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Twitter to sell celebrity tweets to app developers?

Emma — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:55:09 +0000

Twitter is to allow its celebrity users integrate their tweets into other services and applications. For example, if a big name musician like Lady Gaga tweets then her tweets could start appearing beside her songs in media players like Spotify and iTunes.
Twitter is [so far] inviting a select few music app developers (Rovi, The Echo Nest and Gracenote) to integrate celebrity ‘verified’ accounts into applications used by Spotify, Apple, HTC smartphones and Sony smart TVs.
Twitter wants to make money by selling these tweets to app developers and the publishers that carry the apps.
Read what @jasoncosta has to say about the proposed service on Twitter’s blog.

Competition – WIN, WIN, WIN!

Edward — Wed, 18 May 2011 10:50:49 +0000

Our friends at GoSailing.ie have given us two sets of two tickets (that’s four tickets in total to you and me) to offer our readers in exchange for Facebook likes and Digital Times email subscribers.
The competition ends COB Wednesday 25th of May, winners will be announced and then contacted by Aaron and his team in GoSailing.

In order to enter you need to:

Go to http://www.facebook.com/Gosailing.ie and like the page!
Lastly, go to http://bit.ly/jv5uor and subscribe to our daily email updates from Digital Times’ blog.

Scurrilous self promotion I know, but if you don’t like the posts just unsubscribe and hopefully everyone likes sailing.

The prize

Worth €80 euro a pair, we are giving away a three hour trip around Dublin Bay on The Explorer, a 54-foot ocean–going yacht, custom designed to the highest specification. The yacht is crewed by professional sailors and Aaron O’Grady, the skipper, who also coached at the Beijing Olympics. Do check them out, they are an Irish-owned, family company and their service really is good fun for all. The winners can arrange the time and date that suits directly with Aaron once they have been selected at random from the subscribers and likers.

Ireland Town hopes to take on Farmville

Emma — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:05:17 +0000

Tourism Ireland will launch an online game, which will go live on Facebook on St. Patrick’s Day. Called Ireland Town, the game “brings the holiday experience here to life for Facebook fans across the world”.
This is the first time a national tourism board has launched a social game. It aims to tap into the popularity of games like FarmVille and CityVille. 24% of all people on the internet in the US and GB play social games at least once a week.
Mark Henry, Tourism Ireland’s central marketing director, said: “It is a unique promotional tool and a first, as no other national tourist board had done this before. Tourism Ireland is constantly looking at ways of reaching potential holidaymakers and we are increasingly using social media to do so.”
In Ireland Town, Facebook fans are invited to create their own idyllic town in Ireland, with the help of ‘tour guide’ Sally. They can then explore iconic sites and visitor attractions around the island, completing various challenges in order to progress to the next level of the game. There are 32 destinations and nine different tasks to be completed at each level.
“Given that Tourism Ireland currently has a fanbase of a quarter of a million people around the globe, and each of the fans has in turn an average of 130 friends, Tourism Ireland can potentially engage with 32.5 million people worldwide through our new Ireland Town game,” suggests Henry.
Tourism Ireland will drive interest in the game through a major advertising campaign, which includes targeted Facebook advertising. PR will also play an important role, particularly in terms of the game ‘going viral’.
http://www.facebook.com/DiscoverIrelandGB

4chan founder gives masterclass in publicity

Stephen — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:12:37 +0000

Poole has a pot shot at his respected elder, Zuckerberg

Christopher ‘Moot’ Poole, the founder of the 4chan online message board, gave a masterclass in attracting publicity at the SXSW festival in Austin Texas at the weekend. As he prepares to launch his ‘anti-social’ network Canv.as, he took to the stage at SXSW and ripped into Mark Zuckerberg’s fanciful ideas regarding online privacy. The result was worldwide headlines and suddenly this ‘kid from nowhere’ (he’s 24) is being quoted everywhere from the Guardain to TechCrunch. Nice work.
Poole’s musings on Facebook are nothing new. He simply disagrees with Zuckerberg’s theory that privacy shouldn’t matter anymore. “Zuckerberg’s totally wrong on anonymity being total cowardice. Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way,” he said, adding that the web allows people to “reinvent themselves” as if they were starting a new life somewhere.
Chris Poole’s next big venture is best described as an ‘anti-social’ network. It’s an extension of 4chan – a site that allows people to post random and often controversial material and one that attracts over 8 million visitors a month. The new venture, Canv.as is in closed beta at the moment and sounds like a safer more sanitised version of 4chan. It allows users to take images others have posted and make then even sillier. It intends to be a place where people can let off steam anonymously. As Poole explained: “I get a lot of e-mail messages from people who say thanks for giving them a place to vent, an outlet to say what they can’t say in real life with friends and work colleagues – things that they know are wrong, but they still want to say. Is it right? No, of course not. People say some disgusting, vile things. But just because we are hosting it doesn’t mean we agree with it. I don’t support what they are saying; I just support that there is a site like that to say that.”
It sounds like a Facebook for Trolls. And be warned, if you decide to visit 4chan, there is plenty of rude and tasteless material on there that might cause you trouble at work.

Lynx’s latest campaign debuts on Facebook

Mark — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:17:20 +0000

To mark the launch of its first scent of 2011 Lynx has teamed up with Rupert Sanders, creator of X Box’s Halo 3 Believe to create a seven minute short film called ‘The Fall’. This being a Lynx ad, it naturally features some scantily clad ‘angels’. Interestingly its debut was on Facebook before it hit TV screens.

A real eye opener?

Stephen — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:19:04 +0000

A bit of eye candy here (excuse the pun). Here’s a short viral video that’s really taking off. The question is – is it real? Jonathan Post is a creation of Francois Vogel, a ‘visual pioneer’. Our guess is that this viral is the first part of a series of viral ads by a 3D TV company that are slowly building the idea that people are better off with 3D glasses. Probably.

Interacting with the suburbs – an Arcade Fire project

Stephen — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:28:36 +0000

This is pretty cool. It’s an interactive music video for Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used to Wait’ single from The Suburbs album. You will need to launch Google’s Chrome browser and type in your address (Dublin comes up). The HTML5-enabled engine will then use multiple Chrome windows and Google maps to take you on a journey of the area you grew up in. The two behind the concept are @radical.media director Chris Milk and Google’s Aaron Koblin. Production is by B-Reel. Click here http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ to see what’s what, but you will need to use the Chrome Browser for the full effect.

‘A way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall’

Stephen — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:49:30 +0000

Following the release of the full length trailer of ‘The Social Network’ a film about Mark Zuckerburg starting Facebook, come this – the ‘Twitter Movie Trailer’. Obviously a spoof but many agree it is as ‘factual’ as the Facebook movie trailer. Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, likes the trailer. Maybe he’d put some money behind making the full length movie? The trailer was made by the Barely Digital group. They like to use the word ‘awesome’ … quite a bit.

Are these really ads?

Edward — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:52:00 +0000

Okay, these ads come with a bit of a health warning, don’t watch them if you don’t like cussin’ and moochers. The reason we are blogging about them is because they were made for a big US footwear brand and are probably the furthest removed we’ve ever seen from a traditional big brand ad (e.g. Nike or Puma ads).
The ad above is Spike Jonze’s ‘Twizzler’ for the Lakai footwear brand. It’s directed by Johannes Gamble and Federico Vitetta. It doesn’t seem like an ad, but that’s the point. The target audience for this brand of footwear would be too cynical to receive any obvious branded message.
The second ad (below) is ‘MorE Spinoza’, filmed and edited by Lannie Rhoades. The music is ‘Thug’ by Slim Thug from the album ‘Boss of All Bosses’. Again, it gives a hint of how diverse advertising is becoming and how far removed a lot of today’s ads are from the traditional, message driven formats of yesteryear. Plus, they were made to be viral.

‘Mixed Tape Amnesty’ part of viral ad campaign

Stephen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:23:59 +0000

The ‘Mixed Tape Amnesty’ video was doing the rounds of Twitter land yesterday, much to the amusement of all those who watched it. Ad agency Chemistry is behind the viral and the hoax is part of an ad campaign for 4FM. In just a few hours after going live the site had attracted thousands of visitors with thousands of posts on social networks including Twitter and Facebook, in an attempt to gauge if it was genuine. Even genuine music websites gave it the thumbs up: http://www.podcomplex.com/blog/mix-tape-amnesty/
Fintan Cooney, client services director at Chemistry said, ‘4FM wanted to do something a little different ahead of their advertising campaign. In particular they wanted to entertain people while at the same time communicating who the station is aimed at – people who will have grown up taping music from the radio. We thought this was a perfect way to jog a few memories, in the same way 4FM’s music policy surely will.’
The new campaign, ‘4FM – songs you know and love’, launches on Monday, May 3 and will be seen on TV, in the press, on outdoor sites and online.