By Peter Ha
You know, I have to give props to Microsoft’s ad agency Bradley and Montgomery for a hilarious new ad promoting IE8. It’s full of celebrities poking fun at the Internet with intermittent sprinklings of IE8 that don’t overwhelm and bore you like other MS ads. Kudos all around. Happy YouTube Friday!
Posted on Crunch Gear
By Andrea James
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 launched Thursday and to accompany the new browser, the company has released the following commercial.
The video mocks the history of the Internet.
Advertising agency Bradley and Montgomery did the video, which premiered Thursday at MIX09, Microsoft’s Web developer conference in Las Vegas.
What’s the point? Microsoft wants the world to know that it was there first.
“Almost everything you’ve experienced on the World Wide Web in the past 15 years or so has been seen through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” says Ben Carlson, Chief Strategy Officer of Bradley and Montgomery.
The video features Janeane Garofalo, Christian Finnegan, Dave Hill, Anjelah Johnson and Baron Vaughn. It’s also got Ask a Ninja and Obama Girl.
My thoughts: I did like the ‘Ask a Ninja’ guy talking about “completely defining everything with clip art — all of my emotions were somehow encaptulated in a waiter holding a bottle of champagne.” That made me laugh out loud.
The Hamster Dance brought me back to college.
And I loved that they stuck in the unicorn clip…”Shun the non-believer. Shunnn. Shunnn-uh.” (The clip is from this YouTube video, which has more than 35 million views.)
The video went on a little long. Maybe they should’ve mentioned (realized?) that thanks to the Internet, we’ve all got short attention spans.
What did you think?
Posted on Seattle Pi
‘Mojave Experiment’ Finds a Voice Through Campfire Indie Pop
By Charlie Moran
Man, I wasn’t really sold on this whole Microsoft “Mojave Experiment” until now. The blind taste-test method of a new pretty operating system is a lot like a new puppy: it’s adorable and you just wanna rub its fur all up in your face and everything is beautiful and exhilarating and then you bring it home and it poops in your hat. But I’m willing to cut Redmond some slack because — in addition to dropping the hidden reveal part — they’ve made one of my favorite songs as of late, “Oh Mojave” by The Ruby Suns, the theme song for the campaign.
I’m at a total loss to explain the stylistic origins of this song except to say that it sounds like a giant squirt of happiness into one’s ear. And a little bit like Animal Collective of course. It’s also a pretty good warm-up for all the Christmas music we’re trying not to listen to yet.
Posted on Advertising Age
On the Vh1 website, Sharon Osbourne admonishes girls about drunk dialing, going commando, showing their boobs, vomiting and other less than polite behaviors as part of a mobile campaign leading up to the premiere of the VH1 reality show, Charm School. Created by Bradley and Montgomery, the “manner musts” are raunchy, tongue-in-cheek clips that can be sent to friends from the VH1 website as either audio or video clips.
Posted on Ad Rants
We’ve learned, thanks to our handy-dandy tips box, and a few other resources, that New York’s own Bradley and Montgomery is the creative hive-mind behind the work.
A quick call to BaM confirmed what we’d heard, and Bizmology reported earlier today. The agency prides itself on not being an AoR, and creating work on a project-by-project basis.
We’re told that Microsoft called BaM and told them they needed the focus group recorded and edited in 20 days. Damn, Bam! Anyway, the research subjects needed to fit two requirements; they couldn’t be Vista users and they had to have a neutral or negative preconceived notion of the product.
The rest you can see for yourself at the Web site. We hear there are more videos being edited and added to the site all the time. And remember, dear addies, Crispin had nothing to do with this. Their work is still to come. Check out more of BaM’s work at BamIdeas dot com.
Posted on Media Bistro
The Mojave Experiment’s success is debatable, but Microsoft must roll up its sleeves to battle false rumors, bad press — and Apple
By J. Peter Bruzzese
You may have heard of the Mojave Experiment: Microsoft took a bunch of XP users who were afraid to move toward Vista because of all the negative press it had received. In an attempt to reverse their negative feelings, the company sat them down in front of the latest desktop OS — but didn’t tell them it was Vista. And, lo, the people said they like it!
Some people have trashed this approach to marketing. Wil Shipley, software developer for Delicious Monster, posted scathing remarks regarding the “experiment,” calling it “bad science, bad marketing.” InfoWorld Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall Kennedy said this: “While the Mojave project may help Microsoft grab a few headlines (embarrassing folks by tricking them into contradicting themselves on camera always makes for good copy), it does nothing to address the very real flaws that are causing enterprise IT shops to turn away from Vista in droves.”
[ For Kennedy’s perspective on the Mojave Experiment, please read “Windows ‘Mojave:’ Another sign that Microsoft just doesn’t get it.” ]
Meanwhile, popular blogger Long Zheng wrote, “Whatever you think of it, you have to admit it’s a pretty smart idea.”
I say it’s easy to write off the whole thing as silly when you see the Mojave Experiment site. But I thought it was an informative and reasonable attempt. Given the fact that so many have decided to shun Vista based upon giant urban legends propagating throughout the workplace (sadly by mostly misinformed, inexperienced persons who possess a measure of credibility in the field), I think it’s nice to go back to the people, make them look at Vista with no predisposition because it’s Mojave now, and let them tell you what they honestly think. And they like it!
The Mojave Experiment was the brainchild of Microsoft’s newly acquired marketing guru Bradley and Montgomery. B&M has been working on a bunch of different ads to encourage a more positive view of Microsoft. Whether or not the Mojave Experiment was the right way to demonstrate that given a fair chance, people can appreciate Vista, it’s clear what the company is doing: It’s trying desperately to recapture the imaginations and loyalty of consumers who are constantly bombarded with criticisms about Microsoft.
Among them, there’s the notion that Microsoft just isn’t cool. Who says? Well, the hundreds of commercials with the portly glasses-wearing guy representing PC and the skinny cool guy representing Mac. Those ads are brutal. And hilarious. It’s one of the strongest marketing techniques of our time — and one of the meanest. Microsoft might be able to play off of the sympathy card with those. However, eWeek’s Joe Wilcox offered a great way to respond to those commercials, where a Mac emerges and introduces himself in the familiar, “Hello, I’m a Mac” fashion. Then one after another, hundreds of PC people enter and say, “And I’m a PC.” There is silence. The Mac guy looks at the thousands of PC people and mutters, “Wow.” The punch line: “You can be alone. Or you can have friends.”
B&M also has a lot more work to do in countering the allegation that Windows Vista is as a dud. The truth is, the OS never should have been installed on the thousands of systems that were not powerful enough to make it look good. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the company didn’t enforce a stricter policy of hardware requirements from their vendors. It compromised at some point.
Apple never does that. The company controls both hardware and software and ensures that every system is one they can be proud of in terms of performance. Granted Microsoft has a different style, a different model — and it if weren’t for Microsoft’s model, how many companies wouldn’t exist today such as Dell, HP, and so forth? But it causes a hit-or-miss experience with Vista that has damaged the reputation of the Vista OS undeservingly.
Personally, I’ve used Vista since Beta 3 on all sorts of different systems. They were all perfect for Vista (2GB of RAM and a solid processor speed). I couldn’t be happier with the OS and I’m not alone.
Yet Microsoft does appear to feel users’ pain — and is willing to accept some responsibility for it. Last month, at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Brad Brooks, corporate vice president of Windows consumer product marketing, spoke very honestly about Vista and the disappointment people feel toward it — and Microsoft.
He said, “We had an ambitious plan. We made some significant investments around security in this product. And you know what, those investments, they broke some things. They broke a lot of things. We know that. And we know it caused you a lot of pain in front of your customers, in front of our customers. And it got a lot of customers thinking, and even yourselves and our partners thinking, ‘Hey, is Windows Vista a generation that I want to make an investment in?’”
Indeed, Microsoft realizes the mistakes it’s made. The company is willing to make up for it, and it’s poised to rise up like an awakened giant to engage in a battle that has been brewing for a good year now — little guy Mac taking one slap at Microsoft after another with no response thus far. More marketing campaigns will be attempted; some will fail, and some will succeed. But overall, from my enterprise perspective, it’s the quality of the product, how it runs in our environment, how it works with our other applications, how comfortable and productive our users are with it, and the price; these are the things that are going to determine the future.
Brooks tried to encourage folks not to wait two more years for Windows 7, but to make the investment now because it will be based on the same Windows Vista architecture. People have been cursing the new OS, but perhaps with the new marketing, perhaps with more admissions of error on the part of higher-up Microsoft players, perhaps thanks to improvements in the OS with SP1 (such as driver compatibility problems), that “wow” that Microsoft promised may eventually come through.
What about you? Are you done with Microsoft, or just frustrated? Can you see your users moving to Mac or Ubuntu? Do you think they are ready for that extreme interface change? Do you have the training resources available to get them through it?
Posted on InfoWorld
With oil prices rising and other operating costs trailing not too far behind, Microsoft has launched a promotion to highlight the environmental breaks small businesses can reap by switching their computer systems over to the Windows Vista operating system.
Owners or employees of U.S.-based businesses with two to 100 workers can visit BumptheSlump.com to register for the gas giveaway. The winner will be chosen after July 21 and will receive the award in the form of a gift card for Shell gasoline.
The sweepstakes, designed for Microsoft by agency Bradley and Montgomery, also offers Web visitors five basic tips for reducing the load their computing systems place on the energy grid and cutting their own costs. These include replacing business travel with Web conference via Microsoft Office Live Meeting, enabling employees to telecommute with a Windows Small Business Server, and deploying Windows Vista as a standard operating system.
“Windows Vista can save you as much as $70.77 in energy costs per PC per year compared to a typical PC not running Vista,” the Web site says. “It saves you money and lets you give Earth a little hug.”
Microsoft has previously highlighted the green benefits of its Vista operating system. In a speech to an industry group last March, CEO Steve Ballmer said Windows Vista had been engineered to use 3 watts per hour on an idling PC compared to 100 watts per hour for one running Windows XP, the operating system the company rolled out in 2001.
Microsoft has been campaigning to get both business and personal users to adopt the Vista operating system for more than a year now, but has been encountering resistance from users who want to stick with Windows XP. Most recently, computer chip maker Intel announced on Monday that it will not upgrade its 80,000 employees to the Vista system.
Consumer resistance to Vista has been heightened by Microsoft’s announced plan to launch its next new OS, Windows 7, late next year or in early 2010. Some business IT departments have reportedly decided to skip integrating Vista in favor of that next OS.
Posted on Promo
By Daniel S. Comiskey
A local agency attracts national attention by expanding the boundaries of advertising - coming soon to an electrical outlet, treadmill, or Christmas tree near you.
In the so - called “TiVo Age,” as consumers discover ways to fast - forward through commercials and block out the ever - expanding number of billboards, the little downtown ad agency has been busily inventing new places to throw a message your way. With clients such as Microsoft, Chase, and MTV, BaM has emerged as a standout in the world of nontraditional advertising, a category that includes just about anything that’s not television, radio, billboards, or print. While it’s not the first agency to hinge its success on that trend (ads have been popping up on everything from manhole covers to shopping carts), BaM has done it with greater success than most. What began as a two - man agency in 1999 now bills more than $20 million annually.
What’s more, its work has generated buzz. In 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article on a series of Chase ads BaM wrapped around airport electrical outlets, and The New York Times and US Weekly, among others, seized upon an Internet video campaign the agency did for MTV’s The Hills within a week of the launch.
Of course, not everyone rejoices about the never - ending proliferation of commercial messages. Several national anti - advertising groups consider such work, however inventive, to be a blight on the landscape. Organizations such as the Anti - Advertising Agency, a not - for - profit group of writers and artists in New York City, rage against the growing tidal wave of ads - some 5,000 exposures per person per day - in which they say we’re now drowning.
“No business succeeds for very long by making people hate it,” says co - owner Scott Montgomery. “The first surge of nontraditional media, when it was just surprising because no one had ever put an ad there, has passed. Now you have to give the viewer some kind of value. It has to be surprising and delightful.”
Not dismissing those concerns, the principals of BaM say they’re mindful of the line between surprising and annoying.
“No business succeeds for very long by making people hate it,” says co - owner Scott Montgomery. “The first surge of nontraditional media, when it was just surprising because no one had ever put an ad there, has passed. Now you have to give the viewer some kind of value. It has to be surprising and delightful.”
For the principals at BaM, “delightful” means the medium fits the message. It means stunts like promoting MTV’s Two - A - Days, a show about a high - school football team, by fastening ads to treadmills at private gyms - one of the agency’s nontraditional gambits in 2006. “The creativity is there in spades,” says Craig Wood, a visiting professor of advertising at Indiana University and former ad executive at the New York firm Saatchi & Saatchi. “The challenge for them and everyone else working in this nontraditional space is now measurability. Show me the results.”
Founded in 1999 by former Young & Laramore creatives Mark Bradley and Scott Montgomery, BaM billed just $237,000 in its first year. The agency arrived in a market already crowded with creative boutiques and larger agencies, but the two Herron graduates slowly accumulated clients and hired a few employees. In 2004, they moved into a 19th - century brick building on St. Joseph Street. During that period, the principals gathered at a kitchen table one night and made a decision that would change the agency’s course dramatically. “A lot of big clients already had a roster of big ad agencies,” Montgomery says. “We realized they didn’t need us to churn out their print and television ads. But that machine doesn’t know how to make money in nontraditional media. To us, that seemed like the future. That’s what we wanted to focus on.”
Today, BaM employs 24 people and boasts a roster of large clients, 70 percent of which hail from the coasts. Although BaM remains a fairly small group even by local standards, its growth outpaces almost every advertising agency in the market. In their shared office, Montgomery and Bradley sit about five feet from each other, old college friends surrounded by electric guitars and piles of paper several feet high. The two like to bounce ideas off each other and see no reason for cloistered workspaces. They wear the sport coats and jeans you might expect from artistic types who have done well for themselves, but there’s not a whiff of pretension from either. Mostly, they seem like two guys enjoying an improbable windfall brought on by coloring outside the lines - and the PR buzz that comes with it.
One of BaM’s successes experimenting with nontraditional media was created on behalf of Hansen & Horn in December 2006. The homebuilder was hoping to sell more houses during the holiday season, a tall order even in happier times for the real - estate business - people just don’t tend to make that commitment in December when they’re nesting. But the agency identified one place it could intercept hordes of customers that month: Christmas - tree farms. After calling a lot of bewildered tree - farm owners, they finally found a dozen willing to sell them a $60 tree, allow them to hang it with Hansen & Horn gift certificates as ornaments, and leave it out front. “Our client saw traffic to its model homes double compared with the same month of the previous year,” says BaM chief strategy officer Ben Carlson. “And it was incredibly cheap.”
A tight budget also motivated the electrical - outlet portion of the Chase national campaign. Though it had just $65,000 to spend, the company’s commercial - banking line wanted to reach business executives. Everyone knows placing an ad in The Wall Street Journal is one way to do that, but at about $129 per 1,000 views, it’s an expensive way to go. Executives also travel, so in - flight magazines might work, but advertising in them costs about $100 per 1,000. There simply wasn’t a cheap place to reach that audience.
So BaM invented one. Knowing that executives often need to charge their laptops at electrical outlets in the airport, the agency’s principals started calling airports to see what was possible. “We were told repeatedly, ‘It can’t be done,’” Carlson says. “When we come up with this stuff, there’s usually no one you can just call and buy the space from. It was an arduous six - month process. The media companies representing the Indianapolis airport all said no, but the people managing the airport finally agreed to the campaign.” BaM placed two - foot - high stickers with the Chase logo and marketing messages such as “We empower your businesses, right down to their batteries” around electrical outlets throughout the airport. The ads were intended to be posted for one year, but they are still up nearly three years later. BaM claims the outlets have racked up 12 million views. The cost per 1,000 was $5. “That’s the beauty of doing something for the first time,” Montgomery says. “No one knew what it was worth.”
Ironically, The Wall Street Journal caught wind of the campaign and covered it in 2006. “What Bradley and Montgomery are doing right now is definitely en vogue,” says Suzanne Vranica, who reports on advertising for the newspaper. “It’s a risky bet because the effectiveness of this kind of advertising is hard to measure concretely. But if you get the eyeballs, it’s better than nothing. And these stunts do another thing, which is drum up publicity.”
In the wake of the WSJ coverage, an onslaught of requests poured in from companies wanting to buy into the new - media opportunity. The only problems were that BaM didn’t exactly own a patent on an entire medium, and its principals didn’t want to anyway. “My Dad thought we were crazy,” Montgomery says. “He said, ‘Aren’t you going to capitalize on this?’ But we don’t want to be famous for being the guys who ‘cracked the code’ on electrical - outlet advertising. We want to be the guys famous for finding the most appropriate and unusual place to put a brand’s message.”
Consumers are changing their habits, and advertisers need to engage them wherever they may be says one Bam customer.
And their customers aren’t complaining. David Clifton, senior vice president of Chase, believes in the novelty of an approach like the electrical - outlet campaign. “It was a pretty out - there idea,” he says. “But we don’t shy away from that stuff. We’ve projected our logo onto sidewalks, sent street teams out into the world. Consumers are changing their habits, and advertisers need to engage them wherever they may be.”
Sometimes that place isn’t a place at all. Calling upon BaM to promote its DVD release of The Hills Season Two, a show most popular with 12 - to - 24 - year - old females, MTV needed a campaign that would have a high impact on those viewers for a low cost. And it needed it fast. With less than a month to work, the creatives at BaM consulted every 14 - year - old girl they could find. For the people who followed the show, they realized, the characters were a kind of shorthand - every bad boyfriend was a Spencer. So BaM created a medium for that shorthand and put it where the audience was most likely to see it. The agency took clips of the show, attached sentiments like “You need to know he’s a sucky person,” and put them on YouTube for fans to e - mail to friends as video greeting cards. On the first day, they got several thousand hits. Then US Weekly and Teen Vogue got a hold of it. By Day 12, they were at 250,000 views. “When guys like us are in a bar and something funny happens, we’ll quote Caddyshack because it’s part of our shared cultural experience,” Montgomery says. “This is just like that, but they’re sharing it online. We needed a name for it, and ‘emoticlip’ was just dumb enough to work. But giving it that handle gave the press something to write about. It’s really just shared video, but suddenly it had a name.”
The critics might have a few words for it, too. While the phenomenon of nontraditional advertising is not entirely new (Coca - Cola provided general stores with red screen doors and a matching cooler out front to market its product in the early 1900s), ads now appear in spots as unlikely as drinking straws and tattoos across a boxer’s back. These incursions, proliferating at a greater rate than ever before, do have their detractors. The magazine Adbusters, based in Vancouver, publishes rabid tirades about the evils of wallpapering the world with ads. Members of the Anti - Advertising Agency, a New York organization, describe outdoor messages as particularly “invasive.”
“The problem with these ads is that generally they’re done in a public space,” says Steve Lambert, founder and CEO of the agency. “By definition, that space belongs to the public, not to advertisers. If we’re reading through a magazine, we can flip the page. If we’re watching TV, we can change the channel. When it’s in a public space, we have no choice.”
While he admits that he finds many ads clever, Lambert pushes for regulation to limit the places they can appear. His group objects to the advance of advertising into virgin territory. “Once you get used to seeing ads on electrical outlets, they creep into new places,” he says. “It always advances just beyond the line of what we find acceptable. If they push too fast, the public pushes back. But if they push slowly, it’s not considered a big deal.”
For their part, representatives of Chase and BaM claim they haven’t heard any complaints from consumers about the electrical - outlet campaign. Clifton, the bank’s senior vice president, says he faces the risk of offending customers with any type of advertising. But as long as companies need to reach their customers, they’ll find ways to do so that challenge tradition. “Returns from traditional media have been declining, so advertisers are eager to experiment with these new methods,” says Wood, the IU professor. “Agencies will put an ad any place it will stick.”
Experts such as Wood, however, question whether nontraditional advertising can last without a concrete way to count how many people see it. Mark Bradley argues that not only can the new methods usually be measured, but that occasionally they can be measured more accurately than with traditional metrics such as the Nielsen ratings, which calculate TV viewership. In the case of the Christmas - tree campaign, homebuyers brought those gift certificates disguised as ornaments into model homes, where each one was counted. In the case of the emoticlips campaign, BaM knows right down to the click how many people have seen it. “There are some nontraditional approaches we’re still figuring out how to measure,” he says. “But some of them are better than the newspaper. You know how many people subscribe, but how many got to page 2 and saw your ad?”
As for the Adbusters and Anti - Advertising Agencies of the world, it’s a point of view BaM takes seriously. Carlson suspects that more Adbusters readers work in advertising than in any other profession. But he says the critics shouldn’t be railing against a particular new medium, but rather against poor creativity - ads that are boring or objectionable. Some nontraditional work, he argues, can actually be helpful. If you’re looking for an outlet to charge your laptop, can it hurt to have one flagged?
“The medium always has to match the message,” Carlson says. “Unfortunately there are agencies who don’t think that way, who staple ugly flyers to trees and call it nontraditional. That’s not what we do. The more we can do to provide value to the viewer, the more successful we’ll be. And the market for this nontraditional stuff is only going to get bigger. Everything is media.”
Posted in The Indianapolis Monthly
By Anthony Schoettle
Advertising agency Bradley and Montgomery launched an unorthodox campaign for cable television station MTV last month that is gaining the local firm - and its client - national acclaim.
A friend of a friend led BAM officials to the New York-based music television channel, which was looking to promote the release of its show “The Hills” on DVD.
BAM officials pulled video snippets from the show, enhanced them graphically, then uploaded the snippets to Web sites such as YouTube.com and Veoh.com. The resulting vignettes can be used - most often by teens - as a type of virtual greeting card.
The messages aren’t your typical Get Well Soon or Happy Birthday fare. Instead, they might allow one girl to tell another, in a creative way, that her boyfriend is a loser. Among the most popular messages BAM has made available from the show: “Sorry for the assault,” “He’s tainted,” and “Don’t be the girl who didn’t go to Paris.”
Presumably, the slogans mean more to fans of “The Hills,” BAM officials said, but they can also be used to pique the curiosity of people who don’t follow the series.
“We found through our research that viewers use language from the show as a way to communicate,” Montgomery said.
BAM made the rounds among social network Web sites to find hard-core fans of the show, and enlisted their help in spreading the word of the campaign. The agency reports that well over 300,000 clips from the campaign were viewed and/or downloaded in the first month.
“The 300,000 are just the ones we can track,” said Mark Bradley, who in 2000 founded BAM with fellow Young & Laramore alum Scott Montgomery. “Now that this has taken off, there are lots of clips on sites that we may not know about and can’t track. That’s the power of this campaign.”
The video clips called Emoticlips by Bradley and Montgomery can be sent embedded in an email or posted on a person’s page or social networking site, such as MySpace or Facebook.
Naturally, at the end of each clip is a short promo for the release of season two of “The Hills” on DVD.
Word of the campaign is spreading far beyond teen circles. BAM’s efforts merited mentions in AdWeek, The New York Times, US Weekly and E!Online.
The campaign’s budget is relatively small. There is no charge to put videos on sites such as YouTube and the series’ fans do most of the work.
While “efforts by ad agencies to whip up online-video trends are almost heartbreakingly dumb,” said Virginia Heffernan, who writes a TV and media column for The New York Times, she likes BAM’s MTV campaign “a lot right now.”
“Bradley and Montgomery has found a way to promote the DVD season two of ‘The Hills’ with sweet, sendable video clips from the season,” Heffernan said.
It’s quite a coup for a local agency to get such national attention, said Bob Gustafson, Ball State University advertising professor.
“Historically, it’s been very difficult to get even a small part of a national account,” Gustafson said. “It takes exceptionally talented people, and oftentimes a track record. The competition for these jobs is extremely intense.”
BAM’s deftness at using a variety of marketing tools has been key to its success, said Paul Knapp, CEO of local agency heavyweight Young & Laramore.
“This is a significant evolution for them,” Knapp said. “We’re seeing a shift toward a much more complex mix of communication tools and [BAM] is on top of that shift.”
Since 2004, BAM has pursued niche projects for large companies. That strategy, BAM officials said, has led to strong double-digit annual growth.
Montgomery has a clear vision of the firm’s target market, and said his staff of 23 could grow by 10 in 2008.
“The Fortune 500,” Montgomery said. “That’s our [client] universe.”
Posted on The Indiana Business Journal
By Kilian Melloy
The DVD release, today, of the animated Logo TV series Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World will delight Rick & Steve fans, but so might the EmotiClips that Paramount Home Entertainment has brought out for use in promoting the show.
According to a press release for the EmotiClips, which are an innovation from Bradley and Montgomery (BaM for short), the EmotiClips—which were made available yesterday—“will be able to trade online messages of encouragement, love, and well… other stuff.”
A sample EmotiClip—titled I Want to Be Your Alternative Lifestyle Companion!—is available at http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1046397Tkmts3na
The EmotiClips were first employed to promote the DVD release of The Hills, Season 2.
Logo, which is part of the MTV Networks family of channels, is the first (and so far, the only) 24-hour LGBT cable network.
Logo is the newest channel from MTV Networks and the first and only 24-hour cable network for the LGBT community.
Said Ben Carlson, Chief Strategic Officer of BaM, the EmotiClips are “an immediate way for people to discover the show, get fans to introduce the show to their friends, and to take television beyond a passive activity and really use it to communicate.”
Continued Carlson, “‘Viral’ [marketing] has become a bit muddied as a concept. But we’ve found with EmotiClips that when you have compelling content and let fans know about organically through fan sites, blogs and social networking sites it really does take on a life of its own that isn’t artificial or forced.”
Scott Montgomery, principal of BaM, remarked, “EmotiClips takes the idea of being a fan of a show and turns it in a new direction.”
Added Montgomery, “By making it a part of electronic dialog, it ‘badges’ the sender. People already feel like a show they like is theirs;’ an Emoticlip can cement that relationship. Plus, we got to sort through episode after episode of funny stuff. Who doesn’t want that job?”
Bradley and Montgomery, an independent creative agency that bills itself as “focusing on unconventional projects for large and mid-sized brands,” was founded in 1999.
Logo’s Rick & Steve is an animated comedy that uses computer-generated imagery to depict a world in which characters that look like plastic toys get involved in outrageous situations. The pair at the heart of the show—voiced by Will Matthews and Queer As Folk alum Peter Paige—are a gay couple whose adventures are narrated by film director Q. Allan Brocka (Boy Culture).
The show’s five-episode first season (including segments with titles like “Damn Straights,” “It’s Raining Pussy,” and “Bush Baby”) premiered earlier this summer, and features guest voices Billy West (Ren and Stimpy, Futurama) as “Dr. Hunk,” and comedian Margaret Cho (I’m the One That I Want) as “Condie Ling” in three episodes.
The show also features Kirsten Kellogg as the owner of a sex-toy shop, Dana Bernstein as her butch construction-worker partner, Alan Cumming as a older, HIV+ character, and Wilson Cruz as the gay couple’s houseboy.
The show’s episodes tackle material like sperm donation, gay family cruises, and relationship issues.
Q Allan Brocka writes and produces the series, which is based on short films of the same title that Brocka created in 1999.
The 120-minute DVD retails for $19.99.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
Posted on Edge Boston
