Influx

There's been lots of work done in the area of human herd behavior, but recently some research was conducted at Oxford University to examine the behavior around the download of Facebook applications. What the research discovered was fascinating; for herd behavior to "kick in", applications need to...

Old Spice's advertising has been widely recognized as some of the best stuff out there and generated huge talk value, YouTube video views and the rest. It's been great, but it followed the traditional campaign formula, that 's until now, in the last couple of days, the campaign has made a dramatic...

There's a lot of buzz for this viral video from VW (currently close to 2 million views on YouTube). It's clever and entertaining, but I keep wondering why it is we like it and I can only assume it's because it shows a brand really going out of its way to make people's lives more fun. You could hire...

It's now clear that viral and social media has reached something of a threshold that it's now fair game for specialists to thrive in the marketplace. Both areas have won over the the client cynics and now mass brands are eager to explore new venues in these domains.Looking at the world of viral, it...

It's clear the real time communication is becoming the thing and the faster this moves the sleepier and sleepier the ad world starts to look. With each component part of communication development taking so long, what with focus groups, quant testing, pre-prod, production, post production and the...

You can't create something culturally relevant without an understanding of contemporary culture and its manifestations. The "Unboxing Video" category has been with us for years and its format is widely recognized and understood by tech geeks. It's a sub-genre of new media that's ready, primed and...

The French act Daft Punk have been around for over 10 years, but have recently returned to dominance through a series of impressive live shows. I was wondering if all those hand videos on the internet had also helped the band in someway?It all started with this one in June 2007. This was the first...

A post appeared on Techcrunch recently the created something of a frenzy around the ethics of viral videos and their marketing. For any of you who believe ethics are involved, forget it. It appears people are doing whatever they can to game the system to their advantage, employing tactics that...

The latest offering from Dove. Posted by Ed Cotton

The Dairy Milk Gorilla ad seems to have had an impact. The data from Alexa shows traffic to the microsite eclipsing the volume of the sites of Cadbury's competitors. Clearly if awareness is the goal, this viral effort has made an impact and broken through. The probem is that the decay seems pretty...

Doing something genuinely different and surprising, is more important than ever in a cluttered world. Often, because it’s so hard to get, achieving a surprise creates its own problem; the tempting trap of a formula; the belief that recent success can be repeated if similar patterns are...

The recent web sensation Jonathan, better known as “Zombie Boy”, has achieved hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube and national acclaim.What did he do? He simply answered “I like turtles” to a reporter who asked him what he thought of his zombie face paint at the Rose...

Spotted in a bar in Belize. The intrigue of that poker game. To get people to talk, they've got to know something about it. They've got to be made curious. You've got to get them asking questions.It's that (secret) in this "ad" that does all the hard work here.Posted by Ed Cotton

When a top VC says there is too much video content (See WSJ-Kara Swisher's interview with Roelof Botha of Sequoia- below), there's certainly a problem out there. It seems to be getting worse, which is making it so much harder for virals to break through and ads to be seen. This is clearly the...

At this year's Cannes Lions, jury wanted to show the world of advertising has changed, so they and gave the Grand Prix to Dove’s Evolution spot. The effort was rewarded for two reasons:1.    It shows that there’s life beyond the 30sec television spot.2.  ...