Contests

To make shoppers more familiar with the site, Forzley and his team sponsored an online video contest held between October and Christmas 2007. Besides creating as much buzz as possible, they were particularly interested in seeing what a presence on YouTube could do for the brand.

Funny how many engagement debates settle themselves with bribery. The Guinness adult beverage site has rolled out an advergame called "The Legend of the Golden Domino." You watch video clips to find clues, which you use to find codes, which in turn unlock dominoes that release video clips -- which you can ultimately assemble into a finished Guinness ad. If you succeed you can win a solid gold domino.

Remember those Super Bowl ads that dominated our industry for a couple of weeks. Top Rank Blog's Kevin Sawyer followed up, and identifies Tide's Talking Stain ad -- and accompanying online video contest -- as the biggest success. Fifty-five hundred user-generated videos were created for the contest, among which Tide has picked out a top ten. But the bigger news is that the Tide sticks are selling. Better than being number one in the hearts of wannabe ad makers is being number one in your category on Amazon.

It's not like the new Indiana Jones movie needs additional buzz. But you just can't make too many millions, I always say. For the release of the upcoming film's second trailer, Clearspring has created a widget called "Skull." And just to guarantee its wild viral spread, the two fans who distribute the most Skull widgets to their online friends and neighbors will win a trip to the movie's premiere. They'll perform as red carpet correspondents -- with the resulting footage streaming to the very widgets that brought them.