Two fantastic pieces of advertising

I’ve just stumbled upon two great pieces of advertising that I think are simply brilliant.

First of all, there is a serial killer on the loose in Miami, and all his targets are females that work in New Media. Scarily enough, he’s written in blood that “Molt:n Digital, you are next“.

Fox is promoting a new TV show called Dexter, from what I can gather it’s a crime drama about a guy called Dexter who catches serial killers. (As an aside, do we really need another crime drama?) By going to the Dexter website you can create a personalised video to send to a friend, entering their name, gender, industry they work in, and a personalised message from the serial killer to them. They’re then emailed a link to the video, with the news report pulling in those details.

This is such a great piece of advertising as I’ve been engaging with it for the last hour and sending personalised reports to most of my friends. From what I’ve seen already, they have also done the same and forwarded it on. I love the personalisation of it, it’s just brilliant, this was a great idea that has been flawlessly executed, even down to the comments on the video page. I’m almost tempted to watch Dexter when they finally show it and I don’t even watch TV. Now that’s a great piece of advertising!

The second example I saw doesn’t seem nearly as exciting but Mr Burns from the Simpsons has hacked into the Jetblue blog (or as he puts it, the Jetblue “interwebular chronicle”) to tell Jetblue that “your rates make a mockery of the corporate greed our great confederacy was built upon. Who taught you to be a robber baron? Mother Teresa?” This was a joint promotional effort between Jetblue and the Simpsons Movie and it seems to be a perfect fit. Jetblue have built their brand on customer experience and it this seems like a great tongue-in-cheek way of reinforcing their points of difference between themselves and the other airlines. It’s nice to see some very different types of advertising and integration that involve customer engagement rather than just pushing ads on us.

Anyway I’m off to freak out more people with this serial killer video. I could play with this all day… how many advertisers can say that about their ads?

This post is tagged under: Cool websites, Marketing, trends