Back in June, NBC’s dotcomedy.com launched The Lunch Break Show, a new diversion for those of us that eat at our desk to save time during the day. Arby’s was the sole sponsor and the site is plastered with Arby’s branding and links to their TV commercials. Although it seems to have hit the news release channels back in June, I only recently stumbled across it and found it interesting enough to share the links and some thoughts for any of you who might have missed it the first time around.

The Concept:
The top of the original press release states quite obviously where the idea came from: “According to a recent survey by Kelton Research, nearly 60 percent of office workers in the U.S. spend their lunch breaks at their desks looking for distractions.”

So, it seems that NBC and Arby’s decided to go after this target market by throwing together a 30-minute collection of short segments taken from the previous day’s comedy shows on NBC and inviting office workers to ‘tune in’ between 12:00pm and 2:00 pm to watch the show while eating lunch at their desk.

The Experience:
Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser outside the time of 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see a page that explains quickly what the show is about and a form to register for email alerts each day before the show begins that only requires a Zip Code and an Email. There is also a countdown to the next show.

Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser between 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see the video which loops through the 30 minute segment repeatedly, along with a funny little PANIC button.

Thoughts:
I love the idea, it got me interested enough to try it out, but I had some problems with the experience.

Design - I enjoyed the website design and loved the funny little Panic button that pops-up a screen with numbers and lines all over it to make it look like you are doing something important.

Email Reminder - The email comes at 9:30am for me, and there is no way that is going to help me remember the show at lunch. It is buried in my email by that time, and I have to consciously think about the show and go and dig up the email to find the link. (If I haven’t bookmarked or tagged it already)

The Video – The video has some great spots in it each day, and I can always find something to chuckle at. However, you can’t pause it, rewind it, or skip ahead. Here comes the rub. I get what they are trying to do. However, I find it hard to believe that the same people who are clicking around online for entertainment at lunch can’t pause and rewind TV at home with some sort of DVR. I found it very frustrating. A colleague came up to me and asked a question during the show, and I missed something I wanted to hear, and couldn’t pause it or rewind it and I wasn’t about to wait another 30 minutes to catch that segment again.

So to wrap things up, I enjoyed the website and the video, but ultimately got turned off by the lack of ability to interact with the video. I wonder what their drop-off statistics look like because it feels as if they missed the mark a bit on how their demographic would want to interact with the site once they actually got there.

Links:

• To give credit where credit is due, I stumbled across it here at MediaPost in an article that gives a few facts about the campaign.
• The original press release
• Lunch Break Show FAQ

Or Fox River Penitentiary, because I think I know a way out.

This video about a Filipino prison was passed to me by frequent comment poster TS aka Brian Westbrook aka Steve Wilson, and because he suggested I spread the word on this thing and because I just can’t believe it really happened, I had to post it. This again falls in that category of “how do I tie this in to interactive marketing”. I mean, its an online video and without Youtube I doubt we’d ever get to see things like this, but as with my last post I’m not going to try too hard to tie it in. As JJ (another appreciated, frequent comment poster on this blog) pointed out in my last post, it’s not always critical to make sure that my posts tie directly to the company, so I’m going to roll with that mentality.

So basically, just check out these crazy Filipino inmates re-enacting Thriller. I wish things around here were that organized - jeesh.

Not since David Hasselhoff joined reality TV have two of my favorite things come together like this. R.E.M. has embraced Web 2.0 with their recent R.E.M. in Dublin website. In a recent concert there they actually encouraged people to bring video cameras to record the concert and put it on Youtube and other social networking sites. They’ve got Flickr photos, a blog, tags and even RSS feeds. Might Athens, GA be the next Silicon Valley???

PS - for those of you that don’t know me, I was kidding about “the Hoff” being one of my favorite things. He’s barely in my top 10. Again, kidding.

Design and usability are to many “form and function” - the chocolate and peanut butter, and also the difference between an amazing product and a soon to be forgotten one.

I would like this blog post to be Round 1 of the debate over the design interface, the overall product design and its usability among the public. What this is not is a place to complain about Apples’ battery life issues from previous technologies or how Apple will be creating yet another design movement that will effect everything from toasters to toilets. (see iMac)

(Enter and exit Ring Girls and the sound of the bell)

iPhone Advertisement (use in action)

Product Shots:

Can you develop Frito-Lay’s brand and produce their “Mockumentory” ad campaign? Of course you can! With the power of social-media and a bold “hot dog” flavor, you can not only do these things, you also have the chance to be one of the lucky winners to have a year’s supply of Doritos . . .

So why my sarcasm? Other than the fact that social media is by far the tastiest spice currently being traded in the marketing world, I believe that social should be social. Can you still taste that “social” football-flavor left over from the Doritos’ SuperBowl campaign? Do you think that engagement with your community/customers betters your brand online?

The one great thing that Frito-Lay has done is understanding that the online channel is a viable one, and that consumers have no problem going from offline to online. Now let’s see if they will really ever get social.

Check out the Dorito’s X-13D Website.

So in January I wrote a blog entitled The E-Race to the Whitehouse. In that blog I outlined the interactive marketing tactics that Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain were using at the on-start of their campaigns. Since then, I’ve received 50+ emails, all personally addressed to me, from the Senators, their friends, their family, and their staff. I’ve also seen webcasts, blogs, and accounts on Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace. But, what caused me to write this update 4 months later? This:

In this YouTube video, Senator Clinton talks about a recent campaign where she requested that users help pick her campaign song. The unique thing about this new video is that it’s funny! After watching it, I thought, “Wow, maybe social networking really can both help a candidate’s (or company’s) image AND help them reach a younger audience!”

In these days of technology marketing, many marketers dream of going “viral.” Ahhh yes. Your video, so loved that it is sent by one person to 10, and by those 10 to 10 more … becoming a virtual phenomenon.

I recently read a blog post from Ad Age about Diesel’s latest viral campaign. No, I wasn’t a recipient of the viral campaign. Apparently I’m not young and hip enough to wear Diesel clothing. Marketing such trendy fashion to me could in fact tarnish their otherwise “cool” brand.

Anyway. This campaign is crazy (check out the ransom video). Essentially, what they did was stage a kidnapping that played out in video on their website. Two young and beautiful women (the “Two Heidies” as they were called) steal a Diesel underwear collection, kidnap the sales manager and lock themselves in a hotel room saying that they want to be “famous supermodels.”

In their demands they say that they want to be put in Diesel’s next advertising campaign and want the name ‘Diesel’ changed to ‘Heidies’ … because it’s “much younger, cooler, fresher…” They give until Friday or they will destroy the stolen underwear collection.

For the next five days, visitors to the site were encouraged to participate. One such way to get in on the action was to submit your name, which would be spelled out and placed between “the Heidies”. Users were also permitted to request things of the Heidies, such as “Have a pillow fight.” Imagine that.

The production was indeed elaborate, but it paid off for Diesel. This has to be the most innovative viral marketing campaigns that I have heard of.

I stumbled upon found an excellently produced video that summarizes what Web 2.0 is. It was created by Micheal Wesch at KSU - not Kennessaw State University where tonight and tomorrow the SoCon conference is taking place, but Kansas State University. Wesch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology there. I highly recommend this video below as being worthy of the next ~4+ minutes of your life. 

I hope to see many of you at SoCon 2007 this weekend. It’s 2.0 networking in 1.5 days.

For those of you that watched Super Bowl XLI last Sunday, you might be surprised to learn that it was the third most watched TV program of all time. And if you’re like most people, you watched the Super Bowl for the commercials as much as you did the game. The most watched commercial (not sure how official this is, its just what I heard on ESPN radio) during the Super Bowl was the “Bud Light Classroom”.

However, according to AdBowl.com, the Bud Light “Rock, Paper, Scissors” was voted the favorite - it was my favorite as well.

You can see these videos are being hosted on the recently launched Bud TV website (and yeah, its annoying but you have to register - ugh). So far there are a lot of mixed reactions about Bud TV but I think its far too early to tell if this initiative is going to be successful or not. They promote that there will be an HD quality version coming soon and there’s already some decent content with more to come.

The most recent issue of MediaPost’s OMMA (one of my favorite magazines) has an article entitled, “A Leading Role: Be the Content”, which talks about the concept of advertisers and companies producing content rather than trying to advertise around content. I would link to this article but OMMA also requires you to register to see their content online - ugh again. The author makes the intelligent distinction that the content shouldn’t be about your brand, but rather it should support your brand. I agree with this whole heartedly.

And apparently this concept isn’t a new one, dating all the way back to the 1920’s when Procter & Gamble created soap operas to appeal to “a large audience of household-shopping decision makers”. I had no idea that was how soap operas were started but Wikipedia confirms it.

I just came across an article by the Associated Press entitled, “The keys to going viral on YouTube“. The article, which I think is actually pretty weak, lists several things to make your video go viral:

- Infuse yourself into the community by posting video responses and comments within YouTube - this is a pretty good tip, you can’t just build it and hope they come anymore

- Try to get featured on the YouTube homepage…uh, yeah. That’s like telling an ugly person the best way to get a date is to be on the homepage of Match.com. A) If you’re ugly you’re not getting on the homepage and b) if you do get on the homepage, no one is going to click on you anyway. My apologies to ugly people but you guys have your own ugly person website, so I’m guessing you’re cool with it.

- The more people that view your video, the more people that will view your video…rriiiighhhttt

- Have an attractive female in the video…hard to argue this one

Ok, so those are pretty weak. But why do we keep missing the point with this - make the content worth viewing! It’s no wonder marketers get a lot of grief when entering in to social marketing websites. They are more focused on ways to trick consumers than they are on producing good content. So I say, long live the dancing dude and the crazy dog; keep ‘em coming.