Forgot to Place Your Product – No Problem

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I met with someone from the giant media empire that is GroupM and he mentioned that they had begun to experiment with digitally implanting new product placements into existing content.

The example he gave with Jerry Seinfeld‘s fridge, originally filled with Snapple, can now be shown in syndication to have anything in it from Coke to Budweiser.

This piece in SAI has some video from a UK company called MirriAd that does a similar thing.  The possibilities are endless – and a touch scary if these sorts of things were to scare one…

(sadly, snapple is not paying me to use their products in this post…)

AT&T’s Blue Room – Too Subtle?

I was taken by a post on Adverganza about a site run by AT&T called The Blue Room that features interviews with very big names in music like Madonna and Mariah Carey (ok, I said big, not cool). There is no way to know how many views the site is getting (that I know of) but I certainly haven’t been hearing anything about it…

The videos are syndicated to YouTube but as Adverganza points out:

“…it’s surprising how little play they get on YouTube. It’s not as though the interviews are that fabulous, but as one example, a Mariah Carey video put up a week ago has less than 400 views. I’m not sitting on pins and needles waiting to hear about her creative inspiration, but I was under the impression a few other people were.”

Here’s the question: Are people just not all that interested in yet another interview with these people or is it that AT&T has simple not done enough to promote their promotion.  Promoting a promotion raises all sorts of issues – like what the hell is the point of a promo if you need to advertize it…

Hard Truth for Madonna’s Hard Candy?

If you are so inclined you can go and listen to Madonna’s new album, Hard Candy, streaming in its entirety on her MySpace page before the album has been officially released for sale.

This would appear to be a pretty digital-age savvy move but as Mashable points out:

“If it actually helps sales is a difficult thing to measure, but it could also be seen as a rather large gamble to expose an entire work to the public before sales.  I must say as each track plays, I am finding myself less enthralled with this particular outing from the Material Girl.”

This is an interesting question – until recently there was really no good way to hear an artist’s album unless you went out and bought it. You might get to hear one or two songs on the radio, if you listen to the radio, but most of the tracks would be a complete surprise.  I remember many occasions buying an album after hearing one great track on the radio only to be totally disappointed by the rest of the album.

Now, the question is, do customers deserve the chance to hear an album in its entirety prior to purchase?  That would be a pretty huge change to the way things have been for decades.