If you were a video game geek in the early 1990's, this is probably up your alley. A quartet of street artists named Mr. Talion, Epoxy, Baveaux, and Kone have added the heads-up display from the first-person shooter computer game DOOM to a number of billboards throughout Berlin. You can see more here.

via DOOM Display Billboards « Urban Prankster.

This New York Times story on "free advertising" has my irritation levels set on maximum. That's because it's centered around one of the most persistent - and wrong - myths about social media and word of mouth marketing: That it's free.

It's this particular paragraph that I'm going to take issue with:

What does free advertising look like? It can take many forms: Getting a journalist or blogger to review a new mobile phone, placing a video on YouTube, spreading the word via bloggers, and starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product.

All of those cost money.

Getting a journalist or blogger to review a product is not just something you come into work and throw together before you begin your real work. It's (or at least it should be) part of a larger campaign strategy for which goals and benchmarks have been clearly defined. Having worked on more than one product review campaign involving bloggers I can tell you to do them right they're both time and resource intensive.

Placing a video on YouTube is free, yes, but if the brand wants a slick branded channel that's going to cost some dollars in terms of design work. It's also not exactly as simple as upload and let it go. Someone needs to be in charge of managing the tags and keywords on the video and tracking its spread. With the millions of YouTube videos it also helps to do a little outreach to interested bloggers and writers with the link to the video to help spread the word and that costs money.

Which gets me to the "spread the word via bloggers." Not free. It's media relations, which companies have always paid for from their agencies and always will. If you pay an agency $500 for media outreach and that results in 20 mentions *from the people they contact* that comes to $25 per mention, but that billed time also should include vetting a media list and doing their research on the bloggers they're going to be contacting. If, as a result of those 20 initial hits, 10 other bloggers pick up the story the client's costs drop to about $17 per mention. But that's not free.

Finally, starting a Facebook group for the brand or product is, once again, not free. You can't just expect the page will automatically start attracting hundreds of fans that are just waiting for the brand to show up. Agencies need to research if there are existing fan-created pages and talk to them, they need to do outreach around the page and might even recommend doing some advertising to promote the page and drive membership. Plus, since this should be part of that larger online strategy, it's not great thinking to break this out from the overall cost of that campaign.

One of the great things about social media is that the tools that make up that category are indeed free or at least relatively low cost. But while the tools aren't going to cost very much out of pocket the implementation of those tools and the strategy around their usage does and always will. If you're doing it yourself and not using an agency or consultant it's still going to cost something, even if that's just your time and resources.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Public relations supports advertising Highly rec
2. Power Tools wiki for artists to build their online personas Scott Kirs
3. There's a difference After mull

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

"No need to go to war zones to bring back pictures! During the latest conflicts in Iraq, Ossetia and the Gaza Strip, images were censored and distributed at the discretion of the military, while some war zones were even completely prohibited to reporters. See more than what the military wants you to see. Support Reporters Without Borders."

Advertising Agency: Saatchi&Saatchi, Paris, France
Creative Director: Christophe Coffre
Art Director: Vincent Berard
Copywriters: Eric Auvinet, Vincent Berard, Amy Hollier
Illustrator: Paul Chan
Released: 2009

derStandard.at überrascht heute auf der Startseite mit einem großartigen Product Placement seiner selbst!

Lowe Bull in South Africa has fashioned a pair of new "Stop the abuse" ads for the Animal Anti-Cruelty League. This one imagines a dog as a soccer ball; another casts a very furry friend as a mop. (See larger images here and here at Ads of the World.) My view is: animals would mop the floor with humans and kick our asses with their unclipped hind claws if they only could. Dogs are the focus of this campaign, which is wise. Dogs, generally speaking, would have the decency to wait until they were hungry to consume us. Cats would kill us for sport.

--Posted by David Gianatasio

Advertising Agency: Y&R, Singapore
Chief Creative Officer: Rowan Chanen
Art Director: Scott McClelland
Copywriter: Scott McClelland
Photographer: Chris von Menge

Nach dem erzwungen Exitus der Wildplakate bzw. deren erzwungenen Exodus auf die schicken Halbschalen (zum dreifachen Preis), werden neuerdings von der Gewista-Tocher "Kulturplakat" auch die Plakatflächen auf den Stromkästen verwaltet (Hätte deren Beklebung durch Plakate nicht von den Halbschalen ursprünglich verhindert werden sollen?!).

Montags präsentierte der Verein "Freie Plakat" und die IG Kultur Wien eine Forderung nach leistbaren wie kostenlosen Plakatflächen, auf denen die Ankündigungsplakate weder von konkurrierenden Wildplakatierern noch von "Plakatieren Verboten"-Hinweisen der Gewista-Kulturplakatfirma überklebt werden dürfen. Sprich: endlich mal hängen bleiben dürfen....

• Presseaussendung
• Pressemappe "Plakatwüste Wien" (.pdf/104kb)
  

Can you surf the Web and chew gum at the same time? Perhaps, but you'll be wasting your time. That's according to Dentyne, which has a bunch posters up in the NYC subway (and probably elsewhere) encouraging young people to get off their stupid computers for five minutes and "Make face time." Dentyne can help in this regard by giving you decent-smelling breath--something that's all but unnecessary on social networks but handy in actual social encounters. The ads, which seem to have originated in Canada, may run the risk of making Dentyne sound parental. But it's nice to see a youth-targeted campaign that has nothing but contempt for Facebook.

--Posted by Tim Nudd

Advertising Agency: DDB, Sydney, Australia
Executive Creative Director: Matt Eastwood
Copywriter: Alex Stainton
Art Director: Jakub Szymanski
Photographer: Christian Mushenko
Typographers: Jason Young, Erwin Santoso
Account Supervisor: Penny Sarfati
Advertiser's Supervisor: Helen Farquhar
Retoucher: Dennis Monk