Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser brand is aimed at young men between the ages of 18 and 24 (18 being the legal drinking age in the UK). Customers can accumulate Bud Bucks, which they can then trade in for trips to the US, sports tickets, or a Ford Mustang. Banners on YouTube and FHM point to the Bud Bucks website where users can enter codes on bottles of Bud, see how many Bucks they got, and then trade them for stuff.

The Bud Bucks site is currently live and the banners on YouTube and FHM are up. According to the website, the promotion will run through July. The creatives were built by UK agencies RKCR/Y&R and TangoZebra. The campaign includes a spot of a man trying to steal a bottle of Bud from a fridge guarded by lasers.

Last year, YouTube grew 606% in the UK, according to UK newspaper the Telegraph. Anheuser-Busch also plans to roll out the campaign on mobile websites and interactive television. The company said it will be focusing less on TV advertising and more on online to capture what they consider a tough-to-reach crowd.

Every product on the site is accompanied by a review posted by customers that have purchased and/or used the product alongside a photo. Consumers can also compare the item to other brands through one of many features on the website that helps shoppers narrow down their decision and ultimately purchase a product.

Customer reviews have been instrumental in helping shoppers make decisions on which products to buy. In April of 2006, J.C. Williams Consultancy and eTailing Group conducted a study that found that 92% of the 2,472 participants said reviews are “extremely helpful” or “very helpful” in final purchasing choices.

Three main compartments of the website are designed so that users can find, compare, and decide. Through social navigation using “pros” and “cons” and other descriptions provided on the website, shoppers can narrow down their search options. Review Snapshots helps shoppers to compare the feedback of other users and through an “at-a-glance” function, shoppers can do so quickly. Finally, customers are left to decide based upon all of the information provided on Buzillions.com.

Additionally, the “Affinity Recommendations and Reviews” is another feature where shoppers can choose a group that best describes themselves and from there, view the reviews and feedback from that group.

Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews, said in a statement, “What’s really missing in today’s online shopping experience is the human element and interaction that people experience in stores. We are excited to bring the power of social feedback into that online experience, and help shoppers make informed decisions at each step in the product research process. The feedback from our beta testing site has been invaluable, and we believe we have a truly better way for people to shop and decide what to buy.”

The promotion includes a full homepage that features a Star Wars skin that changes upon each visit. Users will also be able to choose their own skins or turn off the feature entirely. Star Wars stamps, envelopes, sweepstakes, stamp voting, and other promotional features will be highlighted throughout the page. .

“”We created a Star Wars promo component which contains its own navigation for easy display of all of the campaign offerings. This also enabled us to include more offerings such as free desktop wallpapers of the Star Wars Express Mail envelopes for download,”” said Jason Whiting, Managing Director of AKQA DC, in a statement.
For the first time, the USPS has used Flash, which was displayed March 16th on a teaser promotion that featured a R2D2 scrolled across the site.

“This is the first time that a promotion has been done to this scale on the USPS.com. The viral nature of this promotion will bring in new visitors to our usps.com website,”” added Anita Bizzotto, CMO at USPS. Additionally, as an offline tie-in, the USPS also deployed 400 official postal service mailboxes disguised as R2D2.

AKQA, meanwhile is also working on revamping the entire USPS.com website among other creative and technical issues. The Star Wars campaign will run through April 7th.

There are several ways to leverage email as a marketing tool, but not quite like typical email campaigns of the past, which was a batch and blast theory where the more email you sent to a broad audience the better. The most effective campaigns have been utilized as a part of an overall integrated marketing campaign, where the email stands in support of the rich media advertising, print, direct mail, so the same messaging is seen in all aspects of consumer reach. For an online publisher, it would be the idea that the email supports the branding or messaging on the site, and whether it be from advertising or an editorial perspective, the email message is an extension of that messaging.

Rarely if ever now do you see an effective email campaign that acts as a standalone promotion. It is used as an overall messaging campaign, driving consumer, prospect, or client engagement with an overall marketing campaign. One of the most interesting concepts that is evolving, according to the Mobile Marketing Association, is utilizing email as a supplement to mobile campaigns to drive awareness and engagement from the consumer. The idea of using each medium as a support for the other rather than each channel having a specific message. The creative may not be the same, but the core messaging and the overall theme remain constant. SO if you are reading a newspaper, you can draw the correlation that you saw a Nike ad online as well.

There are several issues that a marketer must contend with when utilizing email marketing in the current marketplace. The key issues, however, really have not changed over the past 5-6 years; in fact, they are just getting more pronounced. The major issues facing marketers is deliverability, the ability to get into the end user’s inbox rather than the junk mail folder. This is a constant problem due to robust spam filtering by the ISP’s and individual email clients. A marketer has to be aware of not just the subject line and content of the message avoiding common spam phrases like Free, or Limited Time, but the From address of the message, the IP of machine sending the messages, and the manner in which the message is sent (is it a mass mailing list or is it the same message repeated mailed to individual recipients, the latter can be flagged as spam from the Senders own ISP!).

Other issues obviously are the viability and deliverability of an email address, Even if you are a bonded sender or on a “white” list from the ISP perspective, end users are becoming incredibly tech-savvy in their ability to navigate the utilization of their own filtering, something that has become more of an issue in the last 18-24 months. So even if the marketer has done everything right the end user could still be flagging them as spam because they are unaware of the fact that they have subscribed to the list, or that they are not receiving messages they should be simply due to the sheer volume of messages flowing in cyber space.

Because of this decreased deliverability, email marketing on the surface has lost its effectiveness because the consumer response has seemingly been declining. However, as you continue to look at the available data of a campaign, you will see that the response rates have really stayed the same if you get your email delivered. It is the fact that a large percentage of email is getting diverted outside of the consumer’s inbox so it appears as if your response rates are dropping. Because you do not get a hard or soft bounce (a technical message stating that the email address is invalid or that the mail has been delayed due to inbox limitations or slow response time) when your mail gets diverted to a spam folder, you have to assume that it was delivered to the desired recipient in the standard fashion and therefore your response seemingly goes down when in fact it has never been delivered. Once the email is opened it is still as effective (as long as the message has a strong compelling component) it is really your OPEN rate–the number of people who actually view the message–that has gone down.

The big challenge facing a marketer today is how to engage the consumer to actually open the message once it does get delivered. It is apparent that the marketers are becoming more aware of what the consumer wants to hear not just what the marketer has to say. The most effective marketing campaigns are the ones that have a clear purpose and are sent because they can add value to the recipient in some way, and the marketers that are only sending messages when that is the case are seeing the best responses. Community-based sites such as Gather and Spire.com have seen similar approaches increase their member engagement and the response rates of the emails they do send are in fact driving greater response.

The traditional marketing calendar of systematic touches to the consumer or mailing list are being set aside for a more relevant messaging strategy. If a marketer has been sending emails communication on a bi-weekly basis and realizes they would be sending the next message simply because it is on the calendar as needing to be sent, but there is no relevant or new information, they are better served by simply skipping that messaging cycle until they do have something of value to offer their recipient.

This strategy allows for the consumer not to feel bombarded with messaging for the sake of messaging. Also, a key component to an effective email marketing campaign now is to establish a level of trust with your membership rather than simply hawking the next best promotion or the next new thing. You establish a level of credibility by offering insight or insider access first and then in subsequent emails, you have the ability to offer services and goods in a way that seems as if you are offering advice rather than selling something.

Of course, you have heard the cries from traditional direct marketers saying the art of email is dying and offline direct mail is resurging. Well, the latter is true but the former is not accurate at all. Email marketing has by no means bottomed out; it is still one of the most cost effective and immediate ways to reach your target market, and the ability to segment and analyze the data is invaluable. The key to maximizing the effectiveness comes in your firm’s ability to message appropriately for your audience and the technology between them.

Publishers, as I said are going back to direct mail, but only as a component of an integrated marketing campaign. They are using various channels, rich media, direct mail, email, key word, print, radio for a consistent overall integrated message–rather than the previous approach, which was to use a more integrated approach across standard channels while using email as a separate marketing campaign.

What mFinity does offer is a platform to create, connect and control mobile SMS (text-based) enabling marketers and brands to create and manage mobile initiatives that directly coincide with their target consumer audiences. Through an ASP software license, mFinity can be accessed after logging in.

“The PC Web has become ubiquitous, but mobile Internet sites (WAP) have an even greater potential in terms of marketing reach. PCs don’t leave their desks and laptops can be left at home, but mobile phones are an always-on, direct and powerful way to reach consumers,” said Paran Johar, managing director, MRM Worldwide, Los Angeles.
“Previous mobile marketing solutions required the purchase and deployment of multiple technologies in order to create connect and control a mobile campaign. The iLoop Mobile mFinity platform is a complete hardware and software solution that can be hosted in-house. In addition, it is so easy to use that our staff members did not require technical training and can present ‘mock’ campaigns to clients in a matter of minutes.”

Not only can users create and manage their initiatives but the new service also hosts the following features: Texture, which enables a wide variety of SMS services, Cascade connectivity to wireless carrier networks via mobile aggregator service, Constellation, a content management system, and Resonance, which allows wallpapers, ringtones, games, music, videos and other content to be sold.

Steve Koskie, CEO of iLoop Mobile, stated, “Previously, companies that launched mobile initiatives, in most cases, required a multitude of technology partners and weeks of ramp-up to start using their services or campaigns. With the launch of the iLoop Mobile mFinity mobile platform, brands, marketers, content owners and enterprises can reach mobile users via SMS, Web, mobile Internet sites and other mobile technologies with one solution, regardless of what mobile phone the consumer uses.”

“We were looking for the best way to generate sales as a result of rave reviews, and Clear Channel Radio presented us with a strategy to connect with our target audience throughout the entire day — while they are on the road and on the Internet,” said Chevrolet general manager Ed Peper in a statement.

The radio ads will air in cities like Dallas, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oklahoma City. Each one will send listeners to their corresponding radio station’s web site where they’ll see Chevy Silverados driving around the home page and parking in a prominent leaderboard banner. The leaderboard shows more information about the Sliverado and links to the Chevy web site.

“With a very strong product, a patriotic, American-made message and the opportunity to communicate with truck buyers about the Silverado over the next year, we expect this targeted campaign to be very effective,” added Clear Channel Radio Sales regional president Jeff Howard.

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.”

I went to see a friend who worked at an interactive agency in London. He’d said that they were doing some mobile marketing themselves, and I wanted to see first-hand how it was being done. I had already set up a shop to start testing mobile in America, but I was a bit stymied by the technology end of things. I’m a marketer, not a telecommunications expert. So the first thing I wanted to know was how the guts worked. How did the messages actually get from your database out into the cellular ethersphere and into consumers’ handsets?

When I met the CEO of this agency, that was the first question I asked. He looked at me like I was an idiot. He pointed to his laptop sitting on his desk.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” he finally replied. “It all comes out of there.”

I begged him to elaborate. “I just plug my phone into the back of my laptop,” he explained, “and we wrote a little script that just, you know, sends them through the phone.”

To my British friend, it was the most obvious thing in the world. But to my American ears, it didn’t add up. There was no way to plug my American cellphone into a laptop. And even if I could, there’s no function to just send text messages. I knew enough about the American market to understand that there were many complications to take into account. Each American carrier (like Verizon or Sprint) had their own very particular way to send messages through their system. And even if you were technologically able to send bulk messages, you needed the carriers’ permission to do so.

I’m still no expert on the British mobile networks, and I’m not entirely sure whether what my friend was doing was kosher. But our firm has now operated scores of mobile marketing campaigns in the U.S., and there’s one thing I’m sure of: In the U.S. there simply is no “plug and play” way to operate a mobile campaign the way you’d send an email blast.

It is tempting to think of sending text messages like sending email. But there are crucial differences on both the marketing and the technological fronts that every marketer needs to think about. Here are the key differences to think if you’re someone who is familiar with email marketing, and thinking of moving into mobile marketing:

1. The Pipes are not Open: The Internet is not owned by anybody, so if you have an Internet connection then you can send email. There’s no real barrier to sending out batches of emails, notwithstanding whether they’ll make it through spam filters and to their intended recipients. This is not the case with mobile. Each mobile carrier owns its own network and has the right to control what passes through its system. Carriers typically require explicit approval of whatever you plan to send to their subscribers. Carriers have an acute interest in making sure that their hard-won paying subscribers are not bombarded by messages they do not want. So you’ll need to plan for the time and effort to get those carrier approvals before you can start sending text messages.

2. The Pipes are not Free: An email service provider may charge you to send your emails out through their system, but there’s no fundamental cost to using the Internet. Sending a text message incurs a cost that must either be paid by the sender, the consumer, or both. It’s more like postage than like email. If you’re a marketer, you probably don’t want to charge your consumers to receive your message, so you’ll wind up footing the bill. It’s only a few pennies per message, but with volume it adds up. That’s a significant constraint that you need to bear in mind and budget for.

Yellowpages.com, a subsidiary of AT&T, is relying on humor for this promotion. In each TV ad, someone tries to do some task in a crazy way like jogging up an escalator for exercise. Then the phrase “Need something?” appears followed by an answer. In the escalator runner’s case, the answer is “health clubs.” Each ad ends with the phrase, “We wrote the book on local search.”

Yellowpages.com is focused on building brand awareness, carrying on the momentum generated by its first national campaign in 2006. “We saw terrific success with that approach last year, including tremendous growth in site and mobile application usage,” said Yellowpages.com chief marketing officer Matt Crowley in a statement. “By developing an ad campaign that builds brand awareness and drives search activity, we expose Web users to a valuable resource and offer our advertisers greater value by giving them increased exposure to consumers.”

Yellowpages.com handled more than a billion searches last year. The new ads are being created by GSD&M, which has been working with the company since 2005.