Robins states bluntly. ‘Young, hungry guys’ are who we’re appealing to. It worked with Paris, and they were trying to do that again to a certain extent with a lesser known. If we can do remotely close, that would be a very good thing.”

Robins says the site is planned to stay live for six months, the expected duration of the Buffalo chicken sandwich, which will be sold simultaneously in Carl’s Jr and sister company Hardees. While it might not have the instant infamy of the Paris push or offer a ton of interactive goodies to chew on, the “Spicy Ashley” spot could have some shelf-life all its own thanks to its new, ahem, tour guide and some decent engagement points.

As Robins himself says, “We’re trying to sell the sandwiches, but if we don’t do it in an entertaining way, it’s never going to viral…or successful.”

Following our lengthy chat with Vin Bhat at Bollywood content provider BODVOD, as well as similar multicultural, a la carte video outlets including SIVOO, we now shift gears to the live music realm and arguably the leader in this specific market, CONCERT.TV.

With a focus strictly—and appropriately—on live music (minus a specific genre focus), the emerging media outlet has made its presence known by providing original, exclusive and licensed live footage from some of the most heralded music artists, past and present (everyone from Bowie to Alicia Keys to the White Stripes and numerous underground/alternative artists).

Having made its mark on the digital cable landscape from the outset, 2007 marks the year where CONCERT.TV takes big strides in the online/broadband space—from both content and advertising standpoints.

Recently, ADOTAS chatted with CONCERT.TV co-founder/CEO Jeff Shultz (pictured), a former corporate finance attorney who traded the courtroom for the digital space by heading business development efforts at NBCi, the online arm of the NBC network. Shultz, who currently oversees distribution, advertising, business and finance affairs for CONCERT.TV, shed light on his company’s history, its business model, and how this live performance programming outlet plans to create more distribution and branding opportunities in ’07.

Hi Jeff, so give me some background and business model info on Concert.TV

We’re the first television network dedicated to music performance documentaries. We launched 3 ½ years ago in September 2003, and now we’re carried to a little a north of 16 million homes through Comcast, Cox, and Charter. 2007 should be a big year frankly in terms of growing that number of 16 million, because each of those MSOs has their own aggressive plan in terms of converting analog to digital and converting digital customers to video-on-demand.

We also expect to see real movement in terms of new distribution. We’re planning on launching on satellite, and then rolling out broadband in a big way in 2007. We take advantage of the focus both narrowly on live music, and broadly on genres of music. It really is the best styles of live music regardless of when it was performed or who was performing it. That gives us a lot of freedom to reach a lot of people.

I was digging through my email and I found something that one of our programming guys put together, a snapshot of the program schedule for December, January and February. Each of the months are really strong, but it’s so diverse that it couldn’t be a better listing. It’s a great snapshot about how each of these artists in their own right is interesting. But when you package them all together, the fact that you have so many artists of such different tastes all in one place, it’s a perfect illustration of what we’re trying to do.

It makes sense to blur the genres.

That’s right, with one exception. Every month, we have a programming focus which is a monthly theme. December was really interesting. It was the Best of 2006, and that was a virtual voting booth. During the year, people are watching by pressing play, which creates a census count. It creates a record of how many people watched what thing. In December, we added it all up and we programmed an entire month of what was most popular during the year. And as you can imagine, it was an incredibly popular month. It was a record that more people watched [Concert.tv] than any other time before in our history.

What about this month?

February being Black History Month lets us go at that programming theme broadly, so it would be Marvin Gaye and Busta Rhymes. On a broad basis, we’re still touching as many consumers as we can.

Your archive section definitely appeals to music diehards.

I think one of the mistakes that’s been made…in the live music video business is the [assumption] that something had to be brand new or happening live in order to be interesting. Some of the most popular programs we air are some of the oldest. Led Zeppelin from the 70s was one of the most popular programs we’ve ever aired. That’s one of the things we’re definitely embracing is to package up the old stuff with the new stuff.

How do you guys procure the rights for all the content?

It’s a big part of what we do. It’s almost half of what our human resources spend time dying. Artists and management oftentimes control themselves. Independent labels are doing a lot and they tend to be very forward-thinking in how they use their material and how they promote their artists. And then there’s are a whole lot of stuff that’s just been created, hundreds or thousands of hours of programming that’s created by major media companies and independent producers who have really just been waiting for a way to get to consumers. That’s where we come in. So a lot of our day has just been finding the stuff, and putting together the relationships and exploiting it.

A bigger example was Later with Jools Holland from BBC. This is one of the longest-running music series in the world. It’s perfect for us in that it’s a time machine. We can go all the way back to Page & Plant, or we can show Coldplay from last year. But it’s only gotten limited play in the United States. A lot of people don’t know the name and the brand. A lot of people haven’t been exposed to it. So what we did is we put together an exclusive deal to be the exclusive home in the United States for the entire series. So over the course of the next three years, Concert.TV will air the entire series. We launched it in October/November, and so far the reception has been extraordinary. People are loving it.

According to various sources, Reznor and agency 42 Entertainment, harnessing the old Internet model of a webring, are behind a series of eerie landing pages (listed below), some endorsed by a supposed “US Bureau of Morality” and others peddling military operations like “105th Airborne Crusaders.”

http://iamtryingtobelieve.com
http://anotherversionofthetruth.com
http://bethehammer.net
http://105thairbornecrusaders.com
http://churchofplano.com
http://www.consolidatedmailsystems.com

The top site listed, with its placid Americana-loving backdrops, actually hides something more sinister underneath. Simply click and hold your mouse, then proceed to mouse over the image to tear away the pixels and render a nuclear apocalypse underneath (below). The others also tout a somewhat scary, futurist setting with glitchy graphics and gutted text—perhaps the remains of a fallen digital voice for a once-flourishing American establishment.

While the concept seems a bit Terminator 2: Judgment Day-esque, MTV News reveals that the origins of the campaign can be traced back to the merch booths in Portugal, the launching pad of NIN’s current European tour, which kicked off earlier this week. On the back of tour t-shirts sold, where the dates and cities are listed, certain letters are highlighted. When those letters were arranged, they spelled out the phrase, “I am trying to believe.” Sure, that sounds like a standard line from the Reznor playbook, but according to MTV, a more curious individual decided to Google the phrase…leading them to the destination above.

Coincidence or clever marketing scheme? I’d have to side with the latter, considering a closer look at a new statement from Reznor himself posted on UK site Xtaster.

“…It takes place about fifteen years in the future. Things are not good. If you imagine a world where greed and power continue to run their likely course, you’ll have an idea of the backdrop. The world has reached the breaking point – politically, spiritually and ecologically. Written from various perspectives of people in this world, ‘year zero”‘examines various viewpoints set against an impending moment of truth. How does it sound? You will hear for yourself soon enough, but given the point of this document is to provide information…”

It’s this Orwellian ideology and unfolding Web mythology that has had NIN devotees salivating and provoked to play amateur sleuths. Fan sites like Echoingthesound.org and TheNinhotline.com, and even newly created Ninwiki.com, have been deluged with so many comments and regular updates on new findings, that they’ve had to shut down to increase bandwidth for brief periods at a time.

The domains hint at botched military operations, fallen heroes, a tyrannical government, and a mind control drug Parepin. While all are registered to Arizona-based Domains by Proxy, MTV reports that they are actually part of an alternate reality game concocted by 42 Entertainment, an outfit best known for the Halo 2-based ILoveBees promotion and an agency that ADOTAS has featured recently.

While it’s not confirmed to be another facet of 42′s strategy, an Mp3 of a new Year Zero track, “My Violent Heart”, leaked to music blogs on Wednesday (and was subsequently taken down by some alleged RIAA-style outfits…perhaps another marketing tactic). The story behind this goes that Flash drives were found in bathroom stalls at venues hosting NIN on their current tour and were subsequently nicked and the track was uploaded–perhaps an error from a band roadie, or simply a clever guerilla tactic that’s part of the greater good of this campaign.

Whatever the case may be, an inquiry sent to 42 Entertainment went unanswered. Mum’s the word for now it seems on this campaign, but from the looks of it, Reznor’s dreary vision has seen the light and his goal is achieved in promoting his upcoming opus.

Still, one can’t discount that the rabbit hole will open further here, and even if not, kudos for one of the more memorable buzz/guerilla/web marketing integrations in recent memory (and that’s not just predicated on my own Nine Inch Nails fandom). The folks behind the Boston fiasco could learn a thing or two…

Home of the Blizzard and other cold, sweet confections, Dairy Queen has been one of the most enduring and familiar brands/franchises in North America. But while we’ve been prone to TV, outdoor and print campaigns from the company—most recently with its ‘Talking Lips’ spots—DQ is taking its first full-scale foray into the digital marketing realm this year, beginning with its Valentines-themed viral site, the “DQ Slow Jam Lips Sync”.

“You’re catching us at an interesting moment because we’re about to much more significantly integrate digital and online initiatives into our overall marketing mix,” DQ’s North American Chief Branding Officer Michael Keller tells ADOTAS. “What you’re seeing here with DQSlowJams.com is actually our first truly notable foray into, let’s say in this case, we’re talking about a viral sitelet, pretty interactive and fun to use that ties back to our brand.”

With four different dropdown menu screens (below) at their disposal—voice, cake type, slow jam, and mood—users can then select from a handful of options in each to customize their own smoothed-out “slow jam” video—which features those familiar talking lips and varieties of amusing footage that can be set into several different combinations. From the Barry White-like “Velvet Mayfly” being the “Perfect Gentleman” over a “Beatbox Serenade” in a dim-lit bedroom to “Lady D” sensually peddling a “Classic DQ” cake over a “Soulful Ballad”, Dairy Queen brings out the lothario in all of us while using puns and double entendres to push their popular cakes.

“This [campaign] did happen to coincide with the big holiday obviously, and we do a pretty significant cakes business in North America,” says Keller. “So to get out there for Valentine’s Day made a lot of sense. We’ve integrated our cakes content into DQ Slow Jams. There are a couple of links there to take people to their store locator to find stores that sell ice cream cakes, which obviously [sell] pretty heavily around Valentine’s Day.”

The viral effort, which kicked off February 9th and will likely run through this weekend, also marked DQ’s budding relationship with digital partner Space 150, who took the company’s traditional Talking Lips concept and implemented it into the online creative. “They did it in just a couple of weeks, which is impressive given all that’s integrated into it,” Keller boasts. It also marked a coup of sorts for the brand, considering that national agency of record Grey Worldwide has been its exclusive creative conduit…until now. “Talking lips is a creative concept developed by…Grey Worldwide,” Keller emphasizes. “We have been using those talking lips in television and it started last July. We’ve never allowed other voices to flow across the lips. We’ve never allowed anyone but the folks that work with our Grey team to animate it, and we’ve certainly never been out of our typical advertising context. That element of content was the inspiration behind 150′s ideas, so they’re leveraging a creative asset we already have, but doing it in a way we’ve never done before. So this is brand new territory for our lips.”

DQ’s faith in Space 150 seems so much so that the digital agency will also spearhead overhauls of DQ’s flagship DQ.com site and its fan club destination, BlizzardFanClub.com. This initiative, along with DQSlowJams.com, is just the beginning of several 2007 digital promotions, according to DQ’s CMO. “This is our toe in the water, and it will be one of about 5 or 6 digital initiatives this year that occur, let’s say, over the next 6 months—not including the overhaul of DQ.com and BlizzardFanClub.com,” Keller reveals. “There are a range of things, but we will probably have at least one other viral sitelet. Unlike DQ Slow Jams, we’re looking at some advergames that should be pretty compelling. It’s the kind of games where any kid and any family connected to Dairy Queen could play it and enjoy it, but more sophisticated gamers might get a real challenge out of in trying to maximize their score or maximize their progress.

He goes onto divulge, “Later in the spring, we have a pretty big integrated promotion with a variety of media for our biggest new product introduction of the year, which I can’t really talk about yet. But I can tell you that that integrated promotion is going to run a couple of months, and it’s going to involve multiple things.” This, according to Keller, includes mobile, sweepstakes, and other promotional overlays.

But in the meantime, before the more ambitious endeavors, DQSlowJams.com thus far seems to indicate a successful start for DQ Digital. “It’s very encouraging,” says Keller. “For this small test of ours, I think we’ve gone well past 100,000 sitelet visits now, and I believe we have a 22.5% open rate from our Blizzard Fan Club members to get there.”

While he remains somewhat skeptical of the full potency of digital branding, Keller seems proud of his company’s shift into the arena. “Going from nothing in 2006, for example, that was really happening for us digitally to launching what will probably be between 4 and 5 of these digital initiatives over the next 6 months starting here with Slow Jams, is pretty notable for us.”

But in the wake of the arrest of giggly rabble-rousers/co-conspirators Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky (pictured below) and their subsequent release, new developments and questions have arose in the week since—mainly spurred by Turner Broadcasting’s agreement to fork over $2 million in restitution to the city of Boston for law enforcement costs.

While the agency that concocted the scheme, New York’s Interference, Inc, wasn’t allotted the fine and Turner parent Time Warner footed the bill, what kind of precedent does this set for marketing culpability and the stifling of creative expression, especially when in this case, the only reasonable need for a fine—property damage—was minimal to none at all?

“I’m guessing that Time Warner/Turner Broadcasting’s viewpoint in offering to pay restitution, I see that as more of a public relations kind of thing,” posits Mike Sproule, partner at New York City law firm Akabas & Sproule. “They look really bad and they want to make up for it, because there isn’t really a strong legal argument, I don’t think, for the city to sue them for extra man hours.” Is it perhaps simply that the city of Boston just overreacted?
From another angle, in the post-9/11 era, the coexisting themes of safety and vulnerability are prevailing in our society, and with the heightened sensitivity and fear, a case like this one proves the notion of any buzz creating good buzz is antiquated—and sometimes even damaging if it’s based on a schism from popular opinion…as history dictates. “Dixie Chicks got lots of buzz when they said they were ashamed of George Bush 3-4 years ago,” recalls Buzz Marketing CEO and best-selling author Mark Hughes. “They received a ton of buzz as a result…but buzz resulting in a huge decrease in their popularity. It crossed the bounds of our zeitgeist…we simply want to be safe in an era of 9/11 reality.”

Hughes himself, though, is no stranger to taking risks in creating advertising gimmicks and garnering buzz. During his tenure in the early days of Half.com in 1999, the exec helped convince the town of Halfway, Oregon to re-brand itself as his company’s namesake in return for $100,000 and donated computers. It was a move that eventually catapulted Half into the mainstream and resulted in an eventual acquisition by eBay a year later.

But as bold and intriguing as said campaign was, it was generally innocuous; its impact was positive, and its creators’ intentions seemed fairly altruistic—something that Hughes argues can’t be said for this Boston fiasco, especially judging by the behavior of its masterminds. “The most important thing is how the agency and these two sub-contractors are handling it,” he claims. “Interference did the slimy Sony Ericsson campaign on the Empire state building, and now this. But most importantly, the people they hired have zero remorse.”

(photo courtesy of Associated Press)

Hughes outlines a more constructive solution that perhaps would’ve worked better than the blatant derision offered by the main players involved. “The best thing these guys, Interference, and Turner could do is say, ‘We didn’t mean to create a public situation, we were only trying to do some innovative marketing. We’re sorry if we created any issues. National security and personal safety is just as important to us as it is to the city of Boston and America, and we apologize for causing any issues of misunderstanding.’ The above sample quote…would be the right way to address the situation, but the attitude they are taking underscores their lack of intelligence. The bottom line is that Americans don’t like to have their personal safety taken lightly or screwed with…if you don’t understand this concept in today’s post 9/11 world, you shouldn’t be in marketing.”

But with the advent of the online space and more recent channels including mobile, the interactive agencies themselves have cultivated their own star power and notoriety beyond the brand, giving face to a name not seen since the days of David Ogilvy.

And while we are well-aware of the CP+Bs, Starcoms and R/GAs making headlines today, lesser-knows firms are trying to stake their claim as viable outlets for your branding solutions. One such firm is New York-based Levelwing Media, an interactive agency that bills itself as “the new agency of record.” The clientele for its campaigns range from education to automotive care to healthcare, and with ’07 well underway, Levelwing is ready to position itself as a more recognizable and desirable agency in the interactive space.

Recently, ADOTAS engaged in a conversation with the company’s two co-founders, Jeff Adelson-Yan (above) and Steve Parker (right), to discuss the history and strategy behind their brainchild, their promotional game plan, as well as the trends that will impact the interactive industry for the coming year.

Hi Guys. So how did Levelwing get started?

Steve: Jeff and I have both been involved in online advertising for essentially the better part of ten years each. I started in the online industry in 1995, and Jeff in 1996. We both have worked for a number of different publishers, sales organizations, and business development organizations in the online marketplace during that entire time including iVillage, Medscape (now part of WebMd), Q Interactive, among others.

We just started talking about doing our own thing and decided that we really wanted to start a media agency. As the online marketplace moved away from just straight CPM-type advertising to other models that were more performance-driven, that allowed us to enter the marketplace. We started doing some things that, at the time, people weren’t really paying a whole lot of attention to across the board. Specifically, [it was] really targeted and focused, qualified lead generation and search marketing. We started our business 4 ½ years ago around the time those things were just starting to take off essentially.

How has the company evolved since then? You now call yourself the “new agency of record”.

Steve: Media for a long time has been done in a very specific way—when you look at offline media, especially. The traditional agency model, for the most part, has good components and some that are very bad for clients.

But overall, in calling ourselves the “new agency of record”, it’s really looking at media from the standpoint of…for example, there are two types of pilots, you have pilots that can fly by line of sight, and you have pilots that are instrument-rated pilots. So, if you’re on a plane and you’re flying in bad weather, which one are you going to choose? You want an instrument-rated pilot. As this marketplace evolves and changes, there is a lot of clutter and “bad weather” so to speak.

Everything that we’re doing is heavily instrument-rated across the board. As an agency, everything we do has a specific goal and return of asset based on that goal, whether that be brand media, direct response, search, it doesn’t matter. It’s driving everything back to a very specific metric. All of this is very traceable and trackable, so we measure things based on instruments essentially.

That’s why we’re saying we’re “the new agency of record” because this new model is going to take hold. We’re not going to be the only ones doing it; there are others that obviously are as well. But that’s the way we’re positioning ourselves and that’s our mantra.

Speaking of going forward, you guys told me you want to put yourselves out there more in terms of publicizing Levelwing. What is the game plan for ’07 in how you present yourselves, and what is the value proposition to potential clients?

Steve: In terms of moving forward, one of the things that we’re going to do is focus on letting people know who we are and what we do. As we talked [before], we’ve been very quiet and on the backburners, just making sure we built a smart foundation and had really good clients that we worked with who get it when it comes to the Internet.

We could have grown a lot faster, but Jeff and I both started this company with our own money and we wanted to run it in a way that we thought made sense for us and makes sense for our clients. For many of our clients, we’re the only Internet-based ad agency they work with. We are going to announce those relationships, which include Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire and College Loan Corporation. We want people to know here are the clients we have and here is why they work with us.

Jeff: We’ve actually allocated a marketing and PR budget, which is something we had not done in years previously. We still are in the shadows, but we’re trying to showcase the clients that we do work with, and the expertise that we bring to the table.

So with the global awareness of the “melt-free” candy’s taste and look at their disposal, the folks at parent company Masterfoods enlisted two notable firms to help capitalize on the instant familiarity by encouraging consumers to “embrace their inner M.” For this latest multi-channel marketing effort, BBDO New York, along with Boston-based Barbarian Group, sought to illustrate how those who’ve found the M&M inside of them “embrace the fun in life.”

Kickstarted on January 16th with a TV spot aired during the American Idol season premiere, the “inner M” campaign will veer its way through print and other TV placements in an effort to drive people to the highly engaging destination, BecomeanMM.com. A joint creation between Barbarian and BBDO New York, the microsite is a fully-animated world dubbed “Planet M&M’ST”, in which the user can interact in various scenarios by first creating their own M&M character through what’s appropriately called “The Character Creator.”

“For so long, the M&M characters have been a part of our lives, and this was more or less (about) letting people into their world,” Tim Bayne, BBDO Creative Director, tells ADOTAS. “People absolutely love the characters and we’re just trying to reward them by letting them have fun by being in their world.”

By using the Character Creator, visitors are able to customize and design their own M&M characters with a slew of candy shapes, hair (from afro w/pick to Mohawk), facial features (including eyes and mouth) and accessories (glasses, hats and footwear) that can all be additionally altered through a whole spectrum of colors. “There are 27 million different combinations you can do, and if you just hit random like 15-20 times, some of the characters that come up are pretty funny,” Bayne adds.

Inspiration-wise, the Character Creator was born from internal BBDO New York powwows and a certain popular Comedy Central series. “South Park had this website where you could create yourself as this South Park character, but you really couldn’t,” Bayne reveals. “What we found is that a lot of people were having fun with this, but they were taking it into Photoshop and blowing it out even more because the options that this website offered weren’t enough to make it look like you or anything. But we just had so much fun with it, so we just thought let’s see if we could do this for M&M’s.”