A great campaign from MTV against drinking and driving in those festive days.

Well to everybody who reads my blog a Happy Christmas; and what a better way to do that than with the most ... Christmas song (I don't want to offend anyone so you can fill in the dots ;-).

I know these short movies have been on YouTube for quite a while but I just found them and think they are soooo great so I had to show them on my blog. The first one is from 2003 the second one has been added in 2006 they are created by a Finnish company called woordpeckerfilm.

Jean-Claude Van Damme our Belgian "pride" in Hollywood appears in a commercial for WOW, he's added to a long list of other "Stars" like Mr T., William Shatner and Mini me.

Last week I talked about the "Miss Belgium" issue, the results of the words pageant, miss and Belgium in the title of my blog-post where really incredible, the readers of my blog where 10 times higher than on a normal day. So this proves the fact that trash really sells. We see a lot of examples on the Internet in Belgium of that concept, look at  Zattevrienden, the only thing on their is trash en still we know they have an incredible amount of visitors. Another perfect example of this is "Het Nieuwsblad", when you have a look at their mailings there are more games, contests, movies than actual news and when we look at the CIM numbers we see that the site of "Het Nieuwsblad" is much bigger than any other newspaper site although on the other sites the content is much more qualitative.

This all clearly proves that if you want to attract lots of readers it's always easier to put non relevant trash on your site than really relevant content.

Aol launched a few days ago their portal in Belgium, problem is at the moment that the portal is not really worth it. It's only a combination of the news of Belga, a link to their instant messaging, mail and some video. But than again, it clearly states the word BETA on the top so it's only normal "At the moment", looking forward to see the evolution there.

For AOL News they really created a great viral for 2007, what will happens when Miss Teen USA, Don't Tase Me Bro and Chris Crocker meet up in a shop. AOL shows us.

As I said yesterday evening the whole world mocks with Belgium... I think this meaningless fact has been taken enormous proportions and went all around the world from Las Cruces - Mexico, Dubai - United Arab Emirates, Bangkok to Australia and all this about a beautifully Miss that couldn't talk Flemish but speaks fluently 3 other languages. There is less coverage about the fact that we still don't have a government than about this occurrence.

Well it just seems so strange, but than again maybe it's only me.

Metatale should list the most influential Belgian blogs but does it really? If we look at their top 100 there are blogs that don't exist anymore or that don't have had a post since a long time.

blog.seniorennet.be/artistlover (does not exist anymore)
blog.seniorennet.be/lyalm (Asks for a password)
http://webwerkers.wordpress.com/ (last post 11/06/2007)
http://the-shadow-tigers.skynetblogs.be/ (last post 14/06/2007)
blog.seniorennet.be/martincarels (last post 23/07/2007)
little-lions.skynetblogs.be/ (last post 14/06/2007)
crapule-de-luxe.skynetblogs.be/ (last post 31/08/2007)
http://www.gazetvantienen.be/ (got a 404)

It all started really well but somewhere along the road it just stopped!!! They promised an update every week but I guess this didn't go trough neither. Does somebody know if they still want to make this thing work or did they simply give up?

I couldn't believe my eyes when a colleague of mine pointed me out to the Yahoo.com site today.

Again Belgium looks silly in the eyes of the international press. As if We don't have enough political problems. When is this stupid community thing going to stop cause it ridicules us in front of the international community, Belgium is such a small country why can't we all get along ... it seems so simple but apparently it isn't.

You can read the full story on the Yahoo News site there is even a video coverage from ABC.

Paramount will launch Jackass 2.5, Thursday 19 December. Next to the fact that I'm a huge fan of these "Stupidities"; the special thing is that they will launch the entire movie online and with that they will be the first to launch a studio featured film first online.

You can read the full story in the NY Times.

The Official Trailer & Site:

"PICTURE A DAY FOR 39 YEARS." Homer Simpson mimics Noah's photo time lapse. From "The Simpsons," episode 19x09 which aired December 16, 2007.

The original one:

The Simpsons one:

This is a great example of how user generated content changed many things.

Google became yesterday the Site of the year in Belgium followed by kinepolis and ebay. The blog of the year went to http://onnozelheidmag.wordpress.com/, which was I guess the biggest surprise. Less of a surprise was the group blog award which went to http://gent.blogt.be/.

One thing is for sure the site that won't receive this award is the site of the election itself, when I wanted to have a look this morning at the site http://www.sitevanhetjaar.be/, the only thing I saw was this:

I really don't understand such a big errors. When you organize such an election and the day after when everybody wants to see the results .... the site is down. Such a pity, but maybe it's because I was a programmer that I find these errors so important. I sure hope they get it fixed quickly!!!!!

UPDATE 10:14,
I guess they saw the mistake cause the site is back online.

This campaign is TV message for the Hungarian television to warn about the dangers of TV. I guess that everybody that has children will clearly understand the message.

Found this great viral campaign to warn the Dutch public about the dangers of firework. They could have done a completely boring campaign but instead they did this, just great. You can have a look at the other movies at http://www.laaf.info/.

Yesterday evening I received this press release from Thomas Bannister of SX Mobile Media. "Europe United, a new music video from Samsung Mobile and SX Media has launched on Youtube and is the first ever truly democratic music video. Samsung and SX traveled to 10 European cities in 10 days -London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Prague, Barcelona, Ibiza, Moscow, Edinburgh and Galway- to get ordinary people to dance in this street. Whoever made it into the final cut won a free Samsung phone." After viewing the Video, I thought it was really worth wile putting it on my blog, it became a nice project and summarizes perfectly the unity in Europe like they intended to, great work guys. SX Media is a ‘new media’ company, which produces shorter entertainment content.

Another one from the fwa! I'm a huge fan from everything that roams the oceans; what you can see on this site  http://www.whalefootage.org is almost like a mystical experience.

The footage on there is the work from one guy Dieter Paulmann, his experiences where so special that they changed his life and he decided to give all this footage for free. The site brings this footage in such a great way and with the right background music that it almost takes you into the Ocean. The agency behind this marvel is Sholz & Volkmer a German agency.

For this message we should all take a little bit of our time and have a look. it really puts you back on both feet and makes you really "Appreciate what you have".

In an add For the Spanish wine company Freixenet; Martin Scorsese remakes 3.5 pages of an "abandoned Hitchcock project". No expense was spared for this advert, and Scorsese does a great job capturing the look and feel of 1950s Hitchcock. If you're a fan of his work you really should have a look at the movie, the end with the crows is just great.

I just received this mail for a campaign from playstation called "This is living", actually the mail looks quite good (a typo in the subject of the mail, OK). But when you click on the links this is far from good the only thing you see is this error message.

"Warning: main(en_US/home/index.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/vhosts/thisisliving.com/httpdocs/detect.php on line 97"

I don't know who has send this out but I surely hope they'll notice their mistake and fix everything for tomorrow morning.

UPDATE 06/12/2007
I guess they could not care less after 2 days you still got the same error message. These are situations I really don't understand nor the client nor the agency sees that there is something terribly wrong .....

The FWA again pointed our a great site, it's created for Sean Kennedy Santos a NY based photographer. It's a really "clean" site and it shows his work on such a nice way. My absolute favorite part is absolutely his cinema work the pieces well created, pure ART.

Marketing Charts published an article that "One in four internet users read consumer-generated reviews online, which then have a big impact - affecting not only what they purchase offline but also how much they are willing to pay for it, according to a new study conducted by comScore with The Kelsey Group." The numbers are really impressive and clearly show the importance for brands to have a hand in what the consumers think and write about their brand.

Got to love those sport brands everything they create for the online advertising world is so great. Another of these examples is the new site they created for the new Jordan Melo M4 basketball shoe.

The full screen option is really nice and the  integration of the video's is also impressive. Those sites are real experiences I simply love them. The site is from the hand of Blast Radius a company based in Vancouver (Canada).

Just found this impressive add on Illegal advertising, it's all about the fact that we shouldn't ignore that HIV positive people exist. It was created for the world aids day (1 December).

For the once who don't know what they are looking at here is the explanation in plain English ;-).