Sony and Sky are tying up to show the UK’s first HD advert tonight.
You may well have seen a lot of the build-up for Sony’s latest advert – the one with the paint. It’s the follow-up to their coloured balls advert shot in San Francisco.
Appropriately the advert is for Sony’s Bravia range of HD TVs. Shot in the somewhat less-glamorous location of a disused tower block in Glasgow, Scotland, it shows 70, 000 litres of coloured paint exploding up the side of the block of flats.
Shot over 10 days and with a crew of 250 people, the paint was mixed on site by 20 people. The clear up took 5 days and 60 people.
Behind the scenes footage of the shoot has been circulating on the online video services for about two months now. The wobbly camcorder shot material lends itself to looking like it’s been shot by your ‘man in the street,’ but given the size of the campaign, it’s more likely to be seeded by Sony or their advertising agency, to try and create a build up of interest.
Here’s the finished results.
It makes total sense for Sony to shoot this ad in HD given they’ve been pushing HD for nearly 3 years in Europe – initially through their professional arm that sells the cameras. Given their zeal in this area it makes you wonder why it took so long for an HD advert to come out from them.
The launch of this first HD ad follows a major marketing agreement between Sky and Sony to promote HD.
The HD advert will shown on Sky Sports HD 2 tonight during the Chelsea vs Barcelona football coverage.
U.S. Internet advertising revenue has hit a new record high of nearly $8 billion for first six months of the year, increasing by a money-spinning 37 per cent, according to a new study. 
The IAB/ PricewaterhouseCoopers figures show that Internet advertising revenue totalled nearly $4.1 billion in the last quarter, representing a thumping a 36 percent increase over the same period last year, and up a healthy 5.5 percent over the first quarter of 2006. 
We’ve all known for years that PVR’s have been eating TV advertising. Murdoch has been on top of this for ages too, which makes it all the more interesting to hear that his Fox network is using 2-second Blinks, adverts. 
Overall, Clear Channel Radio has experienced mixed results following Less Is More, though recent quarters have shown positive revenue increases. Clear Channel executives have credited those jumps to the shortened advertising slots, which address a major source of radio listener irritation. 
Viacom have been making further moves to secure their future in digital media. Given all of the moves they’ve made this week, we thought it was worth summarising it. 
Viacom are experts at delivering messages (TV, films and adverts to you and me) on television and films, and as we can see from the above deals, they’ve caught on that they really ought to be able to do this online too. To try and simplify this, they were looking for a way to smooth the transition of their content to the digital realm. 
Google Video has been serving videos to the Internet population for over a year and a half now, both 
Clicking on Watch their Ad link opens a new browser session and plays the video advert from … Google Video. All very neat. 
PayPal is to be the exclusive online wallet across Yahoo’s product and services. In a wide-ranging, four component, business arrangement announced today, eBay and Yahoo will be stroking each other commercial departments. 
Interestingly Yahoo will also be offering sponsored search for complementary products on some eBay.com search results pages in the U.S. 
For us, this part of the announcement is a bit of a strange one. Yahoo has Yahoo Messenger with Voice and eBay has Skype, so who would provide the voice services in which circumstances is pretty unclear, and we would have though, an area for friction. 
Broadband giants Telewest have had to bend over and feel the sharp swish of the Advertising Standards Agency’s corrective ruler on their ample rumps after their broadband radio advert was deemed ‘misleading.’ 
A Telewest customer – clearly already living in a Telewest area – liked the sound of the deal so much they rang up to sign on, only to find that they were clearly in the wrong sort of ‘Telewest area.’ 
The ASA concluded, “We considered this important restriction should have been explained in the ad and that “Conditions apply” had not been adequate to cover such a significant condition to the offer. The ad breached CAP (Broadcast) Radio Advertising Standards Code section 2, rule 3.” 
Companies are now starting to dip their toe into the world of Mashups/user-generated content – but when the user is generating it, the results might not always be what they expect or desire. We’ve seen a few examples of this today. 
Amazingly the thing that they don’t appear to have noticed is that many people see Chevy as Uber in a couple of sense – the sheer size of their company and, importantly for this piece, in the sheer size of the cars on the road and fuel-guzzling nature. 
We love the idea of corporate tools being used against those who are paying for they development, hosting and bandwidth, but suspect that corporate number two who approaches this may take a different approach. This won’t of course stop those who are angered by this type of thing using their own footage to the same affect. 
Suppose you ran a Web site, and got a little money in advertising. And then suppose someone came along, and said: “I can give you more readers, and extra advertising!” – would you be grateful? Especially if this was genuine, and tested out? Well, 
The Kryptonite comparison, summary: inhabitants of the InterWeb Blogland discovered you could steal a bike locked with Kryptonite even if all you had was a ball point pen, and Kryptonite dismissed those quaint Bloglanders as irrelevant. Well, yes; if you sell a product which is shown to be non-functional, you need to deal with the bad press. 
Now, I can see Google’s point. “What is this guy’s problem?” you might say. After all, most adverts on Web pages are there without the explicit consent of the site manager. One-click and other advert providers post adverts “on the fly” and track the individual user. Click on one advert for fast cars, and they’ll probably show you more next time you visit; and they don’t ring up the Web site manager and ask specific permission. They just download the advert. (Eventually. When you’re almost out of patience, and thinking of switching to Firefox and running Adblock. Another story…) 
Making blogging too easy seems to be making it hard. It may be coincidence, but one example of “too easy” blogging is the spam blog, or splog – and suddenly, there’s a rash of upset bloggers who have had their blogs blacked. 
And a spam blog is something that doesn’t actually have any real content. It’s just links to trackback pointers for everybody else. The trouble is, all the signs of a spam blog are caused by the ease with which they are built. You just have to create the blog (two clicks) and then set up a robot that scours the web for new posts, and links to the trackbacks. 
I’m not saying that Qumana is what caused the blog to be blacked. I am saying that if it produces a series of random, unrelated tags to a single site, it’s going to fulfil one of the prime indicators of a splog. And when random, unrelated blog entries all get tagged “Qumana” whatever their subject, you have something so similar, it’s going to be quite hard to see what a blog provider can do to filter it.