Seems I was not alone in disliking the BBC trailer with the disembodied heads. The BBC have dropped it after recieving complaints about it being ‘ “horrific” and “disturbingly psychotic” ‘

Innocent Drinks have a seasonal campaign to raise money for Age Concern and Extra Care, by selling drinks with little woollen hats in selected stores. And just in case they did not get all 80000 of the hats made in time, they’re asking their fans to knit some as well. The instructions start off with a perfect line: 1. Tune in to Radio 4.

The magazine associated with the gadget and gear website Boys Stuff was floating around the office today. Amongst all the gadgets such as remote control cars, robots, game accessories etc areideas for Christmas presents that sound great but only get bought at this time of year, such as:

• Naughty duvet cover, with tasteful (!) pictures of naked people
• Inflatable Moose Head, for hanging on walls when you really don’t want to go out and shoot stuff
• and finally, the Candy Lingerie set, for those special moments

  But the favourite one in the team at the moment would be the Takeaway website – everything you need to build your own in a box.

Over on Heavy.com, Burger King masks are being featured in community generated videos, starring in a number of different videos including Safety dancewhere a bemasked dancer goes around gesturing rudely at BK’s competitors and Webcam Stripper where a strip tease also features the mask (surprisingly, it is safe for work).

Both of these would feature in nightmares of certain lawyers I know. It’s not the taking of the content and mixing it up that is regarded as the key problem – it’s the taking the content, mixing it up and the company getting sued because of the new content that is often bought up as a barrier. Wonder how the BK lawyers react to these videos

Absolut’s Christmas site is fun (the first time only though). Singing bottles take you through seasonal recipes and invite you to send to a friend. Those songs though – drive me insane. Bet they were fun to work on ;o)

And that’s about the only thing I;ve seen over the last few days, having spent most of them laid up with a bad cold. I hate winter!

eMarketer published details about the Edelman/Technorati survey that was published around a month ago. Surprisingly, given how long it was in the genesis, there is little, if any additonal commentary with the report; the numbers have been recut slightly to fall into the publication guide. However, it does provide you a link at the bottom for their indepth report – so, looking for analysis, i follow, to find it takes me to a report that would cost me $695 to read – for 15 pages and 27 charts. Maybe some other time.

I attended a launch party last night for Public Relations Online, “a forum showcasing how brands can protect themselves and improve relationships with partners, customers and press by using new techniques such as web-monitoring, blogging, and search engine optimisation.” A lot of enthusiasm to embrace the different ways of working, with a frank acknowledgement (with a hint of worry) of the challenges of doing PR in a connected environment. However, I think there’s still some steps to take – putting up the formal press release as a blog post with no further comment is not necessarily the right first step! But, willingness to learn was evident so I’ll watch this with interest.

The event was held at the Adam Street Club. Looks like a fun place, as indicated by the signs on the back of the loo doors.

“Please do not throw…tights, knickers, shoes, i-pods, suited gentlemen, thick & ugly people (well maybe them!), or circus performers down the loo. If you do so, it will cause a terrible mess, which will be your fault entirely, and very embarassing all round. Frankly , you may never quite recover form it.”

The Budget Treasure Hunt enters it second week, with three winners announced. For a blog supporting a campaign it appears to be appears to be rather light on posts on the main page, even with the weekend getting in the way, but the Hunters’ Stories page, which is competitor driven, is busier .

Evelyn Rodriguez has a post about why, as a customer, she won’t be influenced by the campaign. I have an opposite reaction – I very rarely use hire cars, so something like this brings Budget first to mind if I’m searching. But it won’t be first choice if the costs aren’t comparable.

Kathy Sierra has suggested an number of alternate uses for marketing spend beyond the usual. As market becomes fragmented, as people look beyond the one way ads, there’s more opportunities to try different things. From utilising the web with its alternative communications strategies to sponsorship and other community activities the ways that agencies/brands can spread their word grows (or should that be the need to do things differently grows as people get bored with traditional methods!)

Adrants points to the fact that posters of 50Cents which were part of the Bubble Project seems to have scared people off. The project puts little speech bubbles on posters to encourage people to add their own commentary. Mexx (a clothing store) appear to have been trying to do the same thing with their recent posters in Bond Street Tube station, with speech bubbles on the posters already. Maybe the the agency expected people to add their own stuff, in a cool, ‘consumer generated content’ way, but in the week they have been there, none of them appear to have been added to. Maybe I should take a pen with me tomorrow

Hill and Knowlton have provided the link to put the queries into your own posts. Just like this.

They’ve already added Blogpulse to it and there may be further updates.

Via Steve Rubel, a nice – if obvious in hindsight – method of tracking conversation about your brands in amongst the category. Comparing category vs brand conversations using a tracking tool such as IceRocket allows you to see the percentage of the conversation. And Hills and Knowlton have provided an interface so that you don’t to work out any inclusive or exclusive search terms.

The example shown looks at comparing two brands against category.

I met up lat night with some friends who have set up Jing Tea, a tea import business. There’s an obvious passion for the tea, which, in some ways, is similar to the the wine or malt whisky business. There’s a whole range of flavours and tastes to explore. So we’ve got some plans to help this exploration process.

Katherine Stone discusses a new campaign to promote the Mercury car in the US. Arriving unannounced at a coffee store, the promotional people bought everyone a coffee and let them take a look at, and talk about, the new car model. No big fanfare, no promotional speech, just buy a coffee and and let the product be talked about. For me, this type if experiential marketing, bringing the product to the customer sits some where inthe middle of the push-pull model. Not overtly interupting my activity, but present, giving a choice to interact instead of being seen as a pair of eyeballs/ears what does nothing but wait to be fed. Choice of participation or choice to ignore and just drink the coffee.

Update: I see they fixed it.

To tie in with poster ads, Wonderbra have a site promoting thier new range, experiencewonderyou.co.uk. A nice site, but with the flash navigation it prevents you linking wiithin the site so I could not send someone a direct link about one of the products. I like the rolloever effect on the individual product pages – dressed or underdressed!

The site is pretty slick – so it is quite funny to see the error that slipped past what I know would have been lots of testing. Been there, missed similar things (and worse!)- how ever often you read and stare at copy, there’s often something that slips through to the live site (and I have no excuse given the atrocious proof-reading that takes place on this blog. So here, Wonderbra have a new product – the pluging bra. I wonder what that does?