Benadryl interactive gets trolled, brand reacts like a boss

Benadryl in the UK recently launched an interesting interactive tool that invited users to report "pollen hotspots", allowing their site to crowdsource reports of heightened allergic sensitivity. Which was a great idea, until someone who the Drum describes as having "a little too much time on their hands" got crude with it:

As juvenile as that is, I was really pleased to find out that today, while locking up the interactive (presumably for some retooling) they acknowledged the act of vandalism with excellent British aplomb:

Excellent work!

"A Stretchy Hand" — new sticky viral from Coca-Cola

Go ahead. Do it! Go to astretchyhand.com and tell me you didn't waste a good five minutes (or more) on that sticky little thing.

(That's what she said.)

Breasts exploited in the name of cancer (again) #FdAdFriday

The technology is interesting, if it actually works as intended.

Poster before thermoactivation.

"Breast lumps are often discovered by womens partners. As a part of communication launching Breast Unit Prague (clinique for preventing and curing breast cancer) we produced this poster targeting men in male areas. When they placed their hands on the poster a pair of breasts would appear. Headline: ‘Touch them to ensure that they don’t disappear.’"

Poster thermoactivated.

While cause marketers like "Coppafeel,"  "Feel Your Boobies" and "Self Chec" promote self-screening for lumps in humorous and playfully sexy ways, this one seems more lecherous and objectifying. (Even though the creative team of Tereza Sverakova, Lauren van Aswegen and Igor Paleta seems to include at least one women.) And I don't know what it's like on the streets of Prague, but I wouldn't want to be seen feeling up a poster in public. Especially not a cancer campaign.

Ummm... what "thermoactivated" that line below the hands?

Let's hope this ad wasn't literally "F'd"...

Campaign by Leagas Delaney Prague, Czech Republic
Via I Believe in Advertising

OB apologizes to me personally, gives me a tampon coupon

Awww, thanks guys. You really shouldn't have.

According to Jezebel, this is a campaign by OB to try to win back customers in Canada after a supply disruption took the tiny tampons off the market last year. Jez comments, "For some reason, O.B. is only apologizing to Canadians at the moment" — well, duh! Effusive apology is such a Canadian thing to do.

And this is totally over the top. You enter your name in their interactive site, and this mopey man sings the hygienic product's apology to you as your name is tattooed on his arm, written in rose petals, and spread across the sky.

I'm touched, really. Deep in my... umm... where do you put those things again?

Ladmag interactive wants readers to tug their Halloweenies

Zoo Magazine uploaded this YouTube interactive last week, but I just saw it today.



It basically has three of the magazine's busty models show up at your door and offer to strip for you. Not really a breakthrough in the portrayal of women in popular media.

It might also be a bit of a frustration for the teenage boys and old pervs who get worked up over it, as it is still YouTube.

Which, from a strictly marketing perspective, is a pretty effective tease strategy. Want to see her surgically-enhanced breasts in all their ungravitational glory? You'll have to go to their site.

Interactive Lynx vid is a lot of work for not much payoff

That's what she said:



When you click the timeline and click "5738" the tiresome innuendo of this video gets shortened to a few seconds of mild amusement.

Again, "That's what she said".

Via Copyranter

Just be shareworthy, and the world's attention is yours

Osocio has just announced the finalists for its Campaign of The Year award.

In the announcement, editor Marc van Gurp writes:

"The 20 nominees this year show us a remarkable evolution in social advertising. When I started blogging about this niche industry in 2005, most of the campaigns where print-only. The majority of the campaigns in 2010 are driven by online video. Digital and real-world interactivity, and social media, are growing fast. My prediction for 2011 is that these two will be the leading campaign instruments."

I wholeheartedly agree. If you look at the campaigns that really capture public attention these days, most of them are about making you part of the story. And it can happen in the real world, the digital world, and between both.

For example, just today on Osocio I covered the most recent phase of an Israeli campaign by Woman to Go. The first part was a real-life installment in the shop window of an upscale mall in Tel Aviv. Real live women, who appeared to be scared and abused foreigners, were offered for sale like products or pets.

Clients are constantly looking for broad coverage, and trying to buy it through traditional media. Instead, Woman to Go created newsworthy real-world content in a single location, and ended up being talked about globally.

In the latest installment of Woman to Go, they posted an online video of an anonymous man actually buying a woman from the storefront, and encouraged people to interact online by pressing a "dislike" button on the YouTube page.

It's a very simple formula, and one which combines the very oldest form of advertising — live performance — with the newest media channels. You see it in the (now tiresome) trend of flashmobs that are recorded and put online. Or when an actor brings the commercial to a bunch of unsuspecting victims. Or even when an advertiser pulls some really weird shit like this:



The important thing is that what used to be called a "publicity stunt" now often becomes viral content. And if you're only trying to raise awareness for a cause people can really care about, their automatic interest makes it all the easier to get out there.

Even traditional media can work this way, when you start thinking about focussed impact rather than direct reach.

This interactive bus shelter for Amnesty International Germany could actually track the eye movements of a person sitting inside, presenting the violent domestic abuse scenario only in the peripheral vision.

Could they afford to do this more than once? Did it function perfectly? Did it get vandalized?

Who cares? It got the message out, and made headlines around the world. And that happened because it was novel technology, and used a strong concept to draw attention to an important issue. If you document it and seed it correctly, it only really needs to work once.

So as I face yet another year of trying to help clients with shrinking ad budgets and great expectations for "social media", I hope I'll be able to do something different. Something shareworthy.