"Stronger marketing" was one of the four identified strategies in a late 2012 "growth strategies" report from McDonald's Holdings Japan. The chain desperately needs some positive strategy in Japan, where McDonald's has reported 12 consecutive months of decreasing sales and a nearly 18 percent drop in operating profit.

Stronger marketing includes recruiting quality employees and brand ambassadors. To this end, McDonald's Japan has introduced the "Dancing McCrew," a viral hit about dancing through the workday.Continue reading...

Coca-Cola has been getting very serious about its "Open Happiness" campaign. Now it may even be ready to try to beat swords into plowshares—or at least into vending machines.

Ad Age reports that a big announcement "is coming soon" about a "major project" for the brand, possibly involving vending machines that will virtually connect consumers in India and Pakistan, two countries that long have had sectarian, sometimes bloody, differences. As depicted in a teaser video that Coke released in December, the machines would use video technology so that users in the two countries could see each other and "touch hands virtually," the magazine reported.

"The idea," Ad Age continued, "is that it could roll out to various countries in conflict."Continue reading...

Albert, killed during a 1948 experimental space mission launched by the United States, was not the first money in space. Or so contends a unique new viral promotion in China by SOHO China, one of the nation's largest real estate development enterprises.

"Abo," SOHO's campaign tells us, was sent into space by China in 1946. In this retelling, he returned to earth — a little changed. He spent time bonding, it seems, with some aliens and has returned to Earth to tell China it is a creative failure, a "copycat empire" that is "burying alive the creative spirit of a billion citizens."

Yes, this is a marketing campaign for a Chinese brand. A creative one — and a controversial one, with a debate raging on social media about what Time Out Beijing called "a crazy PR stunt."

"Of course some of the issues that Abo talks about sail very close to the wind," Ogilvy & Mather China Chief Creative Officer Graham Fink told brandchannel. The intention is not to offend people but just to make them think and to awaken their creative passion."Continue reading...

As a viral marketing ploy for the upcoming film Monsters University, Disney's Pixar animation studion has launched a clever website promoting not the movie, but the university that Sully and Mike learned their chops for Monsters Inc. The website is real, but the university (unfortunately) isn't. This isn't your normal run of the mill movie website, either — there is plenty of depth and room to explore the world of the movie (which comes out in June) and its campus setting.Continue reading...

Coca-Cola’s "Open Happiness" global marketing campaign kicked off in January 2009, when Cee Lo Green and Janelle Monae appeared in a music video that exclusively debuted on FOX's American Idol.

A year later, the "Open Happiness" theme took a tangible, and unforgettable form — a vending machine that appeared in the common room of St. John’s University in New York. It was rigged to dispense flowers, pizza and a six-foot sub resulting in a viral swish of happiness, generating more than 1 million views in the first week and still attracting comments 2 million views later.

The campus Coke machine stunt migrated to London, and morphed into a Hug Machine at the National University of Singapore in a gestural marketing stunt where a squeeze yielded a soda. Since then the Coca-Cola Happiness machine has popped up in local activations around the world, in markets including India, Buenos Aires, Indonesia, Tokyo, Istanbul for a special Valentine's Day stunt, and back to Singapore, this time promoting recycling in June.Continue reading...

Long before the London Games kicked off in July, the International Olympic Committee made it very clear to big businesses and small that you don’t want to mess with them, that they would come after anybody who used the Olympic name or image or implied an affiliation with the Olympics.

The IOC- and LOCOG-empowered ambush marketing squad of branding police got busy, so a small café once called Olympic suddenly became the Lympic and a British florist and shopkeepers were made to take down the bras and window displays set up to look like the sainted Olympic rings.

Areas were designated around all Olympic sporting venues where only official sponsors of the Games, all of which had rolled out barrels of dough, were allowed to show off their logos.

Leave it to Nike, the supposed founder of guerrilla marketing, to break through, though, with not only a rules-testing "Find Your Greatness" TV campaign that featured everyday athletes going for the gusto in other Londons around the world as well as track shoes that were worn by a number of gold medalists and given a bright greenish-yellow chartreuse hue that “the human eye is most sensitive” to, according to NBC News.Continue reading...

The annual San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) kicks off today, and as ever, it's a massive promotional platform for brands.

Founded as the "Golden State Comic Book Convention" in 1970 by a group of San Diegan comic book fans, the annual fanfest has evolved to include video games, toys and other forms of genre entertainment. That's why Hollywood beats a path south to the show every year — to generate buzz among the estimated 250,000 comic book, sci-fi, fantasy, anime, and video game fans hitting town for the four day pop-culture fix.

One of the biggest movies being touted this year: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, which marks the cast's last appearance as Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner hyping the Nov. 16th final bow with a 1pm ET (above) panel. Also red-hot: Iron Man 3, with Robert Downey Jr. and co-stars on hand to promote the movie scheduled for May 3rd of next year.Continue reading...

If your fantasy is to experience a world in which the Schwarzenegger classic Total Recall was never remade, you're out of luck. But if your fantasy is a little more pedestrian, the new Total Recall viral "Welcome to Rekall" may be of some help, complete with corporate tie-in sponsors for each experience. Continue reading...