Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Eating, apparently.

An edible billboard made from 390kg (860lb) of pure chocolate has been eaten in just three hours.

Thorntons invited passers-by to tuck into the 14.5ft by 9.5ft (4.4m by 2.9m) sign in Covent Garden, London.

The Easter creation, a world first, was made of 10 chocolate bunnies, 72 giant chocolate eggs and 128 chocolate panels, each weighing 2kg.

The billboard took three months to plan and 300 hours for the team of 10 to build and was expected to last a week.

That, and getting on the news and then being blogged about by gullible bloggers who get caught up in the swirl of viral marketing.

Well, just 5 months later, the very same marketing hoax has made it to the UK. Though this time it's masquerading as a MySpace account.

Still pretty much the same billboards, though...

Emily:



Jane Doe:



And whoa - look what programme is appearing on a satellite channel here in the UK. The very same one that "thatgirlemily" was advertising.

[Edit: is there a link between NTL/FLextech and GCap Media? BRMB certainly seem to be in on the hoax...]

So we've got a shining example of really bad PR - running a discredited viral campaign from the US in the UK, in the vague expectation that no one here could have spotted any of the US controversy. What's sadder is that some of the UK media seems to have fallen for the scam. Don't they do any research?

Original pointer to the poster and the MySpace account by A PR Guy's Musings

A radio advert this morning advertised a new book about Beethoven, which comes with an accompanying "Beethoven mood chart".

My first thought was the obvious: a list of the form "beethoven current mood: crotchety, beethoven current mood: busy", and so on and so forth.

But then I realised there was only one thing it could say (which would also make it a lot cheaper to print):

beethoven current mood: decomposing.

It always comes back to the old jokes, doesn't it...

Here are a pile of photos of Sony filming a new commercial in Glasgow. Paint bombs everywhere!

Start here and then move on through the photos....

Link found via Linkbunnies

[Update: nalsa points us all at this video of the paintbombing of the flats]

..at least in the web advertising space. I just spotted a Google Adwords advertisement for MSN Search...



You know you've won when the competition sees you as the best way of getting to their target audience.

I still don't think Google advertising is an adequate substitute for a business model...

...from wendyg on the issue of advertising on LiveJournal at newswireless.net.

LiveJournal, home to approximately 1.3 million active blogs and 10 million overall, announced this week that it's inaugurating ads on its site, following on from a post on the subject from the founder about six weeks ago.

The general idea isn't all that dissimilar to what Salon has been doing for the last five years with its Premium service: you pay for the value you receive with either ads or money, your choice. LiveJournal has always offered free and paid accounts, basing the incentive to pay on limiting the features available to the free accounts. Now, it will offer an intermediate "Sponsored" level which will include ads. If you're a logged-in paid user you will never see ads; if you're a free or sponsored user (or visitor) you will see ads on LiveJournal's main site and on sponsored journals. No one has to display ads on their journal.

Almost simultaneously, Six Apart, the owner of LiveJournal, announced that it had secured $12 million in venture capital funding. LiveJournal was a cooperative community; now it's a business.

More here.

500 channels and nothing on? Well nothing, unless you drive an Audi.

I've learnt my lesson. I shouldn't have been channel-hopping between all those odd little channels just under the movies.

Because I found it there: The Audi Channel.

Nothing but Audi content on a low-bandwidth satellite channel. While media organisations like Future Publishing built their market position on niche magazines, it seems odd that there's market space for a manufacturer-run advertorial channel. Sure, sponsor a show or send a DVD out to the world in a mass-mail shot, but fill bandwidth with your own advertising? Has channel space on the Sky satellites suddenly got cheaper than a prime time advert? Or is this just going to be a short-lived PR stunt?

What will be next? The Wiskas Channel? The Cillit-Bang Channel? The All New Ocean Finance Loan Channel? The Yes Car Credit Channel?

I think I'm scaring myself...

There's a lot happening here at the Fall IDF in the Moscone Centre. However I did want to bring Intel's new advertising slogan to your attention: "Welcome To The Parallel Universe".

And it's in a very skiffy font...