Picking up the Spare: WALL-E, Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder

WALL-E

WALL-E has been co-opted by Greenpeace for use in a new campaign that’s meant to highlight the tremendous waste of natural resources that goes on in the production of tissues and other similar products. It’s not an actual tie-in, but the character that’s part of the campaign is unmistakeably inspired by Pixar’s environmentally conscious robot.

The Dark Knight

The Hollywood Reporter revisits the day Heath Ledger died and how it impacted Warner Bros. marketing plans for th emovie.

Tropic Thunder

You can now download the entire half-hour Rain of Madness documentary from iTunes. It’s actually quite funny and manages to raise a desire to see the movie, which I’ve not yet done. There are some spoilers for the movie in there, though, so if you also haven’t seen it consider yourself warned.

Pineapple Express

Silicon Alley Insider becomes the latest site to pick up on the fact that YouTube launched a whopping new ad format for Tropic Thunder, something I mentioned quite a while ago. TechCrunch and BusinessWeek also mention it, as well as NewTeeVee and PaidContent.

Rob Walker also covers Booty Sweat and the rise in the creation of fictional products for movies.

Facebook wants to promote impressions with new ads

Facebook doesn’t like the fact that their ads aren’t performing along the same lines as the rest of the Internet’s so they want to emphasize the metrics by which they are performing well.

Advertisers are, though, loving the new MySpace offerings.

Google: No, we’re really serious about selling TV ads

Google asked AdWeek to remind the audience that they’re still looking to sell TV ads. They obliged.

Seriously, though, if Google can bring some form of measureability to TV advertising then it will be a very good thing. But in order to get to a position of any strength and begin to influence the industry at all they’re going to need more partners and more inventory. Otherwise this is a noble experiment that will amout to very little.

With a little help from my (LinkedIn) friends

Professional social networking site LinkedIn is finding success that’s unfortunately coming at the expense of people’s jobs. The site is turning into a communications hub for Hollywood and other entertainment industry professionals who find themselves out of work as a result of cutbacks at studios. The site is sending representatives to industry events to do some education on what LinkedIn has to offer and how they can use it.

Online viewing beginning to trump TV

New research shows that younger people are beginning to prefer go online as opposed to on watching TV. They’re doing research and comparing products, but not apparently when it comes to apparel, a category that they still prefer to try on in person.

I for one am shocked

Who knew there was marketing happening on the Internet. I just didn’t think such a thing was possible.

Think that’s a good idea for a story? How much you willing to pay?

The NYT takes a look at spot.us, a site that asks the community to suggest stories that will then be tasked to investigative journalists. The catch is that those who suggest it are also asked to pony up the cash for the investigation or it just doesn’t happen.

Great idea, but I worry that all that’s going to get reported are stories that people *want* to hear about and not those that they *need* to hear about. That’s still the purview of a professional news organization.

NO CREDENTIALS FOR YOU!!!

No, sorry political bloggers. I don’t care how much pull you think you have, you still need to go through the credentialling process just like everyone else. That’s just the way it is no matter how much you might feel the need to whine to The New York Time which, you should know, is just running this story as a back-handed compliment to your influence.

Brand awareness needle moved by mobile ads

According to Dynamic Logic, mobile display ads are impacting positively brand awareness for those companies doing the advertising. Awareness went up almost 24 percent among those exposed to an ad among the 20,000 participants in the study. Other metrics like favorability and such recorded smaller moves.

But some of that may just be the glow effect of being early to market with mobile advertising. Dynamic Logic warned that as the clutter increases, audience perception of the brands and the ads is likely to go down.

Of course by then – and the story doesn’t go this far but it’s logical – the big players in the telecom and portal spaces will be raking in the dough and the goalposts will have changed (betcha impressions winds up trumping actions) so no one will really care that consumers are increasingly honked off.

Ads within videos found to be tolerable

A new report released by Ipsos shows that there’s an increased acceptance by online video viewers of ads within those videos. The study found that watching the ads is an acceptable trade-off for viewing the videos for free, since that’s largely the model in television and elsewhere already.

According to Ipsos, 82 percent of respondents find it reasonable that there are ads within professionally-produced content like TV shows being streamed online. But that drops to just 48 percent when it comes to amateur material that’s been uploaded online.