Unilever's Axe brand is starting the new year with a digital marketing first — a crowdsourced graphic novel, to be called Anarchy, developed using fan feedback via its YouTube channel. The crowd-shaped comic book (watch the teaser below) kicks off online on January 10th.Continue reading...

Heineken is ‘making responsible consumption aspirational’ with a new theme, 'Sunrise belongs to moderate drinkers,' as part of its global 'Open Your World' campaign (remember "The Entrance"?) for the holiday season.

“Heineken has both the opportunity and the responsibility to encourage moderate drinking. This approach breaks from the norm of traditional responsible consumption messages and takes a progressive stance by showing that drinking responsibly can be aspirational,” said Alexis Nasard, Chief Commercial Officer, Heineken.

The holiday campaign (as seen above) launched in November via teasers in London, Ho Chi Minh, Rio de Janiero and San Francisco, with sofas featuring the hashtag #mysunrise placed in locations with spectacular sunrise views asking fans to post photos of their best sunrise moments, tagged #mysunrise on Twitter and pushing to Heineken’s related Facebook app.Continue reading...

Yahoo! demonstrates its dynamic new ad format for the tablet, Living Ads by Yahoo!, in a campaign with Toyota to bring the Prius to life "like no other ad experience."

In a bid to enhance the rollout out of Yahoo! Livestand to the iPad earlier this month, Alex Linde, Yahoo’s director of mobile and tablet advertising, tells Adweek that the living ads were created in the same vein as aspirational magazine glossies but also try to borrow from the best of television. 

“What TV does best is the branding aspect, it engages me, it gets me aware. But then what online does well is . . . it lets me build a preference and drive some action,” Linde said. “If I was to take an interactive TV ad and put it into a magazine, that would be a phenomenal advertiser experience.”

Ziff Davis Enterprise is going digital in a strategic move aptly called OmniDigital.

The publisher of eWeek, CIO Insight, Baseline and Channel Insider (already an online publication) is following precedent set by former parent company Ziff Davis Media, which stopped publishing print magazines in 2009.

The three print brands have a combined print circulation of about 400,000. The OmniDigital plan is to release native apps and mobile-optimized websites across smartphones and tablets with an end-goal of being 100% paperless in January. Print currently delivers only about 9 percent of ZDE’s total revenues and does not turn a profit, according to CEO Steve Weitzner. Continue reading...

Flash retailing is upon us, as the holiday season fast approaches, and CNET is cutting the line with a pre-Thanksgiving pop-up store: "CNET GOTHAM." CNET’s tech-savvy editors are sharing the gadgets they daily obsess over with commoners – in an interactive experience that lets you feel, touch and play.

Now through November 13, it’s a first for CNET, bringing its online tech innovations off-line to a physical space. Housed in NYC’s Nolita district’s Openhouse Gallery, CNET’s demo space is set-up real-world/real-time: a living-room and den with 3D TV’s and a café full of games and toys.Continue reading...

In a move that could foreshadow what's to come in Internet Connected Television, leading Korean electronics company LG is adding the ability to serve up ads via its Smart TV product line.

LG and YuMe, a company that makes a video advertising solution for Internet Connected TVs, announced an agreement to embed an ad platform into LG Smart TVs and Blu-ray Disc players. While these kinds of announcements are sometimes met with skepticism from industry-watchers, this particular development is significant because the partners said they already have a charter advertiser for the service, namely, the U.S. division of Toyota. 

Toyota will use the ad platform to promote its 2012 Toyota Camry. Dionne Colvin, national marketing media manager at Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. told the New York Times that the new service presents "a great opportunity to learn more about the connected-TV space." It offers Toyota the opportunity "to design programs and campaigns to speak to [consumers] in a way they want to be spoken to," Colvin stated.Continue reading...

Back in the 1950's, Christian Dior made a splash with what came to be known as the "New Look." Today, Dior is all about the new look of its new media. While the production values aren't to the standard of the recent "Charlize Meets Marilyn, Grace and Marlene" short film for its J'Adore perfume, the luxury brand is making a big statement about how much it values digital branding these days by producing a trailer, above, teasing its soon-to-be-relaunched website at dior.com.

Kellogg’s Krave cereal has only been available for a year in the UK, but it’s got a pretty sweet handle on how to gain attention on social and digital platforms.

The brand this week released an iPhone and iPad app — called the Krave Krusader game — in the iTunes store. The goal: "In your relentless pursuit you must run through the Krave world catching as many Choc Chunks while trying to avoid or smash through all the obstacles and jumping the gaps. Collect the many different power-ups as you go to help you along the way to a winning score. Every week one Top Krusader wins a limited edition prize pack!"

Kellogg's UK marketing team is also using the cereal's Facebook page to poll fans on what the next flavor should be that it puts on the market permanently. The goal is to have the page’s more than 145,000 fans vote on two limited edition flavors and then add the winner to the permanent list of Krave flavors in 2012 — and to spur awareness and sales, of course.Continue reading...