Gangsta Post Halloween Treat

by Angela

November 1, 2007

Natasha over at black celebrity gossip site Young, Black & Fabulous has a giveaway for American Gangster that ends November 7th. I am not into contests much but what I did see when I visited the site was the slick embedded interactive ad. Advertising sure has come along way and this type of ad format is exactly where the future of advertising lie. There is no stopping the viral capabilities of this ad either; it can be embedded into your MySpace, Facebook, WindowsLive, Netvibes, iGoogle, and Friendster profiles or even your blog or website.

You can also view trailers, video, and photos from the movie. You can listen to music from the soundtrack in a seamlessly intergrated player and get track listings as well, and you can listen to “Jay-z’s” Blue Magic track and pre-order his CD from iTunes. Lets not forget all of this is in an advertisement. You can thank Special Ops Media based out of NY for it.

I recently read an article about where advertising is going especially on social networks. The theory of the article was that users will eventually be able to control their own ads. It also stated that we all seem to understand that most websites are monitiezed by ads more or less so there is an understanding with web users that their pressence is necessary. The interesting part of the article though was the theory of allowing web users to select which ads are on their profile pages or websites. So if we must have ads we would much rather have it be an ad that we liked ourselves. Interesting concept, and with ads like this promotion for American Gangsta I am sure it would work. I would put an ad like this on my site would you?

Tech Tags: American Gangster, Denzel Washington, Jay-Z, Young Black & Fabulous, web 2.0 advertising, embeddable ads,

Category: Digital Media, Social Networking, Trends, web 2.0

Mega

The ad is gangsta. Imagine how disruptive sic viral ads like this could be to Hollywood's marketing spend...

Lynne d Johnson

Angela

Mega is right, this is a very disruptive viral ad. But used in the right context it provides the right value for the marketing campaign. If used on the right sites, it will get the right burn.

I was thinking lately about how widget marketing is not necessary for every business, but it's definitely necessary for the entertainment business.

Cool find.

Lynne

jbyrd

Indeed, the idea of an interactive ad "widget" is very progressive. The only issue is the size; it seems a bit too wide to fit on the margins of most blogs, though that's not as big of an issue on SoNet pages. Either way that can be taken care of with design.

"The Darjeeling Limited" has a viral ad like this as well, created by the same company. The next step would probably be making something like this functional on a desktop or mobile device...

blackweb20

Yes this could definitely introduce a whole new way of marketing movies. I agree with Lynne as well, it may not be successful or every business/industry or even every demographic for that matter. If should be interesting to see how this format catches on and also what other types of companies/industries try to incorporate it. This is a very exciting mix of content as well though i wonder how effective it would be if the content was not rich media. Desktop widgets of this this manner would be cool as well, not sure how much one would use it in that respect though unless on Vista or a Mac. Pairing mobile technology with this would definitely stir some things up as well.