Edison Chen in RenRen commercial. Watch this video on YouTube

Edison Chen, a leading actor in Hong Kong appearing in films such as Infernal Affairs (later re-made as The Departed) and The Dark Knight, shocked the Asian world in 2008, when a total of approximately 1,300 explicit photographs with some of the biggest movie and recording stars in Hong Kong and the Chinese world were distributed to Chinese language websites, forums and chatrooms.

The scandal started after naughty pictures were taken from Edison Chen’s laptop in 2006 by a computer shop technician that was repairing it. The files were first copied on CD and later published on the internet. The photos included celebrities such as Bobo Chan Man, Cecilia Cheung Pak Chi, Gillian Chung Yun-Tung, Joey Yung, Yu Chiu, Vincy Yeung, Yumiko Cheng, Mandy Chen, Rachel Ngan, Candice Chan, Jolin Tsai and Maggie Q. The photo scandal ended a lot of careers and forced Edison out of Asia and the entertainment industry.

In June 2009 Edison Chen returned to Hong Kong and talked in an exclusive interview to CNN Talk Asia about the matter. Now social network RenRen has used footage of that interview to create an internet commercial. See the particular scene where Edison is asked “Tell me about the moment that you realised that these photos where everywhere?”:

The girl featuring in the RenRen commercial, is a main actress in the sex crisis. When Edison mentions “internet” or 互联网, the subtitle translation in the video is “RenRen” or 人人网. What’s most impressive about the internet commercial, is that at the end of the clip, the core message is something like “find your previous one-night-stand partner on RenRen…”

The video can be found on Tudou (土豆网) and Sina (新浪). Both videos are uploaded last week.

Many thanks to Jason Zhan Jia of the social media and digital marketing blog In2Marcom in China.

Domino’s USA President Patrick Doyle response on YouTube in April 2009

The vast YouTube community was revulsed seeing the videos, yet watched anyway. Within a day the clips had been viewed about 200,000 times. The videos were reposted on other sites. By April 15, the number of views soared to nearly 1 million.

On April 16, local and national newspapers and broadcast outlets, like the Today Show, began calling to get the story and replayed portions of the original video, causing more people to view them. The removal of the video from YouTube turned out to be complicated, so the pizza chain decided to shoot a two-minute apology video apology from Domino’s USA President Patrick Doyle and posted it where the whole thing started – on YouTube.

“We had been fighting fire with water” Domino’s spokesman McIntyre said. “Now we needed to fight the fire with fire.” The Domino’s response video (now set to private) has been viewed 650,000 times, while the original videos, now taken down by YouTube but still available elsewhere, have been viewed about 2 million times.

In an article later that month spokesman McIntyre told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Would we do it again? Yes. It helped us get the word out. While it did expose more people to the issue, it also said Domino’s Pizza is taking this very seriously and that the thing we hold dearest is our customer’s trust.”

Now 8 months later the pizza maker releases a surprising new campaign advert just after the holidays and on the eve of its 50th birthday, entitled Pizzaturnaround, created by Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. In a four-minute YouTube video documentary Domino’s CEO J. Patrick Doyle tells the public it has listened to its harshest critics and made the push to launch a completely revamped pizza, with new recipes for both its sauce and dough.

The pizza is a response to the “Domino’s ‘haters’ of the world, who don’t hesitate to bash us on blogs and in social media sites everywhere” Patrick Doyle said. The pizza maker spent about $75 million on development and marketing of the new pizza, according to an estimate by Forbes magazine. So maybe Dell Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea weren’t that bad of ideas after all

U.S. Pizza Business
Pizza companies everywhere are wrapping up a tough decade after a heady 1980s and 1990s, said Harry Balzer, vice president at NPD Group, a market research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. Americans are still eating pizza, but the weak economy has ushered many people to the frozen food aisle because microwaveable pizzas are less expensive than delivery.

Domino’s same-store sales have been flat, forcing the company to close 108 stores in the U.S. The company, along with Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and Little Caesars, controls close to half of the pizza industry, which is expected to remain flat at $38 billion, according to the trade magazine Pizza Today.

Enjoyable to watch: Stephen Colbert on the pizza company and the Domino’s Pizza Turnaround Spoof

Source: Forbes, AdAge, Comedy Central, Socialmediab2b, Detnews

Harbin beer ice sculpture. Watch this video on YouTube.

On December 24 the above video, entitled “零下34度！年终巨献！惊爆你的眼球……!” was uploaded to the popular Chinese video sharing site Youku (优酷网). In the clip four Chinese citizens create an ice sculpture of Harbin’s Saint Sophia Cathedral by pouring Harbin beer on a square at a temperature of 34 degrees below zero or minus 29 Fahrenheit.

In 10 days time the video has been watched 1+ million times on Youku (优酷网) and has spread to other popular Chinese video sites such as Tudou (土豆网), 56.com, 6.cn (六间房), Ku6 (酷6网) and Joy.cn (激动网), where it’s viewed an additional 300,000 times. The 91 second video has no call to action in the end screen or refers to a promotional site.

It’s unknown if this video is created as a fan-made video or is initiated by an agency to create buzz for the campaign Media.asia recently reported on: wwwins Consulting Shanghai launches a digital campaign across major Chinese portals (Sohu, Sina, MSN, Tudou, Youku and Kaixin) to promote Harbin’s 2010 FIFA World Cup Campaign, which encloses a meet & greet competition with Dutch soccer legend Ruud Gullit (路德·古利特), the ambassador for Harbin’s 2010 FIFA World Cup campaign.

Beer market in China
China became the largest beer producer in the world in 2002. China’s beer production has reached 40 million tons per year, more than the production of 24 million tons by the United States, the world’s second-largest beer producer. Germany, which has a long history of beer production, produces 12 million tons of beer a year.

Source: 56minus1.com

Organizing For America: Barack Obama
Organizing For America (OFA), the successor organization to ‘Obama for America’, has created a personalized video card featuring President Barack Obama, as well as ordinary Democrats from around the country, thanking supporters for their dedication.

The video in which the recipient’s name is incorporated in various places of the clip has already been forwarded by at least a million people to their friends, an Organizing for America spokesperson told NewTeeVee. Launched Thursday December 17 the site featuring the video has seen 5 million visitors in the first seven days. Everyone who sends out a card is added to the newsletter list. The names of the receivers aren’t kept.

Rebel Virals
Viral agency Rebel Virals from Bristol have successfully produced and seeded their Christmas card for 2009, entitled “Jack Bauer interrogates Santa”, featuring Santa Claus along with Jack Bauer aka Kiefer Sutherland from the television series 24. Santa’s been apprehended for suspicious behaviour and Jack wants answers.

The video with over 20 duplicates on YouTube and placements on various other video networks, has been viewed over 1 million times and got featured on MSNBC.

NORADsanta.org
NORAD Tracks Santa is a service offered on Christmas Eve by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint organization of Canada and the United States. Every year on Christmas Eve, “NORAD Tracks Santa” follows Santa Claus, as he leaves the North Pole and delivers presents to children around the world.

This year, the tradition called for a 25-hour operations center where more than 1,200 volunteers from the military and the Colorado Springs community answered more than 74,000 phone calls and 3,500 e-mails from people around the world asking the location of Santa. More than 13 million visitors from 231 countries also tracked Santa on the website at noradsanta.org. The site, which featured both an interactive map and the Google Earth map, offered photos, videos and family-friendly games for visitors throughout the month of December.

The program gained over 27,000 twitter followers in a month’s time and the NORAD Tracks Santa Facebook fan page continues to grow with more than 410,000 fans. On NORADsanta’s YouTube channel several videos uploaded a week ago have been watched between 5,000 and 1 million times.

Source: NewTeeVee, The Inspiration Room, Colorado Connection, Wikipedia

IKEA’s showcase video, viewed 115,000 times on YouTube since November 18

Without breaking the bank on exorbitant budgets the agency managed to create a ripple effect of buzz and engagement, that would not spread just throughout Sweden, but throughout Europe and beyond.

The agency, which has a long-standing relationship with Ikea (dating back to 1996), used one of the most popular and basic functions on Facebook, tagging pictures, and used it to IKEA’s advantage to promote its showroom products. After creating a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, the team then uploaded IKEA showrooms images to Mr. Gustavsson’s Facebook photo album over a two-week period.

Facebook friends of Gustavsson were then encouraged to tag items in the photos with their names, for a chance of winning that object for free.

As word about the campaign spread, the photos were tagged within seconds of being uploaded and requests came rolling in for more pictures. People used their Facebook profiles, newsfeeds and links, email and other forms of word of mouth to tell their friends and family.

The photo tagging promotional giveaway took off like wildfire making the Malmo Ikea store widely popular in just a few weeks. Throughout the world blogs have picked up the story, like Marketing Media in Russia, Ninja Marketing in Italy, La Voz de Galicia in Spain, TV Internety in the Czech Republic, Bright and Molblog in the Netherlands, Brand Republic & eConsultancy in the UK, Mashable, iMedia Connection and CNET in the USA.

“Instead of just looking at a banner with furniture, we got people them to personally promote IKEA” said Forsman & Bodenfors on their YouTube video.

Elf Yourself elves invade Union Square

Read more about Elf Yourself? See “Will Elf Yourself Return in 2009? YES!” (a retrospective) and “Elf Yourself 2009 is Live!” (focus on 2009 campaign). Read more about Flash mobs? Check out the article “Using A Creative Flashmob As A Viral Element” by Matthijs Roumen or do a ViralBlog search or YouTube search.

ElfYourself Flash Mob Rehearsal

Read more of Paul’s articles on Viralblog. You can connect with Paul via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Del.icio.us or send him an email at paul@viralblog.com.

So what’s new this year? There are two new elf dances! In addition to “Disco Elves”, “Country Elves”, and “Elf Classic”, you can choose to model your creation off the “Hip-Hop Elves” or “Singing Elves” dances. The “Charleston Elves” won’t be coming back this year.

Further more JibJab has removed its required account registration, due to a significant dropoff between 2007 and 2008 – 193 million sites visits vs 55 million. On TechCrunch JibJab CEO Gregg Spiridellis explains that the required registration in 2008 led to an anticipated dropoff, but resulted in a huge jump in its userbase, which is more valuable to the company in the end.

Instead of the required registration OfficeMax integrated Elf Yourself with Facebook Connect, which will give users an one-click signin to the site and access to photo albums and your profile pictures, and will also help ElfYourself go even more viral as videos get distributed through Facebook News Feeds. Share options include posting to Facebook and tweeting to Twitter.

Other networks to share to are: MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Tagged, Blogger, Hi5, Live Spaces, Piczo, Freewebs, LiveJournal, BlackPlanet, MyYearbook, WordPress, Vox, Typepad, Xanga, Multiply, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, MiGente, Yahoo, Ameba, Eons, Overblog and Livedoor.

To save a copy of your video, before the holiday season and the Elf Yourself campaign ends costs $4.99. Other personalized gifts you can buy are mugs, ornaments, mousepads, greeting cards, blankets and playing cards, ranging between $4.99 and $59.99.

Time will tell, if this year’s Elf Yourself with help of the registration removal, the increased JibJab userbase and a possible Facebook and Twitter effect can beat Elf Yourself’s 2007 astronomical numbers.

Last year, 122 million elves were created, a total of 35 million “Elf Yourself” cards were sent (source: CNET) and ElfYourself.com scored 55.5 million site visits. Since it launched in 2006, the seasonal site has chalked up 284 million visits.

Singing

Classic

Country

Hip Hop

Disco

Read more of Paul’s articles on Viralblog. You can connect with Paul via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Del.icio.us or send him an email at paul@viralblog.com.

OfficeMax first launched “Elf Yourself” for the 2006 holidays and has turned the free e-greeting site into an annual holiday tradition returning each season with new bells and whistles for the public to enjoy and spread holiday cheer. In 2007, ElfYourself.com attracted 193 million visits in six weeks to become the most viral initiative on record. A look back at each campaign, the results and lessons learned.

Elf Yourself 1.0 (2006)

OfficeMax hired two marketing agencies, Toy in New York and EVB in San Francisco, in 2006 to come up with fun sites that would help distinguish OfficeMax from its competitors. The agencies created about 20 different Web sites, including nine holiday games and sites to create e-cards. The e-card site “Elf Yourself” proved to be most popular of the multiple sites created.

In the earliest ElfYourself.com version you had the the possibility to turn just one person into a crazy dancing elf. All you had to do was find a photo of yourself (or your partner, boss, enemy, etc), select the facial area in the photo (with help of a web-based tool to scale and rotate your chosen shot) and submit the result. Additional you got the option to record a personal voice message to go with it through a toll-free number. Once completed, you could preview the result or email it to a friend.

Elfyourself.com was an instant success and got 200 unique visitors per second in 2006, with 8 new elves created per second. Elfyourself.com received more traffic in 2006 than popular holiday destinations Hallmark and American Greetings, see graph. On Flickr and Youtube you can still find some Elf Yourself 1.0 examples.

Elf Yourself 2006 Campaign Metrics (five weeks, 12/1/06 to 1/7/07)

• Over 36 million site visits
• Over 11 million elves were created (41,000 per hour at its peak)
• Users spent a combined equivalent of 600 years on the site
• Over 79,000 MySpace hits
• Fastest mover on Alexa Rankings, reaching 267 most visited site
• #2 on Entertainment Weekly “Must List”
• Over 100 User created videos on YouTube
• Over 2 million Google search results

“The campaign exceeded our expectations by tenfold,” said Bob Thacker, OfficeMax senior vice president of marketing and advertising. “It dramatically increased awareness of our brand.” The company is likely to repeat the campaign for the 2008 holiday season, he said.

Elf Yourself 2.0 (2007)

By the second holiday season, ElfYourself.com had become an online holiday destination. This time you could upload a headshot of yourself and three other friends or members of your family, to create a troupe of festively dressed dancing elves. In 2007 after six weeks of being live, the holiday site, ElfYourself.com, attracted a booming number of visitors and hit the bull’s eye of viral success, leaving Subservient Chicken, the Whopper Freakout and Monk-e-Mail all in the dust.

“Elf Yourself” images showed up on Flickr and Photobucket, and user-generated videos were uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Fans added ElfYourself.com to Digg, Mixx and StumbleUpon and posted e-greeting tweets on Twitter. The site spread like wildfire across social media and into mainstream culture.

Elf Yourself 2.0

Elf Yourself 2007 Campaign Metrics (11/21/07 to 1/2/08):

• More than 193 million site visits with 123 million elves created
• Average number of ElfYourself movies created per user: approx. 2 movies
• Over 210 million elf dances were viewed
• 60 elves were created per second
• Users spent a combined 2,600 years on the site
• 5,456 blogs posts about ElfYourself (Google Blog Search, 11/07 to 1/08)
• Average time on site: 7.5 minutes
• One in 10 Americans visited ElfYourself.com (Nielsen Online Strategic Services)
• Ranked No. 51 most visited website on the web (HitWise Intelligence, 12/07)
• Top-ranked site in the Humor category, holding the position for the last 3 weeks. (HitWise Intelligence, 1/08)
• Ranked the most popular Entertainment – Humour website visited by Australians and New Zealanders in December 2007 (Hitwise)
• Some 53% of visitors returned to the site
• Ranked No. 1 site on “Movers & Shakers” (Alexa Rankings)
• Ranked among top 1,000 sites in 50 countries (Alexa Rankings, 12/07)
• Three awards wins, including the “Best Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign”, People’s Choice Award for “Best User Defined Experience” and “Best of Show”
• Featured on CNN American Morning, ABC World News Now, Good Morning America, TODAY Show, TNT Sports News, Fox News, NYT BITS Blog, Rosie Chat, & TBS The Daily Flog.
• 63% of participants who shop for office supplies at least 10 times per year were aware of Elf Yourself.
• 95% of those who visited Elf Yourself claimed they would likely visit Elf Yourself again in 2008.
• More than one-third of those who visited Elf Yourself said the site influenced their decision to visit OfficeMax, and about one-third of visitors said the site improved their perception of OfficeMax.

ElfYourself 3.0 (2008)

ElfYourself.com relaunched again in November 2008. OfficeMax partnered with JibJab to add entertaining new features and capabilities. In addition to more elves (up to five photos) and new dances (Classic, Disco, Charleston or Country), the ability to send the personalized video as holiday eCards, do a “QuickPost” to social media sites, or share with friends via a new Facebook application, users could also take their custom elves offline (for small fee) by downloading videos or creating custom photo gifts – playing cards, ornaments, mouse pads and coffee mugs. Consumer anticipation grew as the holidays got closer with thousands of people visiting the site daily according to Quantcast.

Elf Yourself 3.0

ElfYourself 3.0 Campaign Metrics (11/21/08 to 1/9/09)

• Total elves created: 122 million
• Total site visits: 55.5 million
• Average number of ElfYourself movies created per user: 4.5 movies
• Average time on site: 15 minutes
• 14,080 blog posts about ElfYourself (Google Blog Search, 11/08 to 1/09)
• ElfYourself widget was installed more than one million times
• 636,500 YouTube views of user-generated ElfYourself videos
• 7,262 fans of ElfYourself on Facebook
• 1,500 tweets about ElfYourself on Twitter
• 683 photos of ElfYourself on Flickr
• 75 Diggs for ElfYourself.com

OfficeMax 2008 Campaign Goals

• Deeper engagement
• Greater brand association
• Higher user-retention
• Stronger social media presence

ElfYourself 4.0 (2009)

Will OfficeMax revive Elf Yourself yet again for a fourth annual holiday season? Only time will tell, but with holiday spirits at an all-time low during tough times around the world, ElfYourself.com would definitely be a nice addition this season and help us all get in the holiday spirit. Let’s hope for more elfing 4.0 and spreading cheer!

Update: November 5th. As you can see below Elf Yourself will relaunch in about 5 days.

Hints of an Elf Yourself return:

Elf Yourself being filmed in Union Square on November 3rd

OfficeMax.com: “Elf Yourself coming soon”

@ElfYourself Twitter page

OfficeMax replies my question on their Facebook page

Tweet by @OfficeMax with link to a tweetphoto

Website of last year: “Check back next holiday season for more ElfYourself fun!”

Lessons Learned

Elf Yourself phenomenal viral success characteristics:

• Simplicity: make it quick & easy
• Participation: get people involved
• Personalization: let people make it their own
• Unexpected: surprise people
• Humor/Entertainment: evoke an emotion; By making the site enjoyable to use, users flocked to it and spread the word themselves, creating a viral marketing campaign.
• Distribution: use ALL media to tell a story
• Communities: make the consumer your marketer
• Portability: weave your content into their digital life
• Cater to your audience: OfficeMax recognized that while most of its customers use the Internet as an information source, they also appreciate a novel experience. “We gave people something enticing to do, and they spent a long time with us, an average of seven minutes,” said Thacker.
• Experiment: Don’t be afraid to experiment with different sites and strategies. “We tried twenty different holiday sites (in 2006) and saw which ones stuck,” Thacker said.

About OfficeMax
OfficeMax, Inc. is one of the world’s largest B2B and B2C office supply chains. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange (OMX), the chain sells to customers in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Its biggest sales season is the annual back-to-school period in its markets. But the chain also sells digital cameras, televisions, and other products that are popular during the holiday season.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Cleveland of Elm PR.

Source: Adweek, PR Newswire, CreativeCow

Joe Sabia of Whirled Interactive from LA had been toying with Wave for just 24 hours and thought “we gotta do something with this…”. Together with his good friend Scott Chan he created the following highly entertaining video:

Joe came up with the idea 3 days ago, because he wasn’t satisfied with the current Google Wave videos. Joe Sabia sums up the reasons: “a) some don’t show the actual product, b) they sometimes fail to connect the product to people who don’t really understand the purpose and c) they could garner more excitement”.

Joe continues “And Wave really is an exciting product. The fact there are millions of people out there, willing to sell their children for an invitation, is proof that Google’s about to do something very game-changing.”

“So for these reasons – and the major reason of a great opportunity to showcase something so secretive, and so early-adoptive – I wanted to create a compelling look at Wave.”

“Wave is about human to human interaction. Streamlined. Littered with organized media and thoughts. Efficiency and beauty. Because of the communicative elements, I thought laying down audio from a film would be a great complement to text-based visuals between Googlers in each of the wave’s blips.”

Joe Sabia of Whirled Interactive

To showcase Google Wave’s functionality the two guys from LA, embedded photos, image search photos, videos, maps, polling widgets and even gaming widgets into the 2:48 minute video.

Joe Sabia: “The more to show, the better it is for the user in understanding what this product does. In general, sometimes the best marketing attempts aren’t ones that scream “This product is great”, rather, the more effective ones yell, “Look what this product can do!”. It’s all in the hook – people will see how rad it is, and can be entertained at the same time.”

Joe and Scott started out with Good Will Hunting and then decided to take on a more ambitious movie classic: Pulp Fiction. It took about 5 hours to edit the movie, 2 hours to rehearse the actual action, and 15 minutes of recording.

Joe and Scott borrowed the phrase “Google Wave Cinema” from someone tweeting about the video. If you like to see more videos, you can request them in the replies.

The Google Wave team in Australia have shown the “Google Wave Cinema” videos already at their meetings tells Joe. Lars and Stephanie, the product managers there, enjoyed it.

If you like to more about Joe Sabia and his work (like the YouTube hits: “Rick Roll: The Literal Version“, “7 Seven Minute Sopranos” or “2009 Oscars Interactive Photo Hunt!“), check out his personal portfolio at Whirled Citizen.

Many thanks to Joe Sabia for reaching out 3 o’clock in the morning!

Read more of Paul’s articles on Viralblog. You can connect with Paul via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Del.icio.us or send him an email at paul@viralblog.com.

“99 percent of teenagers own a mobile phone”

The document was even discussed at the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference in Idaho, which brings together business leaders, political figures, philanthropists and media executives, like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Rupert Murdoch.

Morgan Stanley decided to publish the three-page analysis, due to its “clear and thought-provoking insights”.

In his three-page report about the media habits of a modern day teenager, Matthew Robson broke down the different mediums into radio, television, newspapers, gaming, internet, viral marketing, music, cinema, mobile phones and directories.

A quick summary:

• Teenagers are not regular listeners to radio, use services like Last.fm
• Teenagers watch television for specific seasonal programs and sports, use BBC iPlayer
• Teenagers only read tabloids and free daily newspapers
• The most common gaming console is the Wii, then the Xbox 360 followed by the PS3
• Every teenager has access to the Internet. Teens do not use Twitter, but Facebook for social networking (see also TechCrunch)
• Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing
• Teenagers from higher-income families use iPods, while those from lower-income families use mobile phones to listen to music
• Teenagers go to the cinema “quite often”, although it’s “not about the film, but the experience and getting together with friends”
• 99 percent of teenagers own a mobile phone
• Teenagers never use real directories

In general, Robson said that teenagers were eager to try new media technologies and deftly switch among them, but they were deeply opposed to opening their wallets to pay for services. Online advertising is considered “extremely annoying and pointless” and traditional billboard advertising is tended to be ignored.

Although the report is anecdotal evidence and not hard evidence, the analysis is an interesting startpoint for debate and might open executive eyes. Executives and investors have grown fascinated by the opinions of teenagers. Rupert Murdoch, 78, has described himself as a “digital immigrant” and his young daughters as “digital natives”, while UBS pulled in an 18-year-old three years ago to demonstrate MySpace to portfolio managers.

Read the full report “How Teenagers Consume Media”:

Source: Guardian, FT

Read more of Paul’s articles on Viralblog. You can connect with Paul via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Del.icio.us or send him an email at paul@viralblog.com.