Brisk officially launched its Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 3D cross-marketing today: a mobile app (dubbed Brisksaber and actively teased on its Facebook page) and a limited-edition drink featuring Star Wars villain Darth Maul, as promoted with a new commercial, above. The Brisksaber app, which can be downloaded at uncaptheapp.com, invites fans to "Turn your finger into a lightsaber!" Click below to check out the limited-edition packaging promoting the movie's theatrical release next month.Continue reading...

Last February, PepsiCo made waves for Brisk with a clay-animated Super Bowl commercial featuring Eminem. Now, as the New York Times reports, PepsiCo is piggybacking on the February 10th theatrical release of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace 3D to promote the Brisk line of iced tea and juice drinks.

This week the brand is introducing new packaging and a new mobile game app featuring Star Wars characters Yoda, R2-D2, Jar Jar Binks and Darth Maul in a bid to engage Brisk's target market of young adults, "particularly males," ages 18 to 29. The extension of its ongoing partnership with Lucasfilm marks the "largest multimedia advertising and marketing campaign that PepsiCo has ever waged for Brisk." Find out more, and check out screen grabs from the mobile game, below.Continue reading...

For some, the very term "climate change" is open to debate — witness the comments on our Coca-Cola scrapped polar bear white can blog post — but a just-issued report card by Climate Counts suggests major corporations are taking their impact on climate very seriously.

Climate Counts, a nonprofit collaborative effort to bring consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change, scores the world's largest companies on their climate impact each year to spur corporate climate responsibility and conscious consumption.

This year's Scorecard, the organization's fifth annual report, is particularly encouraging because 13 companies scored 80 points or higher (out of a maximum of 100 points), representing more than triple the number of companies to achieve that threshold in 2010. "Of the twenty largest companies scored," says Mike Bellamente, Climate Counts Project Director, "seventeen are scoring at the highest level."Continue reading...

Apple slows down growth in China and plans reveal iPhone 5 on its campus, as Verizon sides with Samsung in Apple dispute.

Arizona and Lipton fight for first place in dynamic tea category.

Audi and its new A6 "take over" Jersey City in new branded content with FX.

Blockbuster unveils streaming movie service as Netflix secures streaming deal with Dreamworks.

Bloomberg and Time shuffle web heads.

Boeing offers bidets and electric window shades on new Dreamliner for All Nippon Airways.

Bud Light pairs with Pitbull in pitch for Cuban-American consumers.Continue reading...

Lipton is promoting its green tea line in Asia with Japanese screen idol Takeshi Kaneshiro in a new campaign by DDB Shanghai. The spot, above, premiered last night in China at screenings of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.Continue reading...

Eminem has always been a personification of his hometown of Detroit — ragged around the edges and often downtrodden, but authentic as this morning’s dishes, and an entertainment diamond in the rough.

He first popped up in Super Bowl XLV as a Claymated character for Lipton Tea's Brisk brand, but that wasn't what got everyone buzzing — it was his pro-Detroit Chrysler spot that still has much of the country raving.

“This is the Motor City,” the rapper concluded the spot, pointing into the camera as a choir sang celestially on the stage of the renovated Fox Theater downtown, “and this is what we do.”

Fortunately for Eminem, the parallels between his fate and that of Detroit stop there. On the road to recovery, Eminem is already miles ahead of his beloved hometown.Continue reading...

This was the year that social media and traditional media came together on the Super Bowl field and scored a touchdown.

Campaigns were more integrated this year, with buzz building on Facebook and the web building anticipation for the multimillion dollar on-air campaigns, with an unprecedented number of sneak peeks and teaser campaigns (if not whole spots) posted online before the big game.

Major brand advertisers not only invested in gorgeously produced on-air spots — in the case of Coca-Cola, a Coke Cheers Facebook app and website whetted fans' appetites for the big game (and, naturally, the beverage) with a pro-social initiative that let fans pick their Super Bowl fave, with Coke donating $1 per vote (and then $5 per vote on the eve of the game) to charity — the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.Continue reading...

Google has rolled out its first campaign promoting its display advertising platform. The campaign, called Watch This Space, is a play on words -- "space," in this case, reference to "the blocks of display advertising users see on the Web pages they browse," as the New York Times notes.

The video overview above is supplemented with other videos that focus on the platform's open ecosystem, simpler/integrated system, measurement and reporting, creative flexibility, and Google's ad targeting capabilities.Continue reading...