A project award this time, but equally exciting, we’re going to be handling the UK online marketing campaign for Shrek The Third for Paramount Family. This will be the third Shrek DVD release we’ve worked on (appropriately). Activity is going to include online advertising, online pr and some innovative big online promotions. Watch this swamp for details and repare yourself for an onslaught of Shrek-related puns over the coming months…

We love Universal Playback. For their DVD release of Xena: Warrior Princess Seasons 1 and 2 they organised a mud wrestling event with two very sexy ladies. So obviously we went down to watch it. We also helped out with the online PR side of things, including running a competition to win a Xena Survival Kit, which includes a paddle whip…

Wayhay! New client just in…. Tartan Video. We’ve been working with them in recent weeks on the online publicity campaign for the DVD release of Paul Verhoeven’s (Total Recall, Basic Instinct) Black Book. I’ll be ‘reviewing’ a check disk of that over the bank holiday weekend then!

For those of you planning your summer holiday right now, you might want to consider the fascinating results of our lastminute romance survey, which we built for the launch of The Holiday on DVD. Thousands of people took part in the survey, and i can reveal that the most romantic destination in the world is…….. Italy.

No surprise there, it’s where I took my wife on our honeymoon! And no, I didn’t fix the results.

We’re working with the offline PR agency to sell the survey results into the press next week.

…Paramount Home Entertainment has commissioned us to work on the DVD release of Barnyard. This is our first project for a new client, which is very exciting. The campaign will consist of an online publicity campaign backed up with a media buy and some clever mobile activity. Watch this space for details on this, and hopefully future campaigns!

In this innovative promotion we’ve teamed up client EA’s “Need For Speed Carbon” game and FHM to create a competition to search the UK for a new ‘Need For Speed Carbon Girl’.

The lucky winner will be for ever immortalised in a future fab-filled installment of the game & may even be catapulted to Lara Croft status (well among gamers anyway!).

Entrants simply sign up on the FHM web site (you’d be AMAZED how many wannabe models are promoting themselves through the FHM web site) and the top entrants then go head to head in a public vote to decide the winner.

Just one week into the promotion and already we’ve had over 250 entries into the competition and a huge amount of exposure for the NFS Carbon brand on the FHM web site.

Cakewalk is “the world’s leading developer of powerful and easy to use products for music creation and recording” and as such was interested in innovative ways of promoting it’s products within the emerging music sector.

On their behalf we are tapping into the community through MySpace, by creating a MySpace page which promoted a competition to win some really cool prizes, and subsequently promoting the competition by seeking out and adding unsigned bands and artists as ‘friends’ to the MySpace page. There’s weekly winners, and at the end of the 10 week promotion, one lucky, lucky band will walk away with A?1k worth of Homes Studio equipment from Edirol and Cakewalk. Nice.

CQout have appointed appoint New Media Maze for an online PR campaign.

“CQ who?” I hear you shout… CQout is who!

CQout is a new client that we’re very excited to start working with. They’re like EBay but better, as they don’t charge you to list your items and we reckon that the world needs to know a bit more about them (think David and Goliath!). They’ve built their site and customer base quietly since launch through word of mouth, and we’re going to accelerate that with some online PR expertise. This time next year Rodders, this time next year…

I don’t need much of an excuse to burst into an old Freddy Mercury classic, and when client Network DVD asked us to help them promote 60’s series classic ‘The Champions’ my heart sang for joy. Hot off the back of the work we undertook for Network to promote ‘The Last Seduction’, this is the latest in a series of briefs from this client and features secret agents with supernatural powers (they knew how to write a script back in the sixties you see).

As well as giving lucky web editors the chance to interview the still-gorgeous Alexandra Bastedo, we’re going to be running a major promotion with the Mirror giving visitors the chance to win a hair cut in a Lee Stafford salon where i assume you can avail yourself of a beehive haircut.

This is the first expansion pack from The Movies game released last November by client Activision. It is a simulation style game where you can run your own movie set and make movies and it’s wicked. We pitched the idea to Activision that it would be fun to run a competition amongst The Movies community fans, encouraging them to make a movie showing off their special effects and stunt skills and submit it for judging on a specially developed competition micro-site.
Each week a winner is selected by an esteemed judging panel (us) and we’ve blagged a heap of AMAZING prizes to give to the winners, as well as to feature in a series of major promotions we’re running on 3rd party sites to promote the release.

These include:

London Film Academy are donating a 6-Week Film Course which has been placed on the Guardian Film site

Intotheblue.co.uk have given us a ‘Be A Stunt Hero’ experience which features as a prize on the contest site

Straight Curve are giving a lucky winner a Movie Making Experience (as Production Assistant)

Thanks Darling are contributing a Stunt Driving Experience which we’ve placed on Channel 4 Film and Cars sections

Last week saw the launch of our latest viral marketing campaign for client Fox Home Entertainment, which is to promote the forthcoming DVD release of The Hills Have Eyes, remake of the gory horror classic. I’ve not watched the movie personally (as i’m a big girls blouse at heart), but watching the trailer was scary enough. All of which got us thinking, it would be good to create an ‘interactive’ trailer which lets you switch off the really scary bits.

In addition to creating and seeding the viral, we’ve supported the release with a broad online PR campaign which includes a great competition on web site Channel 4 to win a paintballing competition for you and your mates, donated by the kind people over at Skirmish Paintball Games.

As part of the online PR service we offer to clients, we organise thousands of competitions and 3rd party promotions every year. Consumers love feeling they get the chance to win stuff and it’s a great way to get them interacting with your brand (and giving you their data). The popularity of a competition is dependant on many factors, including where we place it, what the brand behind it is, what the prize is, how long the competition runs for and how it’s promoted.

The true value in competitions isn’t the number of people who enter, but the number who are exposed to your brand by your presence on the 3rd party site, still it’s always nice to get some feedback when a competition is particularly successful. This week we had a record breaker for a competition we ran on Channel 4 for client Activision for the release of X Men The Official Game. With a prize of an X Box 360 and 5 runner up prizes of a copy of the game, we had over 13,000 people enter the competition!

It struck us whilst monitoring the buzz for the theatrical release of a X Men The Last Stand that we truly live in an age where practically any form of information is viral.

From the outset, image stills from the movie released online spread like wildfire across the internet, being shared in websites, newsgroups, forums and blogs. Consumers in the US watched, digitised and uploaded to
Youtube chat show interviews with the cast of the movie, immediately making the content accessible across the globe (apart from China, me thinks, where yesterday The Da Vinci Codea was banned by the government). The release of the
official trailer spawned a host of amashed up trailers, with consumers editing the trailer and adding their own individual twist before re-publishing it online. And across the internet, consumers discussed, dissected and digested in
minute detail the plot, the director, the trailer, the artwork, the cast, the release date, the opening weekend and more. At a peak we picked up over 30,000 new articles per day mentioning the film!

Suddenly everyon is a journalist, and increasingly an unpaid publicist too, writing about your content and sharing it with others. Brands can no longer hope to control the use and spread of their information, and should EXPECT their information to be twisted, parodied and mutated. The smart companies will harness the power and energy of this viral spread, identify the groups behind it and actively encourage it.