Jameson Whiskey Texts Targets On N.Y. Streets

A very innovative way to use OOH in real-time to engage the user. Other than the cost of the mobile projector and the people manning it, this is seems like a low cost solution. While the CD talks about this being the first of its kind in Advertising, it really was done much earlier and better by these people. Anyway, here is the article and visual.


Insert live text messages directed at passersby into projected outdoor billboards and you've got an innovative new campaign created by Omnicom's TBWA/Chiat/Day New York on behalf of Pernod Ricard's Jameson Irish Whiskey.

The traveling ad show was set to launch in New York City Friday night, at high foot-traffic locations in Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn's Williamsburg--and a fourth site still undetermined as of late Friday afternoon when Marketing Daily spoke with TBWA/Chiat/Day Creative Director James Cheung.

The projected ad moves from place to place in search of Jameson's target audience, Cheung explained. For instance, if the Knicks had been playing basketball at Madison Square Garden, that neighborhood could have been a target.

Once in place, the ad is projected onto a wall and a person begins typing real-time text messages aimed at specific people passing and then responding to their reactions (such as "Yes, you, in the blue shirt"). The projections are provided by event marketing agency City Eventions with--at least for launch night--the texting handled by Cheung himself.

As he awaited his debut on the streets, Cheung called the live ads a combination of "chatroom, out-of-home and conversation piece," adding that he was unaware of "anyone else who has done this before."

The conversational wall projections will move on to Los Angeles on Dec. 19, while projected ads without the live messages also begin this month in Boston, Chicago, Denver and Minneapolis. Jameson has also launched a new radio ad in 20 markets, and a trade campaign highlighting that the brand is "Defying the Economic Downturn." Jameson cited AC Nielsen figures showing dollar sales up 33% in the six-month period ending mid-October.

Right in our(one's) backyard

An Art Director in my group has just shown the big boys how its done.  Sean Fournier has a new album out, called, "Oh My."  Sure he has a Facebook page and, yeah, he has a mySpace page.  Oh and the album is free.  Sean took the distribution to the next level and pumped it out through a Peer-to-Peer network.  Much like Limewire and the such, Frostwire is on the radar of many.  In fact, over the weekend, Frostwire handled 25, 000 downloads of his album.  Incredible and a strong use of the internets.  See the pr release here.

Mr. Wolff is trippin'

I am pulling this quote from CNET because it illustrates why most of media elders don't get it. I believe the term, "can't see the forest through the trees," applies here. Within 5 to 10 years these "cretins" are the audience, the user. In fact, they're here right now. We just haven't given them a proper forum. They have strong opinions and equally strong brand preferences. They may not be buying big ticket items but they are buying an ass-load of shoes. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, "The consumer isn't a moron; she's your daughter."

Michael Wolff, whose new, lascivious Rupert Murdoch bio The Man Who Owns The News has taken the New York media industry by storm, stirred up some social-networking class warfare in an interview Monday with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine.

"If you're on MySpace now, you're a (expletive) cretin. And you're not only a (expletive) cretin, but you're poor," said Wolff, whose previous book Burn Rate chronicled dot-com excess in the late '90s and who openly attests to hating the word "blog."

"Nobody who has beyond an eighth grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people," added Wolff, who is also the founder of Newser.