Editoras Online recently launched a guerilla ad campaign to promote their online store by posting over 4,000 QR code stickers all over São Paulo. The codes each led to sentences of either love or hate, generated by their Twitter feed. Editoras then produced a “living” book made up entirely of these QR codes that refreshes on a weekly basis. The book is sold exclusively on Editoras Online.
Publisher’s Weekly just released a long piece about Fourth Story Media, The Amanda Project, and multimedia children’s publishing.
From the piece:
Perched in a cozy top floor of a classic dot-com-like space—Fourth Story is in a former sail-making factory on a short cobblestoned street at New York City’s South Street Seaport—Holton exuded excitement. Having recently left corporate America—she stepped down as president of Scholastic Trade in 2007—she’s now focused on her current job, a deep multimedia YA series called The Amanda Project that HarperCollins is launching this fall. After last year’s launch of The 39 Clues, Scholastic’s elaborate book-series-wrapped-in-a-contest-connected-to-a-Web-site-with-play-along-trading-cards, the Amanda Project is primed to be one of the most ambitious multimedia children’s series to date.
Skittles (as in Taste the Rainbow Skittles) has relaunched its website entirely as redirects to various social media sites. All of the links come up in the Skittles.com window, with a small Skittles branded nav box that allows you to flip around (see image).
A rundown of the linktastic possibilities that now comprise the site:
Homepage (”Interweb the Rainbow”): Twitter search for the term “skittles”
Products (”Package the Rainbow”): Wikipedia entry on Skittles
Videos (”Watch the Rainbow”): YouTube Skittles channel
Pictures (”Watch the Rainbow”): Flickr pics tagged “skittles”
Chatter (”Chat the Rainbow”): Twitter search for the term “skittles”
And, in true social media fashion, the tone is pretty snarky. For example, once you’ve lingered long enough, a little “get healthy” tab pops up telling you to do things like take a walk around – your legs will thank you for it – and, you don’t have to eat the Skittles, just use them for a maraca exercise class instead.
Skeleton Creek is Real (from The Land of Elyon’s Patrick Carman) is a ghost story told through both journal entries (published by Scholastic) and short videos hosted at www.skeletoncreekisreal.com. The first book came out February 10th, with a sequel to follow this September.
Women’s publisher and advertising network Glam is seeking to make money by editing streams from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook’s status updates.
During the Oscars (it’s second run with the idea – first tested over Fashion Week), Glam’s entertainment editors edited down the standard #Oscars Twitter feed into a widget on their homepage. The result was Glam approved commentary that advertisers felt comfortable with, leading Aveeno to sign on as a sponsor of the branded widget.
The micro-blogging widgets are significant because they’re one of the first ways a company has tried to monetize microblogging through editing. Glam is calling its edited news wire “gWire.” Until now, microblogging has largely been either one-to-one or open to all. Glam lets both its own publishers and other third-party publishers embed the widgets on their websites…
Publishers in Glam’s network using the widget get a share of the revenue generated by the advertising. Within “a few weeks,” even publishers outside the network will be able to receive payments, via micro-payments from PayPal.
It will be really interesting to see if more magazines and news outlets go this monetized curating route in upcoming months. Venture Beat has Glam’s chief executive Samir Arora as saying that the feature is best used when anchored to an offline event such as the Oscars since there’s not only a steady stream of commentary, but a sponsor can buy branding on everything from the widget box to the physical event itself to display ads on Glam’s sites, as well as ads on video modules.
Publisher’s Weekly has a long article about everything from e-books to iPhone’s Stanza app to The Amanda Project in this week’s issue:
“We should worry less about the delivery system and more about inculcating sustained reading in kids,” says Michele Rubin, an agent at Writers House. “Books are something they should see as enjoyable.” No one is arguing. In fact, one scenario that publishers are exploring to raise the fun quotient is mixed media à la Scholastic’s The 39 Clues (the series combines traditional books with online gaming and card collecting).
Patrick Carman’s newly released ghost mystery, Skeleton Creek (Scholastic, Feb.), offers a book and dedicated Web site with videos, while The Amanda Project by Stella Lennon (HarperCollins, Sept. 2009) is even more ambitious. This mystery series, aimed at girls ages 12–14, brings together traditional print with Web games, social networking, blogs, music and merchandise.
MySpace recently launched a new “pilot advertising initiative” that allows users to click through a small overlay on the bottom of music videos to buy the song they are listening to, or jump straight to the artist’s page. The initiative (stemming from a partnership with content detection company Auditude) has debuted on two videos so far – My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row, and U2’s Get On Your Boots.
Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran [on the Chemical Romance video] it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos.
The ads are great – the overlay is slick and non-intrusive, and shrinks into a small tab mid-way through. Even better, the overlay replaces the previous ad attempt – a much more annoying (and disconnected) 15-20 second pre-roll.
YouTube launched a similar initiative a few weeks ago, and confirmed that their clickthrough rates have seen significant increases as well.
Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture.
So begins Scott Brown’s satiric eulogy to the classic Freytag Pyramid model of storytelling in this month’s issue of Wired. With Freytag buried, Brown steps in with a model of his own making – Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D!)tm. To “stress-test” the Ziggurat, Brown runs the “classic hero’s journey,” (Die Hard, natch), through both story machines and parses the chunks. While the Freytag view is bor-ing, the Ziggurat’s breakdown includes a pre-movie ARG, Tumblr blog, XBox game, Sprite commercial, and real time tweets. And, to top it all off, the whole thing ends with the Mymaxtm, “a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience.”
Warner Bros. recently released this great viral video of a faux 1970’s newscast for their highly anticipated film Watchmen. The movie hits theaters on March 4th.
