We all know that video, engagement, experiential, and social media are the hot words of the moment when it comes to media campaigns. What happens if you bring them all together? Well here's one example of an amazingly crafted Youtube takeover, the Desperados Experience, advertising Desperados, the Tequila-flavoured beer. Using flash video and interactive wizardry, you are drawn into the ad as you enter a party and are asked to turn the volume down, break the walls, connect and share with your friends, all while the video overtakes the page.

It's undoubtedly very cool-looking, and I'm sure it will generate lots of buzz, but ultimately, I wonder if it is enough? As crazy as this sounds, it seems to tick off all the boxes, without really looking outside the box. I guess I was hoping for something more at the end. Indeed, unlike the Magnum pleasure hunt I wrote about last week, it lacks the extra step that would make me want to actually share this with my friends. Although I'll admit the prospect of having my face tattooed on some random guy's chest is pretty reckless!

So while this campaign is definitely worth checking out, I can't help but think we will soon be bombarded by these internet take-over campaigns, and pretty soon this one will not stick out. That being said, if you are looking for an excuse to get your quick party fix while at your desk, then experience Desperados now!

See also Samsung 3D TV projection and This is the end Doritos campaign.

The secret to good comedy is to use identifiable characters, and I can guarantee that everyone who works in media knows someone like Mark (not me).

Mark is an over-eager marketer, new to to the job and bursting with ideas, enthusiasm and mixed marketing metaphors. Mark's antics can be seen in a new series of videos produced by UK bedding fabric firm DPW (Duvet and Pillow Warehouse).

Mark's first day begins with a presentation, the like of which most of us have sat through at one time or another. 

Part two, dubbed Duvets of Spring is even better: A well observed dig at the kind of pretentious video claptrap that gives branded content a bad name. 

The spirit of The Office looms large, and these clips were obviously a lot of fun to make. It does at times feel like a sketch from a BBC comedy show. I keep expecting Victoria Wood to appear as a barmy northern secretary. 

A peek into the rest of the videos available on the DPW channel reveals a collection of films that tackle such tricky subjects like matress toppers and memory foam. This new series featuring Mark's adventures is unlikely to find an audience outside the UK, unless DPW is able to put out a belter of an episode that makes the Facebook-sharing grade, but is much more watchable than a four minute guide to different types of duvet.

Messages for Japan, Global | Google | Fantastic Interactive

A month after the catastrophic tsunami in Japan, the clean-up and aid operation continues apace. To help keep the aid effort front of mind, and keep people around the world involved in the recovery effort, Google has launched Messages for Japan. This is an online campaign designed to relay sentiments of encouragement from people around the globe to those affected by the recent crisis in Japan. A person from anywhere in the world can type a message of support in their native tongue, and the Messages for Japan site will use Google Translate to automatically translate any one of 57 languages into Japanese. Visitors to the site can post messages and read the messages of others posted from around the globe in their original language or in Japanese. The messages can also be viewed plotted across a world map and shared via Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and the Japanese social networking site Mixi.

The site is very clean, and evokes the key elements of Japanese design. The message map is beautiful. Powered by Google Maps, each message is represented by a muted-pink dot, which expands to reveal the message as you move your mouse across the page. The site also allows visitors to make donations to any one of the six aid agencies working in Japan. 

Read the full case study, and see the campaign video here. 

Thanks to the combination of Easter, the May bank holidays and the royal wedding, the UK is effectively closed for the next few weeks. Leaving aside your opinion on the monarchy, there's no denying that WIlliam's marriage to Kate Middleton is going to be one of the highest profile events in the UK this year. 

The British monarchy might be progressive, but its unlikely that we'll see any kind of brand involvement in a royal occasion any time soon. "The wedding of William and Kate Middleton brought to you by T-Mobile?" Not going to happen. Or at least, not in the way you might expect. This video from T-Mobile takes a light hearted look at the upcoming ceremony. Hopefully the real-life Prince Harry will emulate his T-Mobile counterpart when he makes his entrance to Westminster Abbey. 

Talent show season is upon us once again. As American Idol gears up for its tenth year of finals, preparations for the US and UK versions of X Factor will dominate tabloid headlines and the bizarre human zoo that is Britain’s Got Talent has already attracted large audiences eager to make snap judgements on the appearance of the hapless contestants.

But the money shot for shows like Idol, Factor, and Talent lies in that moment when our initial judgements are blown away. Susan Boyle’s success as a singer is completely down to that famous audition. Appearance suggested that she would be awful, her performance proved she wasn’t.

To say that first impressions count for a lot is hardly revelatory. Draftfcb has worked out that initial impressions are formed in those first 6.5 seconds. As an organisation they believe in this so fundamentally that they have incorporated this statistic into its  branding: “6.5 seconds that matter”.

For agencies, the company website should in theory provide the perfect opportunity to demonstrate their creative flair and talent, and boy do some of them go to town. A quick trawl through my contact book throws up some interesting examples. Saatchi.co.uk is largely blank, except for a carousel of its greatest hits, Agencynet opts for a collection of media buzz-phrases (they lose points for “digital dna”, and over at Initials you can enjoy lots of charming Flash animations. These agencies are like the X Factor contestant that comes bounding on stage waving and cheering, turning somersaults and making a grand theatrical entrance. For 6.5 seconds I’m very impressed – until I actually try to use the site.

Those first 6.5 seconds are followed by a full five minute trying to find out how the site actually works. The Saatchi website is so minimalist you feel like you shouldn’t be there, and as I click round Initials, I’m directed to all sorts of places off-piste, including the travel news section on the BBC, and the British Airways booking page.  This is all very sweet, but I can image quite infuriating to the brand marketer who attempted to find out more about Initials.

Naturally, agencies are often very pleased with their creations. Research from The Haystack Group revealed that 76% of agencies thought their website was a good representation of their agency. This would be marvellous, if it weren’t for the fact that the same research revealed that 93% of brand marketers cannot get the information they want from agency websites.

So the agency sites look the part, but most of them are failing to do the job in communicating information to potential clients. The Haystack Group’s Alan Thompson says this makes it difficult for marketers to compare agencies and the services they offer: “They don’t really find what they’re looking for from a website, so the user experience is quite disappointing. The agencies who actually conceived these things are very proud and feel like their sites are doing the job they want”.

There are some agencies who have attempted to be creative and useful in their approach to the company website. Self-styled conversation agency ‘we are social’ has placed social media front and centre of its homepage. Boone Oakley eschewed the entire of a homepage, and used an intricate network of clips on YouTube instead. This sounds worryingly complicated, but is in fact an incredibly easy and innovative homepage solution.

“The time for any agency to talk to a client in a new business sense is when they’ve got something that fulfils one of the client’s needs,” says Thompson. “That’s when it’s going to be the most potent conversation”. Canadian agency Zulu Alpha Kilo has employed this idea to an extreme, using a website that has no functionality on it at all, save a request for some information.

So where does all this diversity leave the poor brand marketer who just wants to browse through some agencies and compare the services they offer? Until recently, nowhere – but Alan Thompson reckons he has the answer with Haystackonline.com. According to Thompson, agencies find it really hard to focus on their customer’s needs when they’re talking about themselves, so Haystackonline creates a framework in which all participating agencies can demonstrate their services and abilities, effectively bringing some order to the marketplace.

It’s a very sleek set-up. Agencies are still given space to show off their creative chops, but by virtue of their work and not their website. Allowing the work to speak for itself creates a level playing field for agencies of all shapes and sizes. As with Cream, there’s no room for agency ego on Haystack, and whilst I would be expected to say this, the two products complement each other rather nicely. 

As part of Cream's Schrödinger's television series that examines the state and future of the medium, Story Worldwide's Jon King considers the 'end of days' for channel centred marketing.

In 1962 Marshall McLuhan, the great media commentator, said:

"The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form"

Here we are, 50 years later, watching more TV than ever, spending even more time online and playing computer games. There are otiose arguments about whether TV advertising is dead or dying from self-interested parties, eager to land grab or retain above the line media spend. And, in acts of wonderful post-modernity, Thinkbox, the persuasive cheerleaders for commercial television, now produce (excellent) TV ads designed to persuade advertisers that TV ads are persuasive.

The squabbles about where advertising dollars ought to be spent go nowhere; it's hard to care much about them. It's interesting they happen so often right now, illustrating the truism that the most profound disagreements always take place when a system's in crisis; accurately describing how we live now, and the bankruptcy of old-fashioned destination-centric notions of marketing.

We've arrived at an end game for the organised spectacle in which broadcasting, on or offline, can decreasingly satisfy solipsistic and self-organised audiences or groups with a culturally unifying end point or transformative experiences. And yet the debate about media spend, while paying lip service to change (the red button works, too!), is fixed in a tired world-view. The question is, in this time of crisis, where are we headed?

Read the rest of Jon's article here, or read the first installment from Rich Welsh of Bigballs films here. 

Schrödinger's Television, part I:

'Friends, Kings and the survival of the fittest' - The percieved never-ending end of television from a content producer's point of view, by Richard Welsh

In our digital age, we constantly hear about how engagement is the new way forward. Some brands still struggle with this, but Magnum is one that has taken this notion to a brilliant new level. Reminscent of a thrilling video by Intel, Magnum's new interactive campaign to promote the new ice-cream flavour features a woman controlled by the user with the arrows and spacebar, as she runs through the internet to catch chocolates. Taking the notion that the internet is a treasure trove of pleasure, we, the woman controlled by the user, see the internet in a whole new light, as she jumps from one website to the other, including Spotify, Youtube, Tiger of Sweden, jumps through banner ads, drives a car, swings on necklaces, and even flies a plane! Not only are we engaged with Magnum, but with the internet as a whole. The internet truly becomes our playground.

It's no surprise that this campaign was born in the hotbed of digital creativity that is in Sweden. Indeed, a recent campaign dubbed  "The Fuck Tree" is another example of bringing digital creativity to life in media, and has been shortlisted in the Festival of Media Awards 2011 in two categories. In fact the country appears in the complete shortlist no less than five times: The Swedes clearly have an eye on where media is headed.

Listeners to BBC Radio 4, or anybody with a passing interest in popular physics have probably heard of Schrodinger's cat. For the uninitiated, Erwin Schrödinger is one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, which is a very strange branch of physics that deals with the interaction of matter and energy at a particle level. 

Quantum mechanics is a strange and complex area of science, and in an attempt to illustrate just how ridiculous quantum mechanics is when applied to the real world, Schrödinger devised the gloriously absurd paradox, "Schrödinger's Cat". 

In the theoritical experiment, a cat is placed inside a box together with a radioactive device containing some poison. One of the theories of quantum mechanics states that the cat is both simultaneously alive and dead at the same time. This is of course ridiculous - which is exactly the point that Schrödinger was trying to make, but this is the kind of problem that keeps physicists awake in bed a night. 

Fortunately for media journalists, Schrödinger's cat provides another useful analogy for the seemingly never-ending death of television. 

With budgets being tightened and with marketers seemingly obsessed by the supposed accountability of digital media, the future of TV should theoretically be rather bleak. If you believe all the data, we are spending more time playing games, using social networks, surfing the internet on our smartphone and yet TV is still managing to bringing record audiences.

There are several discussions to be had around the effectiveness and future of the medium. There are few evangelists left that seriously believe that digital media spells the end of the box, but the TV model is changing massively, as is the way in which we view, measure and interrogate the medium.

In the first of series of articles, Richard Welsh from Bigballs Filmsdiscusses the percieved never-ending end of television from a content producer's point of view.

No cats were harmed in the making of this series. Read the first installment here.