According to the New York Times the WB is keeping its brand alive on the web. I like this idea. The WB had a specific brand and audience and I think they might be successful in retaining and attracting more people here than on the actual television.

Good article in MediaWeek about the use of web for delivering promotional ideas. I think this is going to explode. Promotion agencies should invest in digital knowledge and/or partnerships.

I wish I had the web when I was a client at Miller in the mid-90’s. We did this crazy program called the MGD Blind Date. It was series of secret concerts held once or twice a year where winners of radio contests across the country were flown into a city, put on a bus, taken to an unannounced venue and then tightly packed in front of a dark stage. Suspense would build and then the lights would come on and David Bowie would be standing there singing Fame. (We had some good bands like the Cure and RHCP and the Foo Fighters and some now embarrassing bands like Bush.) It was a successful program and gave Miller a leg up in the critical on-premise. Anyway, the key to this idea was speculation. Who is the band? We wanted rumors to run wild in bars across the country. In order to make sure that happened, we had to spend $10MM in media including radio advertising. It worked, but it was a sizable gamble and eventually Miller couldn’t bear the risk (although it was one of the longest runing programs in beer history).

ANYWAY, my point of this story is that if I were to do the MGD Blind Date today, I would unapologetically use the web to propagate the rumors and substantially reduce the cost of this program. I hope that begins to happen and marketers start taking more chances and make the world a bit more fun.

So I have been chatting a lot lately with the novelist James Othmer. A few years back, he wrote a novel called The Futurist. Benjamin loaned it to me and we both enjoyed it. Good read. James is a former ad man, and now he’s working on a book trying to get his head around this whole future of advertising thing. He’s been criss-crossing the world interviewing all the hot shops and some of the big ones and some special unknown ones. A few pieces have popped up in Portfolio from his travels, and he’s been blogging about it as well. We had a chat a few weeks ago and I went off on my riff about how branding as we know it was dying. James was intrigued but a bit skeptical. He asked me to write it all down, forcing me to put it into some coherent shape. A few weeks later I rose to the challenge. And here we have it.

They probably use them for presentations because of the built-in RDF.
(via Flickr .)

okay so we had a vip afterparty at our office for ROFLCon
which was super weird/awesome – like drew curtis from fark, CHEEZ, average homeboy, stuff white people like, moot from 4chan, man, tons of people. it was really fun and if you nuked our boston office saturday night, the internet would have been 5% less funny in an instant. no i take that back. that would have made it funnier. anyhow, everyone was unanimously in awe of Tron Guy, who had a camera crew following him around, and i guess i never thought about it beforehand, but this guy’s super nice and has a friendly, thick, SOUTHERN ACCENT. of course it makes sense but i was sure surprised.

I have a piece in the San Francisco International Film Festival. Weird, right? They have a thing called Generator which is an amalgam of a bunch of digital art shorts. My Advanced Beauty piece is in there, along side the works of Lia, Toxi, Watz, and several others. Thanks to Matt Pyke for entering it. [...]

poor mike p, and his repeatedly-crashing machine. dual monitors means twice as many bsod’s :(

We here at the Barbarian Group love video games. We try to play them as often as possible, which is why we have three Xbox 360s, two Wiis and a PS3 between our three offices (not to mention the wide array of legacy consoles Boston keeps around). For my part, I don’t do a lot of gaming at home, though I do play my share of split-screen Call of Duty 4 in the New York office, and I’ve been known to break out my DS Lite when I have a hankering to indulge in two of my all-time favorite games: Tetris and SimCity.

Anyway, I just want to share my excitement about getting to experience one of the rare pleasures in life over the weekend. As you can see in the picture above, I got to play Galaga on a tabletop arcade machine at Tea Lounge in Park Slope. It’s actually a hybrid Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga unit, but man oh man, do i love my Galaga (it ranks second below Tetris and above SimCity in my all-time favorite video game list).

Not only that, but in the one game I played, I scored third overall, as you can see in the picture below. Had I not been pressed for time, I can assure you that I would’ve tried for the gold, and I may yet try again in the near future.