Interactive Advertising

This past year something wonderful happened in my life: the San Francisco Giants won the World Series. The Giants are by far my favorite sports team and have given me headaches since I was very young when they kept finding new creative ways to lose. Their championship gave me a huge boost and sense of joy that I haven't experienced in my lifetime surrounding sports.

The one player that probably most benefited from the championship is Brian Wilson. His combination of a ferocious fastball and even more ferocious beard has made him excessively marketable. Major League Baseball used his growing persona and began a marketing campaign surrounding him and his beard. Fans are able to go to a web page where they can click on sections of his beard and watch a short video of what happens at that section. I spent 35 minutes one night clicking on the different sections and laughing my tail off at the imaginative happenings that take place within Brian's beard.

This style of interactive advertising has been utilized more and more lately as advertisers find new ways to grab consumers attention. Below are a few of my favorites that I have seen.

Tipp-EX

In this hilarious interactive you-tube video Tipp-EX allows the viewer to choose interactions between a bear and a hunter. Type in "eats" and "marries" for a good laugh.

Johnny Cash Project

This website won the Webby award for best use of online media. On the sight the user is able to get creative with some portraits and submit them to the sight. The portraits are used later in an online mu sic video for the song. The first video they made was pretty cool.

Sharon's Sale

Really cool ad. Cannes film festival asked people to submit videos to bring attention to a world cause. In this entry you can move your mouse over the items in the video to see the prices. One of the things for sale holds some shock value.

Welcome to Foodie Friday!

Happy Friday kids!

Welcome to the first installment of our new series, "Foodie Fridays." You should know that we take food very seriously here in the intern corral - after all our blog is called feed the interns, right?


Today for lunch we ventured down to our favorite lunch spot and San Diego gem, Mexican Fiesta... where the food is appetizing and ambiance is questionable. On a scale of 1 to Mexican deliciousness, the interns give it two thumbs up. If it had a legitimate Facebook page, we would "like" it.

Our dishes of choice:

Alessa and Robin - bean, cheese and rice burritos
Michael - chicken burrito (which "tastes like it was barbecued)
Ashley - California burrito

Next time you're in Little Italy, check it out! See you next Friday.

Things I am Liking...

It's been a while since I last blogged on Feed the Interns and boy, do we need to catch up! I'll be here all summer with a colorful cast of characters inhabiting the in the desks at Bailey Gardiner.

For my first entry of the summer season, I'd like to share some things that have caught my attention lately.

1. I'm liking (aka loving!) the intern corral at the Bailey Gardiner office. As I begin my extended internship at BG, I'm excited to announce that I have a lot of company in here! There are four full-time interns this summer... creative intern Alessa Sotelo, ad intern Michael Harris and PR interns Ashley Shafer and your's truly.

2. I'm liking the NYC PR Girls Blog. These three sassy ladies working in the big apple share fashion trends, industry events and hot spots in the city. A recent post, Summer Intern Survival Guide, is a great read for fellow interns. My favorite "Must Have" is a journal. It's a great way to catalog your thoughts after a hard day's work. Track things you're proud of as well as opportunities to grow.

3. I'm liking Facebook Insights and Google Analytics. A slightly nerdier thing to admire but I'm serious. I'm helping the BG team out with the Del Mar Racetrack account this summer and focusing a lot on social media. You can learn some pretty awesome stuff from both of these tools. All PR pros and new pros should utilize these facts and figures.

4. I'm liking this super neat-o consumer PR meets social media meets tech campaign. I found this little gem on Twitter a few days ago. TopShop, a trendy little store in New York (and a few other international cities) will feature the iPad, Instagram and Facebook to create an awesome in-store digital experience this summer. Customers wanting to participate will get a free styling session and their make up done. Then they can snap a pic on the new iPad 2 in their TopShop outfit and select an Instagram filter. Next, the customers turned models can print their photo and upload it to Facebook. Talk about integration!

5. I'm liking @SFMoMA's tweets - Who ever is responsible for this Museum's tweets deserves a high five! Their tweets are human, funny and engaging. Last week, they asked what modern artists inspired a tattoo you have, or who would inspire you to get one. They had so many responses that they put together a collage! How cool is that?


What are you liking lately? Let me know!

My Advertising Development

I have taken 10 psychology classes in my life. In every one I have had to sit through a lecture about Sigmund Freud. If you aren't familiar, Freud was an absolutely crazy cocaine addicted fiction writer/ evil genius who moonlighted as a psychologist. Despite saying almost nothing logical, psychologists still admire Freud as a stalwart in the field. He did contribute to the idea of developmental stages, which if nothing else is an average way of organizing life. Going along with this idea, I figure the best way to begin my blogging is to mix my psych knowledge with my past advertising experiences using stages.

"I Want It" Stage Ages 2-8

My first memory of advertising happened when I was five or six. I was at my buddy Donald's house during a commercial break of a Power Rangers episode. During every toy ad I listened to Donald declare over and over, "I want that." He wanted every Hot wheel and every action figure no matter how big, small or far from his interests. Donald was a year older than me, which naturally made him cooler, so I followed suit, excitedly declaring my need for each toy on the screen (minus the Barbies, those were for girls!) Each ad was the same. They all had two older boys doing the most elaborate thing they could do with a simple toy and a loud narrator acting way too excited about the product for a man his age. It didn't matter to me what they were selling, all I cared about was being as cool as the kids in the commercial and my friend.

Beer Stage Ages 10-13

No, I did not drink beer when I was 13, but I did love beer commercials. To this day I remember laughing my face off at the first Budweiser "wassup" ad. I obviously could care less about the product at the time, but the hilarity of the beer commercials that were and are still thrown at Americans left me feeling like I had just watched a mini sitcom. I could not buy my own things, so I evaluated ads not by the message but instead by how entertained I felt after each commercial.

Smart Teenager Stage Ages 14-18

In the 9th grade I had an assignment to find a fraudulent advertising claim. This was a dangerous task because giving a teenager a reason to be cynical about the world is like giving Sigmund Freud pen and paper (I won't stop until my professors do.) I became the kid who after every ad had something critical to say about the product. I thought this made me intelligent, but instead I was just annoying. In my evaluations I wasn't thinking about the advertisement as much as I was finding ways to criticize the product. To follow a teenage tradition, I will now use hormones as a scapegoat for my stupidity.

Intelligent Stage 18-Present

I realize how self-serving and conceited this title is, but I don't care. I am a smarter evaluator now. I have put aside my cynicism and have instead moved on to using the knowledge I have gained about people in order to think about why an ad is successful.

Going forward as a fresh new intern at BG, I plan on learning as much as I can from the experts that surround me so that I can both contribute to the best of my abilities as well as grow individually. If that doesn't work I'll just become a psychology professor and give sarcastic, half hearted Freud lectures while he laughs at me from the grave.