ChasNote

Here’s a sampler of entries in the contest.

Graffiti, the popular Facebook drawing app, adds a new feature today with help from Intel’s sponsorship dollars. When you see a Graffiti you like, you can embed the animated version — the artist’s virtual brush strokes as he or she draws the image — into your own site, just like you’d embed a YouTube video.

Here’s one I like from the recent Haagen-Dazs sponsored bee drawing contest by Priya S Patel:

A year ago, HP signed on as sponsor to a collection of sites that cater to designers and digital artists, what we call (in FM-speak) the Graphic Arts federation. They took a PBS-style “sponsored by” approach to their messaging, and left the authors and readers of those sites alone to have their haute design conversations without any interference. Pay respect to your core audience, HP figured, and you just might win its affection.

The approach appears to be paying off. Jean Aw, author of “indiellectual” design and aesthetics site NOTCOT, blogged her experience walking the floor of CES: “I must say that i was proud to have our sites sponsored by HP when i walked into this booth… ”

iMediaConnection invited me to contribute to the Best & Worst of 2007 round up. My favorite campaign of the year: Ask.com’s sponsorship of Ask A Ninja. The campaign that made best use of user-generated content — if you count editorial posts on Boing Boing or OhGizmo “user generated” — was HP iPaq 510’s sponsorship of “voice posts.” The agency that, to me, went furthest in pushing the envelope was Goodby Silverstein for Sprint’s WaitLess.org concept, HP’s campaign around voice posts (above), and HP’s Blackbird gaming system launch.

As part of their “What Do You Have To Say?” brand campaign, HP is sponsoring Facebook’s Graffiti Wall. In addition to banner units, HP helped Graffiti add comments and the ability to print Graffitis. Within 3 hours of the launch of comments functionality, Graffiti users had posted 1000 comments. (Artist on the below: Crystal Hughes.)

Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz thanks HP “for supporting the development of all our new community features.” That doesn’t happen every day: Hundreds of advertisers have run on Boing Boing over the past 3 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Boing Boing editors thank one by name. Perhaps it’s because HP didn’t just write Boing Boing a check and send them ad tags — they helped the Boingers improve the site by financially supporting the roll out of new features. Intel had a similar experience when they sponsored the launch of Digg Arc, and found themselves getting thanked by Digg staff and the Digg community.

And he launched a blog — called My Free HP Blackbird 002, nice win for HP if Cannis builds a following — to tell the world how he learned about HP’s marketing campaign and the Blackbird give-away. He promises to share photos soon.

“I’m a computer geek, I spend all of my days working with routers, and firewalls, and hotspot captive portals, and I go home and I fool around with routers, firewalls, hotspot captive portals, and World of Warcraft. So there I am sitting on my arse watching some episodes of Diggnation that I had missed and browsing http://digg.com/, when I notice a small video in the upper right hand corner of the Digg interface. The clip grabbed my attention because it’s highlight frame was a Gnome Mage just chillin and it looked like he was going to do something cool.”

It sounds like Blackbird 002 landed in capable hands!

Eric Wilhelm, the CEO and Chief Project Doer at Instrucables, recently accepted ads from Sprint on his site — ads promoting “Sprint Cuts” at Sprint’s WaitLess.org site. Then, in his words, “After watching the ‘Sprint Cut’ on how to peel an egg at http://www.waitless.org/ I was intrigued. I thought this might be useful for Tim and me considering how many hardboiled eggs we eat. So we gave it shot. Results are below…. We’re not certain whether it belongs in Handy Tricks or How Not To…” Here’s the post.

The post also includes a disclosure, “Sprint is an advertiser on Instructables, and waitless.org is part of their advertising.” To be clear, Sprint and their agencies (Goodby and Mindshare) bought ads on Instructables, but did not ask for or expect any coverage on Instructables. Instead, the fact that Eric tried his hand at one of the short-cuts featured in Sprint’s advertising is an unexpected (if wonderful) outcome to a well-crafted creative concept. Among the 40 comments submitted to this post, I couldn’t find anything negative toward Eric, Instructables or Sprint. Nor could I find anyone who seemed confused or upset that Sprint made its way from the advertising section to the main projects section of the site.

That’s the headline used by Steve Safran in his post at Lost Remote. Lost Remote works with FM, and Sprint is running ads on Lost Remote as part of its Sprint Cuts campaign.

“Have you checked out the Sprint ads that cycle through on the right of LR? Pretty good. Fast, funny, and — I have to say — clever. They’re part of their ‘Waitless’ campaign — ideas to save you time in your life. Now keep in mind that our ads are sold by Federated Media, so we have no idea what’s going to go into that space. We’ve also dissed ads that have appeared there, and so we’re not trying to suck up. (Much.) No — I think the Sprint ads are an excellent example of ‘advertising as entertainment.’ I went through a bunch of their quick videos, and spent time on their site. That’s worth pointing out on the rare occasions that it happens.”

Readers at Lost Remote, at least a few that commented, agree:

“Agreed. Clicked through to their site from here and I wasted a good 15 minutes going through the different clips. Though I still can’t get the hang of speed tying my shoes.”

And this one, which ought to get FM’s critics riled up:

“Those are sheer genius. (The ‘Turbo Parking’ one worries me a little, though.) Thing is, I would never have clicked on one if you hadn’t drawn attention to it… “

Steve and Lost Remote readers: Glad you like em!

Update 9/16: Another brave man, Eric Wilhelm of Instructables tries his hand at one of the “Sprint Cuts” being advertised on his site.

Tac Anderson at NewCommBiz called his post “Is this really advertising?” His answer:

“Is this really advertising? Technically yes. The better answer is that this is the way new media advertising *should* be done.

“It leverages ad dollars to bring additional value to a community that is not interruptive. I don’t know who on the HP side came up with this but I think it’s great.”

Thanks, Tac! And thanks, Jared, my FM colleague, for pointing Tac to the voice-post project!

Original story on voice post sponsorship, and a follow up piece on readers demanding them.