The cool cats over at Media Bullseye do a Roundtable podcast and this week they served up some great kudos for our True Blood campaign. Debbie Weil, author of the Corporate Blogging Book, offers up her insights into what she thinks about the campaign.

Click here to give the podcast a listen. The True Blood spoken word starts in at about the 9 minute mark.

Share This

Subway poster remix via Copyranter

Share This

As Mike teased previously, I’ve been working for the past 6 months on a campaign for the HBO series ‘True Blood.’

I could tell you about the countless hours we’ve spent crafting an online experience that tells the back story of a world where vampires decide to announce themselves….or I could just show you a few of my favorite artifacts we’ve created.

A White House press briefing on the vampires

Global reactions to the announcement that vampires exist.

Real life locals play along in these man on the street interviews.

There’s lots more stuff both already online and coming up. Head over to BloodCopy to watch it unfold.

Share This

I love baseball. It’s the perfect blend of nuance and number-crunching. GDIP, WHIP and BABIP. Deep flies to left field to score a runner from third, long leads off first that draw a throw from the catcher.

And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.

So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.

For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.

Share This

In light of recent events in the world of science, it’s time to revisit the age-old conflict: Monkey versus Robot. Here’s the setup:

(basically, monkey hates technology, robot hates the monkey)

The NY Times tells us this week that monkeys can now control robot arms—-with their minds!

Let’s call this match in Monkey’s favor.

Congratulations monkey-brothers, I always knew we primates would prevail!

Share This

Share This

We had one of our most successful shoots this past Saturday in Middletown, Delaware, with the Jaeger family. The episode will air in about a month; meanwhile watch for posts on My Home 2.0 as well as more about the lively community of Springmills - - and the extraordinary Memory Wall that our crew and partners built for the Jaegers.

The Party’s Over

Shooting

Kathleen somehow directing both the live broadcast on the Jumbotron and the filming for the TV show.
(more…)

Share This

Earlier this month Trent Reznor self released “Ghosts I - IV” on his website. For five bucks you can get all 36 tracks straight from the band, downloadable with no pesky DRM. He’s finally able to do this since breaking with his record label and striking out on his own.

So how did it work out? Well according to Wired he made US$ 1.6 million off 800,000 downloads in the first week alone. Not too shabby. This is despite the album being widely available on BitTorrent sites that Trent uploaded some of the tracks to himself.

Says Reznor, ““Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

The next step for the album is having fans create videos to go with the songs. These will be posted on Youtube with the best ones presented in a ‘virtual film festival’ presided over by Trent and some others fine folks.

Here’s one of the first submissions to Youtube for the film festival.

Share This

Photo from deneyterrio’s flickr stream

Wow. Yesterday’s audience revolt on the Social Media Metrics panel doesn’t have anything on what happened at today’s SXSW Keynote interview between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy. I’ll post video once it surfaces, but in the meantime Vallywag has a decent rundown of the content while Teresa Valdez Klein has a perceptive take on what really went wrong.

Share This

This week Jeremiah and I are reporting live from the SXSW Interactive+Film+Music Festival, and while everyone else is reporting on all the amazing panels, parties, and hoopla, we’re here to report what you REALLY want to know. First up — an in-depth comparison of all THREE (!) SXSW Schwag bags.

Share This