If you live in San Francisco, you must have noticed the new Yahoo! interactive ads in few bus stops around the city.  (Currently at 20 high-traffic bus stops) At each one of these bus stops there is one 72-inch touch LCD screen that allows the commuters to play games and compete other neighborhoods.

Players earn points for a local neighborhood that they choose from a pull-down menu, and at the end of the competition the winning “team” gets a block party with a performance by the band OK Go. The Derby runs through January 28, 2011.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Yahoo’s Ad agency. created the Bus Stop Derby campaign, which is built around four games that correspond to the features of the mobile apps for Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Sportacular and Flickr:

1. “Incoming!” is a race to sort color-coded mail as it slides down chutes
2. “Chatter Scatter” players text against time
3. “Sport-a-pult” is trivia-meets-target practice
4. “Snap Happy” is a 3-D puzzle

“Local’s going to be increasingly a big part of the content we push out, so it’s important for us to have both a digital and a physical presence in the local community,” explains Penny Baldwin, Yahoo!’s SVP Consumer Marketing and Brand Management. (Source)

What a great idea. This is the definition of an integrated marketing campaign. It is local and viral, people try the new mobile apps and it’s a way to fight for your neighborhood. Today Mission is number one! Let’s see who is going to win!

The games are not that much exciting but what else can you do when the bus is late.. Every bus stop is also a free Wi-Fi Spot. I’m really surprised by this innovative campaign by Yahoo! and Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

Read more about the “Bus Stop Derby“

For the last four years, Twitter makes no money. Today (Tuesday 13, 2010), Twitter announces its Business Model! Promoted tweets are coming in your Twitter feeds even if you use a Twitter client (third party application). Twitter can analyze your tweets, keywords, searches, followers and lists and serve you targeted ads! 

Promoted tweets also have the potential to scale revenue quickly for the company, backed by $160 million in funding from a coterie of elite VC firms including Union Square Ventures, Institutional Ventures Partners, Benchmark Capital and Spark Capital.

The promoted tweet is one of three streams of revenue Twitter will have available, including a data fee from search engines indexing Twitter in real time, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the coming “professional accounts.” Professional accounts will include the ability to have multiple users on one account — much like some of the clients such as CoTweet do today — plus a dashboard that shows what’s happening with a brand on Twitter and integration with promoted tweets.

(AdAge.com)

This is what @biz Stone wrote on Twitter’s Official Blog just an hour ago:

Q: What are you launching? What are Promoted Tweets?
A: We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Q. You said, “first phase”; what else do you have planned?
A. Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.

Q: Is this what you said we would love and would be awesome?
A: While we are excited about the platform in general, there are several specific aspects of the launch that we are delighted to highlight. Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single “ad” in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. 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.

Q. Anything else to say?
A. This is a new thing and we expect to iterate to make it better. We’re really excited to get it out to you and look forward to getting your feedback.

In two days, more than 2 millions people watched that ad. It’s the most viewed video in the web today and everybody talks about this. Most of us have seen it more than 3 times. Enjoy this great ad!

There is a quite big buzz these days about the first campaign of Yahoo! The It’s You campaign will be placed on every media channel (TV, print, web etc) and it will be the first time that Yahoo is advertised globally. The cost? $100 million for the next 18 months. Apparently the new CEO, Carol Bartz, tries hard to promote the brand and its new services.

According to Adage “The goal is to boost Yahoo’s user base and to increase the amount of time visitors spend with Yahoo properties, which were once dominant in the U.S. but now compete with social networks and applications such as Facebook and Twitter for attention.”

Elisa Steele, Yahoo Chief Marketing Officer, presented the creative for the new campaign. Personally I like the ” it’s Y!ou ” logo and theme. Take a look at the video and see the TV spot and print ads of Yahoo.

McDonald’s started a very successful outdoor ad at Piccadilly Circus in London. They display various images and videos on a billboard screen and people take pictures and videos. This is a great example of Integrated Marketing Communications plan. This is an outdoor ad, a viral campaign (internet) and a post for my blog (PR). Tourists take pictures and post them on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc. This gives a viral messages to thousands of internet users everyday without spending even $1 more. McDonald’s would use this space for advertising anyway. With this idea the story expands globally.

These are some of the pictures that people take on Piccadilly Circus.

McDonald’s created a video that shows the success of this campaign.

Pictures via , via and via

Volkswagen Innovations. This is a great idea from Volkswagen. Do you know what is TSI, Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Assist and Park Assist? Yeah.. Some of us might know about them but not everybody. So VW created a very interesting website with clear design that explains this new technology through funny games. Visit the website and take a look..

VW created several banners in order to support its online advertising. These are some of them:

Header Banner | Sidebar Banner I | Sidebar Banner II

You can also watch the video that describes the website.

And of course here comes the answer (from the Apple fans!)