Not everyone is out to make a buck for only themselves. A blog called Donate Your Coke Codes was started for charity purposes rather than personal gain. The concept behind the promotion is to Donate Your Coke Codes for Coca-Cola’s Coke Rewards promotion to help buy Brandon McKnight, a child at St. Jude Children’s Hospital surrfering from cranial pharyngioma a present. The points are recruited through a Coke Blog and so far they have collected over 1,400 points in 45 days. Only 14,000 total will get that poor kid a brand new 32 inch Bravia LCD Television.

Retailers are toying with our minds and Space Hijackers made a list of the tricks they use to make us shop more. Below you’ll find a few of those tricks.

Blockbuster: Blockbuster realise that when movies are popular and not on the shelves some customers will go to the returns rack (from which the employees stack the shelves) in order to pick up new films before they hit the shop floor. In order to boost sales of older films, the company decided to spike the returns rack with films that had not been hired in order to make them seem more popular.

Fast Food: Several Fast Food restaurants have been known to re-direct the extractor fans from their kitchens (at the back) to the street at the front of the building. Thereby filling the surrounding area with the smell of fast food and enticing more custom.

Baby Powder: Some UK baby shops now add Baby Powder to the air conditioning to remind people of new-born’s and relax them.

The latest Apple commercial spot works to promote the new techno colors available for the iPod Nano. Created by TBWA/Chiat Day Los Angeles, this commercial was directed by Romanek of Expolis. Although we are still stuck with the dancing “x” ravers, at least this campaign enlightens viewers that the new iPod is supposedly 40% brighter than the previous model. Killing two birds with one stone in a 31 ad spot is always going to win you points with management and your sales. The iPod song in the video is called “The Audience Is Listening Theme” developed by Cut Chemist.

I’ll tip my hat to General Motors (GM) for jumping into the viral video advertising scene. The viral videos produced thus far include; Vegas Road Trip with Flying Car, Flying Cars in Hollywood, and Flying Cars Over Skateboard Ramp. Future Technology Today is taking this viral video campaign very seriously. The credibility of F.T.T. should be taken lightly especially as their website is hosted on Angelfire. The viral-video advertising revolution is truly moving forward. The GM campaign avoids the 7 Deadly Sins of Viral Video advertising and has some new tips and tricks to help us design better viral videos;

- Viral videos should be seemingly amateur. Shaky cameras, distorted images, and white balance are always a plus.

- Videos should be submitted on video sites such as YouTube with a profile that matches to content producer. An 40 something executive, having created an accurate profile and then submitting an Extreme Snowboarding Caught On Tape video will appear less credible than if he had created an immitation profile.

- The video produced by GM does something new and creative. The video starts with the people engaging in another moment when something suddenly happens and they continue rolling. Such realism brings credibility to a viral video.

Marketing to mothers is just the begining of a long road to how advertising is evolving. Hot pregnant women are now replacing men in advertisements targeted towards men. Formerly reported an ad for Seat Altea car manufactuer which features a hot pregnant woman atop the hood of a car. Nova Shin Beer is being promoted by a hot pregnant woman as well! We’ll have to admit, pregnancy and women are a beautiful thing. I guess seeing Britney Spears pregnant and nude on the cover of a magazine wasn’t enough. Now we’ll see hot pregnant women in the ads inside the magazine for some time to come. I personally hate the idea. No one wants to promote drinking while pregnant and this ad seems to do just that. Moreover, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a serious issue not to be toyed with.

According to a Fort Worth Star Telegram article the featured meal choice for an upcoming Six Flags Theme Park promotion will be Madagascar hissing cockroaches. The Dallas based park is buying out all local pet store supplies of the tasty snack in hopes of boosting business with a live cockroach contest.

During Six Flags first annual festival, contestants who down one live cockroach will be given a “Flash Pass” allowing the winner to skip to the front of every line in the park. In many Asian and African cultures, the Madgascar hissing cockroach is considered a delicacy. Bizarre marketing gimmics like this are nothing new. Fear Factor jumped on this bandwagon long time ago and I thought the gimmic of eating or rolling around in creepy crawlies was a dead art of promotion. Albeit, Six Flags hopes to resurrect the art of bizarre promotions.

Do Lucky the Leprechaun, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Punch from Hawaiian Punch, and the Hamburder Helper Helping Hand really increase sales? All the characters I just listed are the creations of Character, an Oregon based company that launched in 2002. With 6 staff members, the company boasts over $2 million in revenue and work with only the largest corporations in the world. Every creation or redesign of a particular corporations character helped sales jump from quarter to quarter after the revisions. One of the firm’s founders is David Atlschul, 61, who created the California Raisins guy back in the 1980’s.

Their team focuses on unique brands, characters, and increased sales for their clients. Their creations connect consumers on an emotional level rather than trying to focus on a target audience. Truly, people always will buy with emotional and justify their purchasing decisions with logical explanations. Read the entire article in depth at CNN Money.

Marketers have gotten over the “all men are metrosexuals” trend in advertising over the past year or two and are begining to switch gears. Increasingly, marketing experts are noticing the mothers are in more control of major and minor purchasing decisions for their family then men. Instead of trying to sell women products for their kids or cleaning goods, marketers are hitting them hard with products and services for when a mother needs her downtime. They’re also looking into selling women pre-made meals from KFC and not to feel guilty that they didn’t prepare their family a home cooked meal. The marketers are working to show ‘mom’ she can have her alone time and she doesn’t have to be a slave to her motherhood.

“We know it’s important to spend time with family, so lots of us feel guilt when we can’t stay home and cook complete meals all the time,’’ said Ellen A. Schwarz, a 28-year- old mother of two who sits on KFC’s council. By ignoring the fact that KFC’s food can lead to heart disease and obesity and instead focus on giving dear ol’ momo the emotional security or serving fast food to her family the ad industry wants to send a long lasting message. To sum things up, marketers want to show that they feel compassion for mom and know how life is for them.

Dunkin’ Donuts is ripping a hole out of competitor Starbucks in a recent series of commercials. The round of 8 commercials are part of their new “American Runs on Dunkin’” campaign which began in April. Many of the commercials poke fun of Starbucks “Fritalian” presence as an overpriced coffee that we just cannot get enough of. The ad spot was created by advertising agency Hill Holliday and begins airing sometime this week. The spot was developed to make fun of competitor Starbucks said V.P. of Hill Holliday. The funny thing is, Dunkin’ Donuts has a point. When you think of words like “latte” you can only imagine a creative writer graduate with a journal sitting in a corner sipping his frosty coffee drink. In contrast, the Dunkin’ Donuts campaign works to provide an affordable “for the people” drink. Indeed, Dunkin’ Donuts is working to outcast the “weirdos” of Starbucks but like all consumers, I will continue to rely on taste and not the image of my coffee. Add to Onlywire

This new Sony Playstation 3 versus Nintendo Wii commercial (game systems debuting this winter) immitates the famous Apple versus PC commercials. The Nintendo Wii is represented by the scantidly clad woman while the larger woman represents the Playstation 3. The commercial was developed by the cable channel G4 and is not an actual commerical but I sure wish it was.

News Corp’s FX television channel, designed for men, is planning on developing the first advertisement campaign directed to counter viewers who use digital recorders (TiVo) to skip past commercials. These digital recorders show only one still image ad as a viewer fast forwards past commericals. The FX series ‘Brotherhood’ will show a single still ad image for their 30 second ad slot. The unique thing about this is most viewers will stick around for 30 seconds rather than a 2 1/2 minute session of commercials. That 30 second spot instills more in a viewers mind for that particular product than a quick 30 second commercial with multiple messages flashing back and forth.

Ever increasingly, as more and more television viewers purchase digital recorders to bypass commercials, advertisers have been looking for ways to get their messages to consumers as television advertising accounts for approximately 46% of all corporate advertising. Television broadcasters and corporate advertisers are both faced with this difficult dilemma and fears are rising with the digital recorder trend. FX will challenge digital recorders when it airs the ‘Brotherhood’ episode and 30 second still image commercial spot to show what it is like for broadcasters and advertisers. The offical air date is during the last week of September.