WHOPPER SACRIFICE HAS BEEN SACRIFICED

I know this happened a while back, but just now I checked the link and it made me smile. First of all, I think that Burger King "Sacrifice your Facebook friends for a Whopper" was a truly original and funny campaign, scarce commodity nowadays. Give up ten of your so-called Facebook friends and earn a free burger. Tell me this is not making you at least crack a smile. The loose connections so widely spread all over Facebook are called friends, if Facebook would use a word like contacts for example, then a sacrifice your contacts would not be funny at all.

Unfortunately Facebook forced Burger King to terminate the whole thing over some privacy issues and that's too bad, cause c'mon it is funny. Still, I think it's gonna be a while till we see something as simple, free and absolutely hilarious. Good for you Burger King and also you must admire the perfect ending. Here it is http://www.whoppersacrifice.com/



As an afterword I want to add that who knows which side of this app was more receptive to the marketing message. The one who was willing to give up friends for a value of a sandwich or the one who got the message that this burger called Whopper is more valuable than his or hers friendship. LOL. Perfect execution.

Kluster or clusterf**k

For everyone who doesn't know that I love all things crowdsourced - here it is " I love all things crowdsourced". Lately I've been playing around with kluster and it's younger sister namethis. I'm not sure why I picked sister over brother. Anyway namethis is simple by nature naming process for new businesses, but it stays true to the whole wisdom of crowds thing. Plus guess what, it's plenty fun.

The way it works is that you sign up and you're ready to start giving baby names to baby businesses. You just read a short description of a start-up and try to give it a truly original and useful name. There's also a reward involved, but the amounts are usually marginal and I really don't think anybody would get into this for money. Then again times are hard.

My only problem with namethis is that I have not been able to come up with a good enough name for something. All of my suggestions keep getting un-original ratings, can't even crack the average rating. Then again I have a feeling that it's all on me.

Now kluster is much more complicated and sophisticated. I'm really rooting for them, since their platform is built for accomplishing serious things. Now they just need members and what I remember from James Surowiecki's book is that you need a lot of them. Variety is just as important.

Let's say you build a community of 100 000 members. Great. Unfortunately 95% of them are guys who think that if you haven't built a Twitter+Second Life+Virtual Earth mashup, you haven't lived. That's where the great idea of kluster can turn into a total clusterfuck. Still I'm rooting for you guys. I'm also starting a DIYcity Group for city of Tallinn.


Same time I'm taking it slow. Baby steps...baby steps. Well hey, I'm still trying to reach the un-reachable goal. An average rating.

Ray Ban Gets It - kinda

We all remember the guy catching sunglasses with his face, it was good and fun. So to stay with a viral feel Ray Ban is continuing with Cutwater and brought us these. I do absolutely love the "Disco Ballers" or "One Man Disco" or what ever you would call it. It's the second one. I do not like the length of it and also that it's still following all the guide lines of old-fashion TV ads.

Is this the future? Virals merging with TV 30 sec. spots and becoming professionally produced virals that last 3 minutes? That's not good, I don't have the patience to watch 3 minutes of still obvious advertising. I think the impact could be made somewhere around 15 seconds.

I do admire Ray Ban for its self-discipline though, their slogan "Never Hide" is visible at the end of the clips only if you look for it. It would've been so easy to go down the slippery slope and plaster their logo all over the content. Maybe that's it, nowadays it's content as long as it's missing the logo and content becomes advertising as soon as the logo makes an appearance.

COOL - UNCOOL

An uncool company like Microsoft brings you an uncool product like Songsmith, but then somehow some people still found a way to use all this "uncoolness" and make something cool. Pop culture at its very best. Here are couple of my favorites.





Just for comparison here's what Microsoft came up with to promote Songsmith, gotta warn you - it is physically painful. Watch at your own risk.