Seeking to breath new life into Old Navy, Gap Inc has named New York fashion designer Todd Oldham to be the design creative director for its Old Navy chain.
Oldham will also develop and launch a line of merchandise under the Todd Oldham name that will be exclusively sold at Old Navy. Before joining Old Navy, Oldham designed a collection of furniture for La-Z-Boy and dorm room furniture for Target.
Oldham, starts his new job in San Francisco on October 1.
To launch Bob Dylan's upcoming greatest hits collection, Columbia Records is launching a viral marketing campaign which will include personal greetings from Dylan and clips from the classic song 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'--you know, that iconic, and much aped video of Dylan standing in an alley flipping through cards with words from the song printed on them.
The viral campaign, encourages fans to put their own words on the cue cards and send their edited video onto friends. When the campaign arrives in your inbox with the message: "Bob Dylan has a message for you" in the subject line. The campaign contains links to the official album website, links to buy the album and the DVD as well as information about the original video for 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'.
Nike has introduced a new shoe line made exclusively for American Indians to help promote fitness among a group beset by high obesity rates. The Air Native N7 features "heritage callouts" in its design and is larger in width and height to suit the unique foot size of the group.
Nike said it is the first time it has designed a shoe for a specific race or ethnicity. It said all profits from the sale of the shoe will be reinvested in health programs for tribal lands, where problems with obesity, diabetes and related conditions are near epidemic levels in some tribes.
Nike designers and researchers looked at the feet of more than 200 people from more than 70 tribes nationwide and found that in general, American Indians have a much wider and taller foot than the average shoe accommodates. The average shoe width of men and women measured was three width sizes larger than the standard Nike shoe.
As a result, the Air Native is wider with a larger toe box. The shoe has fewer seams for irritation and a thicker sock liner for comfort.
Al Gore's The Alliance for Climate Protection has selected The Martin Agency for its $100m global ad campaign. Y&R, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and Crispin Porter & Bogusky also pitched for the account.
Gore created the Alliance for Climate Protection last year to educate the public on global warming.
Brand Republic reports that the RFP said that the Alliance needed an agency to create a three- to five-year "multi-media global campaign to transform awareness into action and advocacy". It also called for a campaign of "commercial reach and scale, with budget parameters that rival major social marketing campaigns of the past" with a likely budget of at least $100m.
Coca-Cola has invented a bottle that chills on the inside when the top is twisted off. Reportedly being launched as "Sprite Super Chilled," Coke and Diet Coke could follow, should the bottling, which does away with the need to add ice, catches on.
In a launch promotion, a Malta-based online gaming site is rolling two enormous steel dice down a mountain slope and taking bets on the result as part of a viral campaign to attract business.
The campaign, called "The world's greatest dice roll", is sponsored by online gaming site Gnuf.com and is being seeded to audiences in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.
Gnuf.com will use a helicopter designed for extreme conditions, to air-lift the half-ton dice, over a steep snow-packed slope in the mountains outside Nuuk, Greenland. Users can view the film of the dice on their journey down the mountain and place a bet on the result at Gnuf.com/diceroll, which will be revealed on October 23.
Goran Marklund, the helicopter pilot, said to Brand Republic: "Conditions in Greenland's mountains can be dicey. We could only count on one chance. But we got up over the ridge and managed to make the drop."
Gnuf.com offers poker, casino games, qualifiers, promotions and special events.
Claude Brodesser-Akner of Advertising Age asks us why is sex on TV OK as long as it's not safe? Or in his words: "Where does the rubber meet the road? Not in Hollywood."
Brodesser-Akner is perplexed by how network executives can continue their rebuff of condom advertising, even while television programming becomes sexier by the season--he sees a sexual programming "surge" to use the latest overused term.
The conservative watchdog group Parents Television Council last week issued a report on the state of family-friendly TV. The PTC's conclusion: Sexual references "swelled" 22% during early prime time when compared with programming from the same time slot six years ago. And according to "Sex on TV 4," a 2005 study by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, the number of sexual scenes on TV has nearly doubled since 1998.
So, while CBS airs its new show "Swingtown"--a program about two generations of friends and neighbors in a Chicago suburb who "explore new freedoms and seek connections with each other in the midst of the socio/sexual revolution (of the 1970's)." you will not see ads for Trojan condoms during the commercial breaks.
That's because an ad campaign for Trojan condoms was rejected by both CBS and Fox because of concerns about the ad's creative content.
In the ads, which did appear on NBC and ABC, as well as MTV, anthropomorphic pigs are rebuffed by comely women in a swank cocktail lounge -- until one of them purchases a Trojan condom from a men's-room vending machine and morphs into a handsome fellow who quickly receives a warmer welcome from a woman at the bar.
In a written response to Trojan reported by The New York Times, Fox said that it had rejected the pigs spot because "contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy."
MTV is launching Think.MTV.com, a site focused on youth activism.
Evolving the concept of social networking, MTV is appealing to its core audience and advertiser base, asking them to actively participate in the community. The company hopes advertisers will highlight their company's socially active campaigns, and that their audiences will be inspired to become educated, and participate in socially conscious causes.
"This is a great platform for those kinds of marketers to let their audiences know where they are making a difference," according to MTV president Christina Norman, as quoted in Adweek.
Think was started in large part because of a study the MTV Networks property conducted last year that found that 80 percent of young people want to actively help their community but only 19 percent are "very involved." To that end, the site will feature blogs, videos, profiles, podcasts and other features relating to socially conscious causes.
Founding partners include the Case Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldhirsh Foundation and MCJ Foundation. The site is also launching with involvement from the United Nations and the Boys and Girls Club as well as contributions from Bono, Jay-Z, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Rock and other celebrities. Initial advertisers include Microsoft.
Here's a message from my friend Bruce Silverman, about his company "Pocket Billboards." Pocket Billboards and Promophone sell print and audio advertising on prepaid calling cards, "turning a trusted and established product into a powerful and revolutionary new ad medium.":
A media vehicle that is an integral part of the U.S. Hispanic lifestyle… where the advertising cannot be ignored… and provides consumers one-on-one interactivity with the advertiser… That’s Pocket Billboards!
Talk about a back-to-school push! Playboy is set to launch a sexy social networking site tageted to college students.
Playboy U is designed to help build brand loyalty among young consumers. The site, which is said to have similar features to those found on Facebook, will be advertising-supported.
The Associated Press reports that tha site bars nudity but leaves little to the imagination with pictures from the mansion's "Midsummer Night's Dream" party and message topics such as "What Do You Think About Penis Enlargement" and "How Many People Have You Slept With? To Lie or Not to Lie."
The site has instituted a college-only policy, which bars anyone without an e-mail address ending in .edu from joining. And Playboy U says it will boot any university faculty, staff or alumni or other non-students that it discovers on the site.
In many ways its format is similar to Facebook and MySpace - people choose to "friend" each other, can post videos and photos or leave messages on a "wall." But users can also access university-specific pages that list campus events while viewing individual profiles of Playboy U members throughout the Web site.
