After a couple of months without blogging, I decided to resume posting as of today. Downtime was initialy due to ‘too much work’ and later transformed into ‘I need vacation’. Anyway, thanks for your patience and welcome back.

The “Wow” starts now, says Microsoft launching Its Windows Vista with a 500 milion dolar marketing campaign. The faces of the executives present at the event express something completely else though: boredom. Once again: believe in you message. Not believing your own message results in, well, just empty marketing. The picture is by The New York Times. | via Seth Godin

It seems McDonald’s has used the show Iron Chef to plant a subliminal message (Video in YouTube). I’m not lovin’ it. | via MIT Advertising Lab

Elfyourself.com, the viral created by OfficeMax, generated 36 milion visist in just about 5 weeks. OfficeMax used the budget for 3 traditional TV comercial to produce 20 viral websites, one of which was ElfYourself (interesting example of Spagetti Marketing).

To give you an idea: Burger King’s SubservientChicken generated 14 milion visits in one year. There is of course an important diference: ElfYourself needs a sender and a receiver, whereas SubservientChicken is intended to view on your own. This multiplier effect (and the fact that it is part of the ElfYourself’s core idea) is crucial in viral advertising. | via Advertising Age

Google could be working on a World Game (think SecondLife), Says Play.tm. SketchUp, Google tool to map 3d models onti Google Earth, could be on of the components. Especialy Adsense, imho, makes a Google Earth / SecondLife combination an interesting thing. Some chinese company is already working on the avatars, says Play.tm, and also a team from There.com is involved in the project.

After having revolutionaized the long distance call market, the founders of Skype set out to do the same thing for television. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been working on a project codenamed ‘the Venice Project’ (named after the conference room the first meeting was held in). A few days ago, the projects real name was revealed as being Joost.

The idea of Joost es to distribute television content over the internet, through a Peer to Peer technology (unlike iTunes). The big advantage of the P2P network is the fact that popular content is actually easier and faster to access (since it is stored on most locations) whereas in a normal service high demand often means slow delivery.

In a first stage, Joost will be an application you install on your PC (and Mac?) which would be hooked up to your television screen. Later on, the idea is to cater other screens as well (think mobile).

The Joost application is based on Mozilla, which is open source. This means that soon we will be able to download plug-ins and overlays made by third parties, FireFox style (also Mozilla based). So not only will the service allow you to time shift content, it will also offer an enhanced viewer experience.

Imagine a plug-in that adds directors comments to a movie (who hasn’t ever dived into IMDB after watching a flick?), or a plug-in showing similar content. Obviously, there’s a lot of nice things marketers could do as well, such as linking products in a show (the casts wardrope?) to ecommerce websites.

Joost is still in Beta, for now. Below a few nice screenshots from BBC’s Fifth Gear as seen on Joost.

‘Go Outside, membership is free’ and ‘Access your closet to build your FirstLife look’ are some of the headlines that remind us to have our ‘first lives’ figured out before we enter in SecondLife. True. Link: Get A FirstLife | via DigitalAgency

If you’ve seen the complete Steve Jobs Keynote, you probably noticed his remote control failing to work at some point. Steve manages to make a joke about it and after a few moments, the show goes on.

Apple sells technology, the one thing that failed to do its job here, but the fact that this incident is not edited out of the streaming video available on Apple’s website shows Apple is willing to tell an authentic story. But Apple knows its fans are able to digest what happened. Also, my guess is that Apple is aware of the power of these 4000 people that attended the Keynote live. They saw the trouble, so trying to cover it up by editing the event video, could do more damage than just showing it. Apple choose to play fair.
Would you have played fair? Would you have distributed the video with the failure still in it? In a hyperconnected world, there’s no room for cheating.

Also, Todd Bishop has a nice analysis comparing Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Micheal Dell keynotes. Worth checking out.

Mark Chandler, SVP at Cisco, used his blog to comment on the pending lawsuit against Apple over the use of the iPhone brand. Interesting to see a corporate blog used as a channel not only to media but also directly to the public, replacing the usual press release. Well done, very personal, credible and sincere.

Various talks over the past few weeks could lead to a deal between Google and CBS. Such a deal would most probably include the following:

• CBS content available on Google Video and YouTube
• CBS radio stations added to Google’s Radio Adsense platform
• Google’s entry in TV advertising, most probably trough it’s Adsense platform

Of course that last issue is what generates most interest. | via AdAge