ChasNote

Toshiba’s banner ads for its Satellite Fusion laptops invite everyday citizens to picture themselves behind the keyboard of a Fusion, literally.

When you visit Toshiba’s site to snap your photo, you’re prompted to email Toshiba’s ad-starring-you to your friends. Here’s my ad:

Here’s a montage of my FM colleagues pretending to be models (lifted from FM’s blog):

And the next time you see a Toshiba Satellite Fusion banner, you’re likely to see yourself right in the banner, like this:

From the press release:

“Irvine, CA (July 9, 2008) — Toshiba’s Digital Products Division (DPD) and Young & Rubicam Brands, are set to launch a new ‘Take My Picture’ advertising campaign. ‘This campaign is pioneering a new phase in interactive advertising by auto-detecting a webcam on the user’s PC and allowing them to place their own picture into the ad.’ said Aron North, Young and Rubicam Brands…. The campaign continues Toshiba’s rich history of innovation, with over 12,800 patents in the last 10 years. As the inventor of the laptop, Toshiba looks to reinforce its history of innovation through proprietary technological advances and innovative ways of showcasing them.”

Intel invites Facebook members to draw robots using the Graffiti application. Normally the Graffiti crew publishes the Top 150 on the gallery page, but for this contest they’ve made it a Top 250 to accommodate a bigger field of exceptional contributions. Take a look at the full gallery; they clearly made the right call. Here are a few:

I continue to be amazed (and I’m sure Intel is thrilled) that so many artists take it upon themselves to work in the sponsor’s brand. Here’s one among many:

That’s nice, you say, a few thousand consumers spending hours with Intel’s brand and a million or so of their friends seeing Intel’s messaging briefly as they swing through to vote for their favorite Graffiti. But is there more? Yup. Since it sponsors functionality that allows web publishers and bloggers to embed their favorite Graffitis, Intel’s robot-drawing contest is creating thousands of media objects that can be shared across the web — Intel commercials, in effect, that spread virally and show the world a richer, more visual web experience.

Well, I’ll admit that’s not a scientifically-verifiable statement. But it is true that I’ve never before seen a blog post that attracted 42,232 comments — which is the number of comments posted by Dooce readers in response to Heather’s post about her Wii Fit party.

From James Gross’s site:

“It contains:
- a video player that redraws all six of the winning graffitis from the ReGeneration Contest. Currently runs on auto-play but could also be a click to play.
- At the top it pulls in the RSS feed from the latest post at ReGeneration.org
- an overlay that allow users to(more button):
- send to a friend
- subscribe to the RSS feed
- download the video
- embed the video on another site (like I’m doing)”

James asks his readers for feedback. Here’s the comment I posted:

“James–As you know, I’m a huge fan of this execution. Two things I especially like. One, while it’s sponsored by Dell, the content comes from its customers — Dell merely surfaces and promotes a real conversation (in this case, a visual conversation about the environment). Two, Dell encourages us to ’steal’ the content and share with other people we think might be interested. This strikes me as a new paradigm: Dell isn’t using ads as teasers to get us to its website, instead it’s giving us its brand assets to take with us.”

Dell’s ReGeneration Graffiti Contest here.

Playboy is out with its list of the hottest web bloggers. It’s times like these where I’m especially thankful that I have a formal business relationship with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin (one of the nine), otherwise it would make for an awkward conversation with my wife as to why I’m visiting Playboy.com.

Clearly Playboy is hip to the Web 2.0 ethos: They’re inviting readers to pick the next online playmate!

As of this posting, Brigitte Dale is leading the voting.

Lenovo has launched an app in Facebook and Hi5 that allows Olympics fans to root for their teams and follow their favorite athletes through blog posts from Beijing. In the words of my colleague James Gross:

“What an awesome way to showcase that advertising can equal media and all participants can benefit. Lenovo, led by David Churbuck, was visionary to create a strategy with Olympic Athletes and online platforms for long term attention share around the Olympic Games. From aggregating Olympic bloggers, to the application that Citizen Sports built for social networks like Facebook and Hi5, to communication platforms like Twitter. Lenovo has recognized that they can differentiate themselves through allowing people to use their brand to create and distribute media.”

Here’s Pete Spande’s write up.

I love these embed-able ad units that feature longer-form video programming (here’s Dell’s), this one from a section of Cisco’s Welcome to the Human Network site that FM is helping them with:

Last weekend, FM’s executive team tried an experiment: The three of us were not allowed to send any emails to our FM colleagues from 6pm Friday until 6pm Sunday. I didn’t expect much other than a time-shifting of our email problems, a postponement of our inevitable email bankruptcy. I was wrong. It turns out the emails the three of us initiate spawn email threads that multiply like virus cells in a warm petri dish. If we shut up for two days a week, everybody else can dial back, too. And I found that my brain worked better this past week — rested, refreshed and more nimble than usual — after a weekend offline.

More from Battelle.

I wonder what happens if you let your brain have 216 offline hours?? I’m headed off for a wifi-free camping trip with the family. I’ll let you know in a week.

I hope the folks at Cococu are saying nice things!

Marketing Shift weighs in, too:

“…companies are looking for ways to aggregate communities even if it’s not directly tied to their core business. Chris Brogan points out that American Express is doing just that with its OPEN Forum, which aggregates blog and business information in one place and encourages conversation in a sponsored area with the hopes of subtly marketing to people who have an interest in business information (e.g. potential American Express users). When you think about it, the concept is a no-brainer. We trust people more when we don’t feel like they are selling us on something. It’s why we hate ads — and marketing.”

Steven Lewis at Inside the Box, while not exactly speaking a different language, adds his support from Australia.

And if financial jargon qualifies as a foreign language, we can count NetBanker:

“American Express’s OpenForum: As the name suggests, it’s a business forum and resource directory, not unlike Bank of America’s…. American Express has added posts from several prominent bloggers such as John Battelle’s Searchblog and Anita Campbell’s Small Biz Trends, to keep the site fresh. The site has 5,400 members and monthly traffic of about 11,000 unique visitors, up three-fold from a year ago.”

Goes to show you: If your marketing projects are great media with quality content and authentic conversation, not only will you engage your customers more deeply, you’ll benefit from social-media amplification as those customers spread the word across the web.

At a conference earlier this week, Intel’s David Veneski presented stats on Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLS Blue Edition for Enterprise IT. In May, visitors to the site, on average, were more than 100% likely to interact with content assets, clicking on headlines in order to read full stories. If the goal is to build something your customers want, the rate of active engagement is a great proxy for performance. In this case, Intel aced it.

I spoke at the Ascentium PDX onference, too. Here are some photos posted to Flickr.