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“

There are few services that I love to use. One of these is Mailchimp. It’s a great Email Marketing platform that you easily use and have fun! It’s the company that when you send an Email campaign, it tells you: “Great Job Nikos, have a banana!” These are some of Freddie’s (the chimp) messages that I see every day on my screen.

Anyway, the reason of this post is a video that they posted today on their blog. They talk about the story of “Rudy”, an Email Marketing guy who spams people in order to satisfy his boss. For you that are working in the email marketing (or you want to know more about that) take a look:

Mailchimp has also a Blip.fm account where you can subscribe and listen to their music selections. Good job guys!

1. Tell a consistent story
2. Engage your fans in a conversation
3. Connect the content
4. Fish where the fish are
5. Reinvent business

You can also view the video version here.

It’s one of these times that you find a website that you like. You add it in your bookmarks, you watch all its videos, you buy the book and you even buy one of its notebooks. The 99 Percent is not about ideas.. It’s about making ideas happen. It started in 2009 as a conference and now is a website with videos, articles and tips on how to make your ideas happen.

The creation of 99%, which was launched with our inaugural conference in 2009, sprung from the belief that, as creative professionals, we often focus too much on idea generation and not enough on execution.

There are several inspiring videos on 99%. Seth Godin talks about quieting our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. Jack Dorsey talks about Twitter’s success and Threadless founders say: The Do-First Work Ethic. Take a look on the 99% latest videos.

Stop thinking and start making this brilliant idea come true!

Sustainable Brands 2010 – Where the Sustainability & Brand & Design Communities Come Together to Shape the Future.

Join 700+ sustainability executives, business and brand strategists, designers, and communications experts who are building brand value through sustainability. Join market-making companies such as Hewlett Packard, Bumble Bee Tuna, IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, Nokia, Coca-Cola, Clorox, Nestle, 3M, Life Technologies, Williams Sonoma, SAP and many others at SB’10.

SB’10 is excited to announce key presenters from among the 100+ top thinkers and practitioners in sustainable brand and business innovation who will be on deck this year to share with you the latest in sustainable brands leadership.

This is a great video that presents the SB Conference! Take a look..

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Sustainability Executives
find new ideas, partners and tools
learn more >>

Brand Strategists
build authentic, transparent brands
learn more >>

Designers & Innovators
better product and service design
learn more >>

Marketers & Communications Pros
tools and language to talk about sustainable innovation
learn more >>

Follow SLM on Twitter and visit it’s Facebook page

This is the brand new SB’10 Brochure

See you there!

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!

These are the most expensive brands of the year for 2009. No big surprises.. I guess that companies from internet and technology industry will climb up on the ranking and get better and better positions. The first five companies are at the top of the list for many years! Who doesn’t drink Coca-Cola? McDonald’s and Google go higher and higher every year while Toyota and Intel become less popular with a weaker brand name. United States is the leading country in the entire list. What a surprise!

These are the first 10 best brands of 2009:

2009 Rank	2008 Rank	Brand	Country of Origin	Sector	2009 Brand Value ($m)	Change in Brand Value
1	1		United States	Beverages	68,734	3%
2	2		United States	Computer Services	60,211	2%
3	3		United States	Computer Software	56,647	-4%
4	4		United States	Diversified	47,777	-10%
5	5		Finland	Consumer Electronics	34,864	-3%
6	8		United States	Restaurants	32,275	4%
7	10		United States	Internet Services	31,980	25%
8	6		Japan	Automotive	31,330	-8%
9	7		United States	Computer Hardware	30,636	-2%
10	9		United States	Media	28,447	-3%

Click here to view the entire list.

(via InterBrand)

It was about time to see a Social Media campaign coming from the number one refreshment drink in the world. Coca-Cola Company, one of the top global advertisers (mostly in Print and Broadcast media), is going to use Social Media to promote the happiness message around the world. Three guys from Germany, Belgium and Mexico are going to travel around the world visiting 206 countries, where Coca-Cola is sold. They will have cameras, laptops and other gadgets in order to post in Social Media websites the happiness of people around the world. Expedition 206 will last one year and the team will start on January from Madrid, Spain.

Coca-Cola will track the campaign through Facebook fans and friends, Twitter followers and website pageviews. Clyde Tuggle, senior VP-global public affairs and communications says: “The challenge that we put to the communications team was to think about the social and digital media space as a new venue for driving good public relations for the company. The team, which has typically worked in the space of print media and broadcast media was suddenly challenged to go into this new media space and come up with an idea to expand our brand.” (AdAge)

Follow @x206 on twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page.

The idea of traveling around the world is not unique. Let’s see how this campaign will go..

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online sustainability training program intended to get business professionals up to speed on what they’ll need to be competitive and sustainable. Brought to you by the producers of the Sustainable Brands Conference.

Participants will learn from some of the world’s top sustainable business practitioners. Each of our faculty members is a leading sustainable business expert in his/her specialty, counseling many of the world’s top global brands about how to step up to today’s market demands and successfully build business value and brand equity by innovating for sustainability.

The course follows Sustainable Life Media‘s 4-step prescription for building the better brands of the future: “Observe, Re-Design, Measure and Communicate.” In just an hour-and-a-half a week, over one business quarter, you and your teams can gain a solid grounding in the core disciplines needed to move successfully in to the new age of sustainable business. Topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to give yourself a full orientation to the basics of building a sustainable brand, now’s the time. Sessions are available live and on-demand.