If you’re not familiar with the Hype Machine it’s this excellent site that searches all the mp3/music blogs out there and will create playlists for you on content you want, and using their player, you can play all these mp3s scattered across loads of websites. For their new design and functionality upgrade, they said they’d launch it to the public, only if there were 10,000 people logged on to this page at the same time. (Page now redirects to main page)The buzz was already building with many influential bloggers having private tested the new design and so 100s of bloggers started encouraging everyone to log on to that page, spreading the word far and wide about Hypemachine. Great idea. And cheap.
For those that don’t know Uncov, it’s this bitchy, nasty, fabulously catty website that takes shots at the Tech world. Think Techcrunch with more arrogance and a billion times more cynicism. Hard to get advertisers on a site that takes no bullshit from anyone right? Well Opera did a very clever thing with Uncov, they ran a competition on it which encouraged the readers of the supernitpicking site to find bugs in Opera, the winner getting access to the Opera launch party. It’s a nice way of leveraging your product with what others would consider a hostile market.
BT2 are doing some kind of dealy with Phantom and maybe other stations too. They’re hosting songs from new Irish bands, you submit your stuff to them and they’ll stick them up on their website. Shame their website is utterly unusable. Cute idea with jigsaws but it’s almost impossible to find the sections to the site without having to move your bloody mouse over the whole page in order to find the hidden links to the various parts of the site. But hey, designs that irritate are good, right? It’s nice to associate your hipster brand with some of the really good emerging music talent in Ireland. You get love from your existing clientele and some love from the bands and their devoted followers too. A good way of reaching the people you want to market to.
Any clever bits of marketing you saw recently? And Not the cadbury’s Gorilla.
I like the recently announced deal between the upcoming PS3 game Gran Turismo 5 and BBCs Top Gear. You’ll be able to download 40 episodes and race on the Top Gear track with the reasonalby priced car. It’s a perfect fit which will make GT5 much more tempting and stand out from the plethora of racing games out now.
The story on BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7059887.stm
Oh that’s bloody clever!