Blog Archives
Database of Radio Promotions and Competitions
Radio creatives, do I have a database for you. Radio Ideas Bank was launched recently with information on hundreds of what it describes as “contests, promotions, and stunts.” You can access it at http://www.radioideasbank.com/. It is a subscription service, but the folks behind Radio Ideas Bank were kind enough to give me access for a test drive.
There’s a list of quick search terms (business, retails, children, events, text, etc) in a list, but you can also do a full keyword search. I did a search for holiday and got over 30 results. Results included the name of the promotion and a brief description. The promotions had names that were intriguing, to say the least, and included “LUCKY TOOTHBRUSHES,” “PHANTOM FIVER FLINGER,” “ROCK, SHOP AND RELAX,” and “BRIEFCASE BONANZA”.
Now, the brief description tells you almost nothing. To download the full article, you need to use a credit. The article stays in your account for two weeks.
For Rock, Shop, and Relax the information in the article includes target market, objectives, overview, mechanics, and summary. The contest is described thoroughly along with some ways you can tease and promote it. Sometimes the contests are very specific — play x, y, and z, and award a, b, and c. Sometimes they’re more open-ended — invite people to do x, structure a contest possibly like y, and award z.
There’s no pricing information on the site — you have to use the contact page on the site to get in touch with one of the Radio Ideas Bank operators — but the searches I did showed a lot of content here. A pretty specific database, but useful for creatives or even event coordinators/marketing folks.
UK Election Leaflets
Thanks to reader APS for pointing me to The Straight Choice (http://www.thestraightchoice.org), a Web site containing almost 3500 (at this writing) election leaflets from UK general election candidates. The front of the site contains a list of latest leaflets found, the top parties, top constituencies, and campaign “not spots” (sorry, Aberdeen North.) You can also search the leaflets by postal code or browse them by party or category. There’s also a fairly substantial tag cloud of keywords.
I went looking at the parties, and found literally dozens — unfortunately some of the most interesting looking ones had no fliers associated with them. (The Dungeons Death and Taxes party?) I did find one flyer from the “Best of a Bad Bunch” party. The party pages for fliers contain links for getting an RSS feed or e-mail alert, and even embed codes if you want to feature a party’s leaflets on your own site. There’s a little data about where the leaflet came from and when it was uploaded to the site, and a few relevant categories listed.
The image quality of the leaflets themselves varied a lot — visitors are encouraged to scan or photograph leaflets and send ‘em on in — but all the ones I looked at were available in a large enough size that they were easily readable. I know this wasn’t the intention, but if you wander through a site with almost 3500 flyer designs you can learn at least a little something about layout.
As long as you’re looking at UK election campaign materials, drop by http://www.electionchampion.com, which is attempting to document election billboards. There’s a leaderboard where you can get points for taking pictures of and sending in billboards. Billboards have some data about the associated campaign and a map of the area where it was found. At least one billboad I looked at seemed to have suffered a bit of annotation. Not as extensive as the leaflets site but there seems to be more elections data here.
Twitter Dips Its Toe in the Ad Water
Twitter announced this morning the launch of “Promoted Tweets” because it’s nice for a company to make revenue. Promoted Tweets are described in the blog post like this: “You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages…. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as ‘promoted’ when an advertiser is paying… Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.”
The site also notes that all Promoted Tweets will be “organic,” that is, they will first exist as regular Tweets. I’m not sure why this is such a big deal; all a company would have to do is tweet something, then promote it.
The Twitter announcement promised “Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.” When I read this I immediately thought, “Doesn’t Google down-position ads that have an extremely low CTR?” It sounded like the same sentiment, dressed up a bit.
These Promoted Tweets will start appearing on the search results page, though I ran a bunch of searches for search terms I thought might be relevant to Twitter’s launch partners (Sony Pictures, Bravo, Red Bull, Starbucks, etc) and didn’t have any luck.
I trust that Twitter will delineate a Promoted Tweet clearly from a regular tweet, and I like the idea of this kind of thing much better than a more heavily-sponsored structure like yesterday’s announced TweetUp (though Bill Gross will always hold a special place in my heart for the GoTo.com suit against Disney — which was settled in favor of GoTo, by the way.)
But I have lots of questions, mostly about the back end. How does the bidding work? Will the advertising be just keyword or also location specific (if it’s location specific I think that’s potentially much better for the advertiser AND the ad viewer.) How often will the ads change? What’s being tracked? How will Twitter handle trademark issues or tweets that are clearly spam? (Or worse, deceptive spam that gets enough clickthroughs to stay in the ad stream?) Will the ads show up in RSS feeds of results or just on the Web site?
Evan Williams and Dick Costolo will be discussing this further at Chirp, so I may do a followup. I’ll also grab a screenshot as soon as one of these ads turns up in a search.
Theme Park Brochures
A big thank you to we Love You So for the pointer to the theme park maps collection, which in turn led to the pointer for Theme Park Brochures, which is exactly what you think it is — a collection of theme park brochures.
It’s available at http://www.themeparkbrochures.net/main.html.
I don’t have a count of the number of brochures here — several dozen? A hundred? The front page sorts the brochures both by date (there are a few that go back to the 50s) and alphabetically. Click on an item and you’ll get a page with links to scanned in parts of the brochure — this 1972 Opryland Brochure comes in eight parts so you can fully appreciate the groovy illustrations and ticket price list.
As We Love You So noted, there are other parts to this site, including the maps list (this one goes back to 1931!, link list (nice annotation), a substantial list of roller coaster builders and another one of roller coaster clubs (for coaster enthusiasts). Great browse.
Ghostsigns in the UK
Ready for a big wall of advertising nostalgia? How about over 600 big walls? An article in last week’s Guardian looks at the Ghostsigns Archive, a new offering from the History of Advertising Trust. This archive tracks painted advertising on buildings across the UK.
It looks like the official site is http://www.ghostsigns.co.uk/archive but you can browse the signs at http://www.hatads.org.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=33. Signs are divided into several categories including Medical & Health, Food & Drink, and Shoes & Clothing.
Choose a category and you’ll get a gallery of signs with thumbnails. Detail pages include location, photographer, date taken, and a transcription of the sign if it’s necessary. I like how there’s a little thumbnail of the gallery so you can continue browsing from detail pages.
Since the idea is to document signage painted on buildings, and a lot of that signage is very old, the images vary a lot in quality. Some of them look like they were painted yesterday and some of them are barely readable.
If you want a larger pool of images than what’s here, you can get over 3700 (though perhaps not categorized as well) at the Ghostsigns Flickr group. And if you’re really interested in ghost signs, you can download a download a Google Spreadsheet of Ghostsigns Archive ad locations.
New Additions to AdViews TV Commercial Archive
Duke Library noted last Friday a new addition to its AdViews digital archive. AdViews, is an online archive for old commercials. The bulk of it is only viewable through iTunes (sigh) though you can do a search.
The new addition to AdViews includes over 1,800 commercials and a couple of interviews about advertising. That brings to total count of commercials in the archive to almost 10,000. The new content in the archives includes commercials for Bran & Prune Flakes (ew!), Corn Crackos, Dennis the Menace Peanut Puffs, and Crispy Critters.
If you don’t have access to iTunes, you can still search the commercials at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/ — you just won’t be able to see the commercials. I did a search for cereal and got 26 results with screenshots from the commercials. If you click on the image you’ll get a little more information about it but to actually open the media you’ll still need to go to iTunes.
I hate that you have to have iTunes to see this collection, but at least with the search mechanism you can do an intial search and find the stuff you want to look at, before you go bug your friend who has the computer with iTunes…
Thousands and Thousands of Vintage Ads
A big thanks to Bryan Eisenberg for giving me the heads-up on Vintage Ad Browser, a directory of over 120,000 vintage ads available at http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/. Once I got into it, I found out it was put together by Philipp Lenssen, he of Google Blogoscoped!
The front page of the site has a huge list of topics to browse through, from Airlines & Aircraft to Xmas. You can also search by keyword or open up a color box and browse by ad color. I chose the “Future” ads. I got one ad from the 1920s but a timeline across the top of the page to direct me to more ads in the 1930s, 1940s, etc. There seemed to be the most ads available for the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I liked the 50s ads the most, especially the one about telephones.
If you’re used to browsing university-created collections like this, you might find yourself a bit disappointed; Virtual Ad Browser does not offer metadata, information on who created the ads, or transcription of print. (Can you imagine if one person had tried to get all that data together for 120,000+ ads?) Instead, each ad has a URL for direct linking, a URL for source (I saw ads from eBay, from poster stores, from library digital collections), and sometimes a link to zoom in on the ad or buy it somewhere.
After all the time I’ve spent lately looking at digitized newspapers, I appreciated this extra look down memory lane with more recent ads, but at the same time I wanted to go back to the digitized newspapers and pull out a bunch more ads for Philipp to use.
One warning: the ads here do reflect the outlooks and prejudices of their times, and as such some of them are offensive. Pay attention to what categories you decide to browse. I wouldn’t let a kid go through this site on their own.
