Microsoft, Best Buy, and the Boys and Girls Club of America set out Thursday on a 20 city bus tour to educate parents on ESRB video game ratings. The companies will also be teaching parents how to adjust parental controls for the XBOX Live service. The project is titled “Safety is no game. Is your family set?”

The overall goal of the campaign, as I would perceive it, would be to educate and lessen the fears of parents who sterotype violent video games while refusing to purchase them for their child. In that respect, all groups involved on the bus tour will make monetary and moral gains. If XBOX 360 can use this campaign to convince parents the safety of the XBOX 360 then perhaps they can hold their ground when the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 launch sometime around the holiday season. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Disney-ABC President, Anne Sweeney, mobile and streaming television programming will play a huge part in the future of advertising. This week, Sweeney described some of Disney’s new alternative media initiatives at the Mipcom trade show. Due to the extremely successful world of social networking sites as YouTube, industry analysts predict the mobile and streaming television market to be worth as much as $27 billion by 2010. One of the reasons behind Disney’s move is obvious. The company wants to protect themselves from piracy. The benefit of television piracy, as Disney is hoping to counter, is the ease and accessibility of online pirated videos.

I wonder if Yoda from Star Wars helped develop this ‘Help The Aged We Will’ advertisement. I wonder if this is on purpose although the last Star Wars movie came out years ago. Maybe some markters out there are Trekkies and never watched Star Wars in their lives.

Yahoo is rolling out the bandwagon with paid search engine result ads for mobile devices in the United States. The press release by Yahoo said that the ads will be limited to a “select group of advertisers.” Advertisers will benefit from the placement considerably. When a user searches Yahoo they will be able to click on the advertiser’s text link, visit their mobile webpage, and even call them. The market for mobile search engine placement is huge worldwide and the biggest in China with an estimated “400 million” internet capable mobile devices. Mobile advertising will be great in the United States too as local searches continue to increase. People often use their mobile devices to search the web for restaurants, bars, and shopping centers. Yahoo plans to expand the program to the United Kingdom by the end of the year.

MySpace is busy developing a cell phone application that will allow the over 100,000,000 MySpace users log onto their account via their cell phone. The bold move could turn the company into what MySpace managers call a “$15 billion” move within the next few years. The move could be the driving force behind the mobile advertising innovations we are begining to see within the industry.

RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan had made the estimate of the website’s potential and based his prediction “on the site’s massive international appeal, capacity to become an intelletual property distribution powerhouse.” Rohan will be developing the project which should be ready within 3 - 4 months in the USA. Continue Reading >>

If only for a minute, everyone was thought their phones were safe from advertising. Unfortunately, our void is being filled. At the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show in Los Angeles our time ran out. With wireless carries, developers, and media mongrels converging the first stepping stones were set in which will become an estimated $11 billion revenue in just five years.

So what exactly is mobile advertising? No, its not putting stickers on the side of your car and shouting “Crazy Jimmy Johns Sandwich Shop!” Some examples include 10 second commercials, text messaging (delete), priority placement on your search results, banner ads, and more. Members at the convention believed that consumers would welcome advertisements on their phone. Sure, as long as we get something in return and as long as we can turn it off. So what will consumers get out of mobile advertising? InfoSpace’s Find It! application to search for restaurants, banks, movies, the Playboy Mansion, and more. Right now, Find It! costs Sprint Nextel users an wallet crunching $2.99 per month (sarcasm). InfoSpace’s Vice President Rod Diefendorf hopes to make the service free with ad support.

So what do I think? I think it’s way to early to estimate the possible success of mobile marketing. Think back to advertising on the internet. Click through rates on banner ads used to be 7% - 10%. It’s really hard to sustain that level and in direct marketing we must forever change the way we do things. Hopefully mobile marketing will give us that spark that we once had online. Read

Car company Lotus has hired an award winning Los Angeles, California Advertising Agency called e2amp to promote their brand name across the United States and Canada. Forget Mexico, the sportscar company is predominate over in Britian where their operations are currently sourced. Having signed on e2amp, the British car company is likely to start promoting their vehicles with ad placement in movies, television spots, and promotional events.

Having checked out e2amp online, I found that their past clients included JVC Audio, Sony, universal Pictures, and others that have nothing to do with the automobile industry. I could only raise my eyebrows with worry over Lotus trusting this advertising agency to promote their image across the U.S. and Canada.

You don’t need a radio to listen to Elvis Duran in the morning anymore! Clear Channel radio recently signed a deal with Cingular Wireless to deliver streaming radio. The first station in the deal is Z100, the New York Top 40 station. Clear Channel hopes to boost that number to 100 stations within a year.

This isn’t the first time Clear Channel done something like this. They have been using Motorola’s iRadio service. The shift from the iRadio’s time shifted radio model to the live streaming content of Cingular is what makes this deal so exciting. Cingular users who want to sign up for the service are charged $2.99 monthly charge and 99 cents extra for live streaming. You can sign up at Z100’s website and enter your cell phone to get connected.

In a truly pathetic attempt at both Mobile Marketing and a man’s “pursuit of a dream car” a new web site has been launched to raise funds for a young man’s dream of owning a Lamborghini Gallardo. He is asking for only $1 or more and he’ll advertise whatever you want on the Lamborghini Gallardo. It will become “a rolling billboard for every person who donates.” The man goes on to say your ad will be seen across the United States as he plans to tour the country promoting the “rare car.” Alberit any Labborghini will turn heads, one covered in stickers like a “Rice Burner” will only produce frowns and disgust.

The man has went as far as to develop donation levels and what you will receive for advertising space on his new Lambo. To date, LamboAdSpace.com has raised $0.00.

There is an all-jeweled edition Porsche in the ultra-opulent luxury car list is this Gold-Plated Porsche. The gold-plated version, is designed by Visualis, which earlier presented a Porsche Boxster in 22 carat beaten gold last year, and has now followed-up with the limited edition model, Gold Boxter which will be available in nine gold-plated models. The gold-plated Porsche will feature all the major components, from the control elements such as the steering wheel and doorknobs to the car body and alloy rims in gold-plated version. Though, the price of this Visualis’s gold-chariot still remains undisclosed, but then don’t expect it to be any less expensive. So, if you have a great fascination for cars with gold and diamond trim than this is really desirable!!

Credit: Gizmag