Madison Square Garden confirms huge JPMorgan deal

By Adam Fraser

September 21, 2010

Madison Square Garden and JPMorgan Chase have confirmed their much-anticipated new, long-term marketing partnership.
JPMorgan Chase will become MSG’s first-ever marquee partner, the preeminent multi-platform, multi-venue, multi-media partnership with MSG. This new marketing partnership provides JPMorgan Chase with an unparalleled level of access for its best customers and premier brand exposure across MSG’s properties and brands. The deal includes MSG’s iconic venues - Madison Square Garden, Theater at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Beacon Theatre, Chicago Theatre - entertainment brands and events - Radio City Christmas Spectacular - professional sports teams - the New York Knicks, New York Rangers and New York Liberty - regional television networks - MSG, MSG Plus - and digital platforms.
 
The Garden is currently undergoing a self-funded comprehensive, top-to-bottom transformation that will provide a significantly enhanced experience for fans, athletes, entertainers, suite holders and partners. As marquee partner, JPMorgan Chase will also have the leading presence among marketing partners in the transformed Madison Square Garden. As per company policy, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, in the weeks before the announcement multiple sources claimed JPMorgan Chase’s sponsorship of the iconic New York venue would be worth US$300 million over a ten-year period.
 
With this new partnership, JPMorgan Chase customers across many of the firm’s lines of business will receive exclusive access to events and unique experiences across Madison Square Garden’s venues and sports and entertainment franchises. From access to sold out concerts and events to behind the scenes experiences with athletes and performers, JPMorgan Chase will be able to provide its customers with one-of-a-kind, can’t buy opportunities at more than 1,200 live entertainment and sports events at MSG’s New York and Chicago venues annually.   
 
“Offering high quality and unique customer benefits is a priority for Chase, so we are proud that our partnership with Madison Square Garden will provide Chase customers with exclusive access to some of the country’s premier venues and sports and entertainment franchises,” said Charlie Scharf, head of Retail Financial Services at Chase. “Madison Square Garden is an iconic, 130-year-old brand with diverse platforms. We believe partnering with The Garden will enhance the Chase brand and add significant customer benefits.”
 
“We are proud to have the world’s leading financial services firm JPMorgan Chase become Madison Square Garden’s first marquee partner. They join our lineup of Signature partners that are all best in class brands – Anheuser-Busch, the world’s leading brewer, Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage company, and Delta Air Lines, New York’s most global airline,” said Hank Ratner, president and chief executive, Madison Square Garden. “This partnership will provide JPMorgan Chase with valuable tools to help strengthen and enhance relationships with their customers, creating defining moments and lasting memories through unique access and experiences with MSG’s legendary brands.”
 
Added Scott O’Neil, president, MSG Sports: “Madison Square Garden and JPMorgan Chase are both storied and established New York based businesses known for quality. This partnership builds a bridge for JPMorgan Chase customers to unparalleled access to over 1,200 events annually at The Garden, Theater at MSG, Radio City Music Hall, Beacon Theatre, and Chicago Theatre, and for the world’s most famous fans to connect with the number one bank in the world. The Chase retail bank has over 1,000 branches and 3,000 ATMs in New York including locations at The Garden. This marquee partnership will continue making our fans their customers and their customers our fans, a powerful relationship that elevates the experience for New Yorkers with both of our brands.”
 
In addition to customer benefits, a central part of the relationship is JPMorgan Chase’s integration in the transformed Madison Square Garden, including several of the building’s new signature elements. The new 7th Avenue entrance to the building will become the Chase Square and feature interactive kiosks, new retail locations and a broadcast area. Inside the Arena the two spectacular new Chase Bridges will be suspended above the floor offering a one-of-a-kind view of the action. The 1879 Club presented by J.P. Morgan will be an exclusive new space that provides event attendees with a casual and intimate environment to relax before or after an event. New Madison Square Garden 7th and 8th Avenue marquees will also feature permanent JPMorgan Chase branding.
 
This first-of-its-kind partnership will establish expansive brand exposure for JPMorgan Chase in New York City and nationwide. JPMorgan Chase will serve as the presenting partner of the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, Radio City Christmas Spectacular National Tour, the Radio City Music Hall Concert Series and the Chicago Theatre. In addition, JPMorgan Chase will become an official partner of the MSG Concert Series, Theater at MSG, and Beacon Theatre. Permanent and digital signage, as well as Chase ATMs, will be located throughout each of the venues. The multi-platform partnership will be fully integrated across MSG’s sports, entertainment and media properties.

Posted on Sports Pro Media

Bradley and Montgomery Wins OMMA Award for Best Standalone Video

September 22, 2009

NEW YORK, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ — Independent advertising agency, Bradley and Montgomery (BaM), took home the OMMA award in the Standalone Video Category for their work on Microsoft’s History of the Internet video Monday night.

History of the Internet, created to promote the launch of Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer 8, was a 5 minute humorous journey through the surprisingly brief history of the Internet. The video featured comedians (Janeane Garofalo, Dave Hill, Christian Finnegan); Web personalities (Obama Girl, the Ninja from “Ask a Ninja”); and even a Harvard Professor (Jeffrey Rayport, inventor of the phrase “viral marketing”). The video remembered the best and worst of the web - from dancing hamsters to pointless status updates - all in a hilarious trip down memory lane to celebrate Microsoft’s newest web browser, Internet Explorer 8.

“We are thrilled to be recognized by the OMMA Awards for the History of the Internet video,” says Ben Carlson, Chief Strategy Officer for Bradley and Montgomery. “Five minutes is tremendously long for a web video. But because it was funny, topical and unique, people watched. In fact, collectively 42,000 hours have been spent watching just this one video online.”

The video was launched at Microsoft’s Mix09 conference in Las Vegas last spring as part of the release of Internet Explorer 8. Using an innovative strategy, BaM used the few hundred people who were in the room watching the video live to help launch the video online to thousands more. People who mentioned the video on Twitter were direct messaged with a link to the video, which many in turn ReTweeted. IE8 ended up as a trending topic on Twitter and the video received a significant amount of social media chatter and press. To date the video has received over a half million views.

To produce the video, BaM worked with Generate, an LA-based content production company. In only a few short weeks, Generate was able to line up the dozens of personalities needed to bring the video to life. The video was directed by Disposable TV, a Generate client.

Posted on News Blaze

EXCLUSIVE: Check Out This ‘Survival Of The Dead’ Poster By ‘The Walking Dead’ Artist Charlie Adlard!

By Rick Marshall

May 3, 2010

“Survival of the Dead” is the latest film in George A. Romero’s continuing exploration of a post-apocalyptic world in which zombies rule and humans are the minority, but fans of the zombie movie genre aren’t the only ones who should take note of the film — comic book fans might notice some familiar art in one of the film’s promotional posters.

In a “Survival of the Dead” poster we’re revealing exclusively here on Splash Page, “The Walking Dead” artist Charlie Adlard turns his considerable talents back to the zombie genre he knows so well… with chilling results.

You can check out the full poster below, and read on for all the gory details about the latest chapter in Romero’s undead saga.

“Survival of the Dead” is currently available on VOD, Amazon, VUDU, Xbox LIVE & PlayStation, and will hit theaters May 28. The film is rated R for “strong zombie violence/gore, language and brief sexuality.”

Yeah, that sounds like a winning combination for zombie fun to me, too.

Here’s the official plot synopsis for the film:

Immediately following the events of “Diary of the Dead,” “Survival of the Dead,” is the 6th film from George A. Romero to look at a world where Humans are in the minority and the zombies rule.

Off the coast of Delaware sits the cozy Plum Island where two families are locked in a struggle for power, as it has been for generations. The O’Flynn’s, headed by patriarch Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) approach the zombie plague with a shoot-to-kill attitude. The Muldoons, headed by Shamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), feel that the zombies should be quarantined and kept ‘alive,’ in hopes that a solution will someday be found.

The O’Flynn’s, who are clearly outnumbered, are forced to exile Patrick by boat to the mainland, where he meets up with a band of soldiers, headed by Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang). They join forces and return to the island, to find that the zombie plague has fully gripped the divided community.

As the battle between humans and zombies escalates, the master filmmaker continues to reinvent the modern horror genre with wicked humor and pointed social commentary.

BRAAAAAAAINS!!!

Posted on MTV.com

BaM Nominated At Webby Awards For Fizziology Web Site

April 19, 2010

Independent advertising agency, Bradley and Montgomery (BaM) has been nominated in the Best Guides/Ratings/Reviews category for the site created for sister company Fizziology, in the 14th Annual Webby Awards.

Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.

BaM unveiled Fizziology in September 2009. After using social media to launch successful online campaigns for Microsoft, MTV and VH1, BaM realized there was a need to translate individual opinions into data that can be measured, tracked and analyzed in real time.

Fizziolo.gy is the public-facing site for Fizziology, a tool that helps entertainment professionals, from movie studio heads to casting agents, understand how their talent and movie properties are faring in the court of social media opinion. Fizziology mines the millions of individual thoughts and opinions expressed in the big three of social media: blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Social media specialists score a statistically relevant sample, then digest the data to let clients understand the volume and sentiment of the chatter, and track how it changes over time.

“It’s the world’s biggest, fastest, most honest focus group,” says Ben Carlson, co-creator of Fizziology.

“People have been trying to use social media to promote. But what they should really do is listen. All of these online conversations are impacting entertainment. Fizziology can help marketers, content creators and other entertainment decision makers understand what people are talking about—spot challenges and opportunities, and do something about them.”

“We’re honored,” says founding partner Mark Bradley.

“All the other finalists in our category are practically household names. The fact that our less-than-a-year-old social media measurement tool is in the company of Yelp, CNET, Metacritic and Tripadvisor is something of a victory in itself.”

As a nominee, Fizziology is also eligible to win a Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community.

Winners will be announced on May 4, 2010 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 14 where they will have an opportunity to deliver one of the Webby Awards’ famous five-word speeches with the world.

Past Webby Award winners—and their speeches—include Al Gore (“Please don’t recount this vote.”), Stephen Colbert (“Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.”), and Michel Gondry (“Keyboards are full of germs.”) For a full list of last year’s five-word speeches, click here.

The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpson’s” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein.

Posted on Taxi

Microsoft Pushes IE8 With Ads that are Actually Funny

By Ian Paul

Jun 30, 2009

Microsoft has done it again: The company has released another set of baffling and mystifying ads, but this time they’re actually funny. The software giant released four new ads to promote Internet Explorer 8 starring Lois and Clark’s Dean Cain as a 1960s style ad man- — no doubt inspired by AMC’s Mad Men. So far the new ad campaign is an online-only affair, and uses the tagline ‘Browse Better.’

The ads highlight IE8 features using mock situations and cutesy acronyms like F.O.M.S. — fear of missing something — for IE8s Web slices, and S.H.Y.N.E.S.S. — sharing heavily, yet not enough sharing still — for the browser’s accelerator feature. But the king of all four ads is O.M.G.I.G.P. — oh my God! I’m gonna puke — for IE8s private browsing feature; private browsing temporarily stops your browser from recording your online activities including your Web history and tracking cookies.

O.M.G.I.G.P. is the most honest ad we’ve seen from Redmond in a long time. Microsoft openly acknowledges in the spot the most common reason to use private browsing: hiding your online porn tracks. I’m not going to go into detail about what happens in the ad, but let’s just say the title O.M.G.I.G.P. is taken very literally.

The new campaign is also tied to Microsoft’s dedicated IE8 Web site called, Browser for the Better. For every copy of Internet Explorer 8 downloaded from the new site between now and August 8, Microsoft will donate eight meals to Feeding America, a domestic hunger-relief charity.

Since the launch of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s browser has struggled with dwindling popularity, as users turn to other Web browsing alternatives like Mozilla’s Firefox and Opera. Will this new campaign help turn IE8’s fortunes around? Check out the ads below and judge for yourself.

Posted on PC World

Bobcat Goldthwait Just Wants to Direct (Commercials)

For better or worse, Bobcat Goldthwait is probably known to most of the public as “that Police Academy guy.” Goldthwait starred in three Police Academy films, but he’s been doing a lot since Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol hit screens in 1987. In addition to directing episodes of The Man Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Goldthwait earned positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 for Stay, a film about a woman who throws her fiancé a curve when she confesses a past episode of bestiality. Goldthwait’s latest film is World’s Greatest Dad, a dark comedy starring Robin Williams as a man who tries to cover up his teenage son’s death by forging a suicide note, which becomes a literary hit. It’s somewhat of a surprise then that the first commercials Goldthwait has directed, announcing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Web browser, aren’t dark at all, but instead rely on Airplane!-style zany humor. Goldthwait discussed those ads, which were created by Indianapolis agency Bradley and Montgomery, and his thoughts on advertising work with Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman. Here are some excerpts of their conversation:


Brandweek: Have you done commercial work before?
Bobcat Goldthwait: No, this is my first time doing commercial work. This is my first stab at it. It’s something I’ve been trying to crack for years, but I think people get nervous you know, like “Are we gonna trust this campaign with the guy who lit the Tonight Show on fire?”

BW: Speaking of which, did Microsoft give you a specific plan where they said “We want this,” or did they kind of say “Do whatever you want”?
BG: Well, it came from the guys at [Bradley and Montgomery] and it’s nice that people have been reacting positively and I’m glad that people think it’s funny, but I have to attribute it to those guys writing funny stuff and encouraging…as a group those guys and I were pitching as a group so it wasn’t like “Here’s our script and shoot it exactly,” so it was cool that they were there on the set.

BW: How did you get involved with Dean Cain? I wouldn’t peg him for that sort of role?
BG: (Laughs) Once again, that was those guys’ idea and I was very happy that Dean got the joke and was a good guy to work with and didn’t take himself seriously. It would have been dreadful if he started saying “Dean Cain wouldn’t say this.”

BW: The tone was very much like the Airplane! movies, making me think he might be good for one of those roles.
BG: It’s funny you say that. After working with him I was like “Oh man, I gotta keep him in mind if I keep making movies and stuff” because he is a funny guy.

BW: You mentioned that you’ve been trying to get into commercial work for some time. Is it difficult to get into that kind of work?
BG: Yeah because I think the kind of folks that excel at that are the kind of folks who are really good in the room and come to the client or agency and say “This is gonna be something you’ve never seen before and I’m gonna blow your ass away with these special effects,” and I’ve always been the other way, which is “Let’s work really hard and see what we come up with. That doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m not threatened by a good idea. It comes from a background of working on shows like Chapelle’s Show or the Man Show or even I used to direct the Kimmel show for three years, so it’s kind of the stuff we would do.

BW: More improv-based?
BG: It’s like you get an idea and you keep working on it.

BW: You mentioned movies. You have a new one coming out?
BG: It’s called “World’s Greatest Dad” and I directed it and it was at Sundance and this was the second movie I had at Sundance. I don’t think people think of me as an auteur or a director and I don’t mind that, I would think the same thing. It’s like finding out that Screech is directing a movie.

BW: Is it very dark?
BG: Folks say it’s dark, but I really do believe that comedy is in general too light. I think that like if you make an R-rated comedy now, you’re trying to get 12 year-olds to watch it. That’s really who you’re making it for. If you make a big mass comedy, the story usually suffers. I don’t think the movies I’m making are for intellectuals, but I don’t really have any interest in going after teenagers. I think they’re idiots and there’s enough product out there for them.

BW: Do you mean like The Hangover?
BG: No, I haven’t seen The Hangover, but I find it frustrating that if you’re an adult and you like comedy you wind up watching shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm and stuff like that and I don’t know that anyone is really going for the-even twentysomethings and thirtysomethings interest me, but if you can kick ass at Guitar Hero, I don’t know how to talk to you. (Laughs) I’m gonna be shooting myself in the foot.

Posted on Brandweek

Microsoft Tries to Sell Millennials on IE8

The tech giant will donate cash to charity as part of campaign promoting the latest version of its browser

June 10, 2009

By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Microsoft is hoping to convince young Internet users to rethink their browser habits with a campaign that offers to donate up to $1 million to charity based on downloads of Internet Explorer 8.

The company has hooked up with Feeding America as part of its “Browser for the Better” campaign that kicked off today and runs through Aug. 10. Each time a Windows user downloads Internet Explorer 8 from the campaign Web site, Microsoft will donate $1.15. The campaign would result in about 870,000 downloads based on Microsoft’s $1 million contribution limit for the campaign.

“We really like the idea of providing a little good in the world when you download the browser,” Ben Carlson, chief strategy officer at Bradley and Montgomery, the Indianapolis shop that created the campaign. “For the younger audience, it’s a way to do a little bit of good by doing something easy.”

It hopes to further goose the reach of the campaign through social networking tools. After downloading the browser, users are invited to update their Facebook friends to the program.

Microsoft is backing the campaign with a series of fake public service announcements created by Bradley and Montgomery, in conjunction with production firm Generate. The spots, directed by former Police Academy star Bobcat Goldthwait, show former Lois and Clark star Dean Cain explaining various made-up Internet conditions, such as F.O.M.S. (Fear of Missing Something). The campaign is launching with two videos, and more are planned.

Each video focuses on a specific feature of the browser. The “F.O.M.S.” spot, for instance, highlights IE8’s “Web slices” that update users with real-time information on eBay auctions, stock quotes and sports scores.

Another video tackles “S.H.Y.N.E.S.S.” (Sharing Heavily Yet Not Enough Sharing Still), trumpeting IE8’s “accelerator” sharing function.

“The millennial generation thinks they know Internet Explorer,” said Carlson. “They’ve made their determination about which browser is better and they have a lot of sway among their parents and co-workers. This campaign is designed to challenge those preconceived notions.”

Microsoft is launching the campaign as it faces increased competition in the Web browser market it has dominated since vanquishing Netscape in the late 1990s. Firefox and Safari have chipped away at its share, and Google is making a push to gain share through Chrome. Microsoft released IE8 in March with a series of new features.

The fight for the browser is critical in the battle between Microsoft and Google for Internet dominance, particularly since many searches occur from the browser search window. Google recently ran its first TV spots to promote Chrome, signaling it is a high priority for the company.

Microsoft still maintains a wide lead in the browser market. According to NetApplications, Internet Explorer maintains a 66 percent share. Firefox is second with 22 percent. According to the researcher, Firefox has steadily chipped away at IE’s lead and under current trends will drive Microsoft’s share of the browser market under 50 percent by 2011.

Posted on Ad Week

Internet Explorer viral video taps Microsoft’s funny bone

By Mark Milian

IE8 Net History, the online video that Microsoft released alongside the launch of the newest version of Internet Explorer, is hip, sarcastic, slightly vulgar and funny — a bouquet of qualities rarely associated with the software giant.

With a pastiche of interviews with recognizable faces, Net History provides a comedic overview of the history of mainstream Internet use. Janeane Garofalo, Dave Hill and the ninja from the Ask a Ninja podcast riff on topics from modems to Internet memes.

The ad continues Microsoft’s recent tradition of hiring comedians to hawk its software. You might remember the pervasive TV commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, in which the pair move in with a suburban family to regain their connection with the average citizen.

Some tech bloggers accused the Seinfeld campaign of being irrelevant and alienating to the average consumer. The Net History video, however, is neither. It’s down to earth, clever and self-deprecating.

From the beginning, Bradley and Montgomery, the ad agency behind the video, wanted to catch people off guard with the video. “How do we …

… talk to people in a way that’s surprising?” Ben Carlson, the chief strategy officer of the agency, recalled asking during a brainstorming session.

At one point, the comedians discuss a new feature to Microsoft’s browser, called “private mode,” that allows you to temporarily surf the Web without leaving a trace in your browser’s history. “I wonder what that’s for,” snarks actress Beth Dover.

Later, the masked ninja, screams, “Developers, developers, developers!” — a parody of the old clip showing a sweaty, seemingly delusional Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, stomping around a stage.

In almost a month’s time, the video has racked up 86,500 hits on YouTube and 80,000 on Break.com. Not exactly small potatoes, but compare that to other viral videos we’ve written about, like EA’s Tiger Woods short or Samsung’s unboxing clip, which each got about four times that amount in just a few days.

Granted, that’s not counting the people who view the video directly on Microsoft’s website — those statistics weren’t immediately available. But part of the reason for the less-than-stellar results, Carlson says, is the relatively long run time. At five minutes, it’s longer than most YouTube shorts.

Another factor that certainly didn’t help is the lack of publicity given to the video by Microsoft. You can find a link to it buried somewhere on the product page for Internet Explorer. But outside of that and its premiere at a conference, the video, which comes from the same agency responsible for last year’s Mojave Experiment TV ads, has relied solely on word-of-keyboard for distribution, through channels like Twitter and e-mail.

Regardless, this coupled with the “It’s a PC” commercials, in which cute hipsters boast the competitive prices of Windows computers, shows Microsoft has been able to add some cool to its image. The software manufacturer still doesn’t carry the same mega-hip cachet as competitor Apple. But it looks to have graduated from Gates and Seinfeld trying on loafers at a shoe store.

Correction: This post originally stated that Kent Nichols played the role of the masked ninja. Nichols is actually the director and co-creator of the Ask a Ninja show.

Brighter designs in darker days

By Scott Montgomery

In hard times, competitive pressure builds, and updating its look is one of the few tools an established brand has to create a buzz.

Why are so many brands making expensive changes now?

Updating a product’s branding —- its packaging, its logo, its look and feel —- seems easy enough. A branding firm arrives with a gorgeous new mock-up of your product, your signs or the tail of your corporate jet, along with reams of supporting data on why your old designs are hopelessly out of step with consumer preference.

You approve, and suddenly, without changing your product in any way, you get to use the most important word in all of commerce: “New.”

Being suddenly “new” is pretty powerful stuff, but there are risks. Calculate the costs of redesigning and reprinting warehouses full of company sales materials. Redesigning Web sites. Changing out building signs. Updating product displays across retail channels. Reprinting forests of business cards. And, perhaps the biggest expense of all, creating the advertising to make customers aware —- and receptive —- to the change. Oh, and by the way, you’re doing it all in the middle of the worst economic downturn in recent memory. Risky.

There are, after all, no guarantees. Tropicana just spent $35 million with one of these firms for a redesign of its entire retail line of juice products —- complete with screw-caps cleverly retooled to feel like the skin of an orange —- that was so roundly criticized by its consumers that the entire endeavor was scrapped within weeks of appearing on shelves. That’s a $35 million logical, clever and systematic process crashing down harder and faster than a runway model in a viral video.

So why change? And more importantly, why now?

Bad times or good, the reason’s the same —- pressure. Competitive pressure, pressure from demographic changes, changes in customer behavior. It’s just that, now, marketers feel a whole lot more of it.

Updating a branding is one of the precious few controls a marketer has to create “energy” and “news” around an established brand. But it has to be more than just a logical, clever and systematic undertaking. Will change enhance the story the brand embodies without losing sight of its history?

Products have important heritages, and consumers can have strong connections to familiarity. Among the winning retail brands in this downturn is Campbell’s Soup, whose packaging would be recognizable to shoppers from half a century ago. So why are other familiar grocery store brands such as Pepsi and Heinz making changes?

Among these rebrands, I think we are seeing a trend toward simplicity. Coke removed all the graphic bubbles, bars and arcs to create a very bold, back-to-basics can. Pepsi nearly mimics Barack Obama’s campaign brand, whose simplicity and elegance was appealing. Now each can is a simple, blue campaign poster. Odd logo, powerful can.

Heinz recently broke with long-standing tradition and removed the pickle graphic from its ketchup bottles to make room for its new positioning statement, “Grown Not Made.” At first this seems logical, clever and systematic —- after all, ketchup is full of tomatoes, not pickles. But they may have lost a small but important thing along the way. Practically all their competitors have a big tomato on the package, so there’s one less point of differentiation there now. More importantly, the pickle was odd and unique —- when I was a kid, there was this little mystery on the label to solve —- what was this pickle? And 57 varieties of what? It created curiosity and invited me to learn more about the product. That’s called a “consumer engagement” these days, and brands want that as much as anything else.

Of course, If any of these rebranding efforts are to truly succeed in this economy, they’ll have to be more than logical, clever and systematic. They’ll have to create more consumer engagement.

> Scott Montgomery is a principal and executive creative director at Bradley and Montgomery in Indianapolis.

Microsoft looks back fondly at that absurd creation, the Internet

By Becky Ebenkamp

It’s (mock) official: Al Gore lied. In this video, comedian Dave Hill details how the Internet really came to be. “My friend Tommy puked, and puke came out of his nose, and I took this awesome picture,” he recalls fondly in the ad. But how would he show everyone? “It was like—boom!—the Internet. So, I invented the Internet.”

The five-minute short-form doc, “Remembering Stuff About the Internet,” was created for the Windows Internet Explorer 8 debut at Microsoft’s MIX09 developer conference in Las Vegas last week. In it, various entertainment types walk us through the evolution of the Internet in classy-Ken-Burns meets shoddy-VH1 docu-style. Through their Web memories, we revisit various epochs such as The Dial-up Years with their screeching modems, the “Caviar. Llamas. Pants” period of buying stuff online, the viral videos of Contagious Content, and the social networking phenom “Friend Me?, Poke You;)”.

Janeane Garofalo, the “Ask a Ninja” ninja and a Harvard professor ponder such things as dancing hamsters and the meaning of a medium with “4 million people writing poetry and 14 people reading poetry.” Just about everyone but former Sen. Ted Stevens tries to explain the Interweb’s inner workings using those tried-and-true “tubes,” “levers,” “magic,” “string,” “dragons” and “kittens eating yogurt” metaphors. Of course, the final chapter suggests, “It’s just going to get awesomer from here,” and flogs IE8’s new InPrivate Browsing mode. But won’t that just make people paranoid that people can spy all the porn and debt they’re accruing now on IE7? The ad was created by Bradley and Montgomery, the agency that created the Mojave Experiment for Microsoft.

Posted on BrandFreak