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Sherlock Holmes and a new twist in game narrative | Technology. It's not often that the promotional game for a forthcoming movie interests me as much as the film itself, but this is certainly a case in point. To lead up to the release of Guy Ritchie's idiosyncratic Sherlock Holmes interpretation, Warner Bros has commissioned a fascinating co-operative experience entitled 221B. Accessed via Facebook Connect, it's a sort of Myst-style graphical adventure, in which players must solve a series of crimes by reading witness reports, analysing evidence, interrogating suspects and occasionally chasing shadowy ne'er-do-wells through alleyways in Flash minigames. The really clever bit is that when you sign-up, you select whether you want to play as Holmes or Watson, then nominate a friend to take on the other role – both players need to work together as they'll receive different clue elements; Watson isn't privy to the crime scene data while Holmes doesn't have the stomach for interrogations.

Have a go yourself right here... AMV Academy on Facebook. Advertising | Media. T-Mobile flashmob wins TV ad of year | Media. T-Mobile's flashmob-style advert at London's Liverpool Street station won the TV commercial of the year accolade at the British Television Advertising Awards last night. The commercial, created by the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, beat competition including Comparethemarket.com's TV campaign featuring the meerkat Aleksandr Orlov.

VCCP, the ad agency behind Comparethemarket.com's ads, won four gold awards for its work including the prize for best series of commercials. Bartle Bogle Hegarty won the coveted ad agency of the year award. BBH picked up a total of seven gold awards for work including Robinsons' Wimbledon sponsorship, which played on the chance of a first British men's singles champion in almost 75 years and a hard-hitting TV ad for Barnardo's about sexual abuse. Production company Rattling Stick won the award for best production company for the third year in a row. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. EXCLUSIVE: The IM Conversation In Which 19-Year-Old Zuckerberg Decided To Build Facebook, This Year's $100 Billion IPO. Darth Vader burger: French fast food chain reveals Star Wars-inspired black bun. French fast food chain unveils Dark Vador meal By Chris Parsons Updated: 17:05 GMT, 6 January 2012 Star Wars creator George Lucas has made millions from merchandise on the back of his famous films, but even he would surely never have dreamt of this.

A French fast food chain has revealed a promotional snack which really has gone to the Dark Side, a Star Wars-inspired burger with completely black buns. The burger chain Quick cooked up the black-looking bun - named Dark Vador - to tie in with the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 3D. Peckish: The Star Wars burger has a distinctly overdone look Although the buns look like decidedly burned, they are in fact simply dyed, and have two beef patties with cheese, lettuce and tomato inbetween.

The relevance is questionable given that Darth Vader only appears in The Phantom Menace as 10-year-old Anakin Skywalker. The stunt is not the first time the French fast food chain have raised eyebrows with their promotional material. Magazine Advertising - Your options as an advertiser. Latest Media>> See our latest magazine advertising profile page for East Magazine - Advertising East Anglia. Your options as an advertiser. Publishers involved in magazine advertising media are trying to do more for the advertiser. In fact a large proportion of them are developing their websites so they can offer Online advertising packages to compliment their existing print media advertising formats.

You see magazine ads have always been more about image than response. Don't get me wrong, magazines have a part to play in the whole advertising and marketing mix, but the advertising costs associated with this form of media advertising has limited its appeal to the masses of small business and consumer targeted advertisers. They now say that simple magazine advertisements work better for response, as potential buyers are in a different frame of mind when it comes to the larger corporate style adverts. Make sure you look at all of the possible variables when it comes to magazines. Forget About Google And Apple, The Future Of Television Is Facebook. Ad men use brain scanners to probe our emotional response | Media | The Observer.

The Mynd wireless EEG headset developed by NeuroFocus to read the brain's emotional responses to products. Photograph: NeuroFocus The world's biggest companies have got a new way of convincing you to buy their products – by getting inside your head. Brands including Google, Facebook and ITV are turning to mind-reading technology to help them develop products and create adverts that people like.

Traditionally, focus groups have been used to tell marketeers what they think of adverts. Unfortunately for advertisers, some people don't tell the truth. Faced with the prospect of consumers hiding their emotions – perhaps a middle-aged man reluctant to reveal that he shed a tear at a sentimental John Lewis Christmas advert – a new breed of "neuromarketer" has emerged, armed with medical technology to probe consumers' brains for genuine responses.

"Neuroscience has completely changed our understanding of the brain. "The industry is growing well in excess of 100%," he said. Charlie Brooker: This year's Christmas adverts aren't adverts, they're 'events'. Ghastly events. Nothing merely "happens" any more: every occurrence is now an "event", which leaps up and down pointing excitedly at itself. Once, the end of a school term would be marked with a shabby disco down the village hall; you'd turn up wearing the one pair of jeans you owned and circumnavigate the dancefloor nodding your head to the sound of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. Now, in 2011, teenagers don outfits chosen by their personal stylist weeks in advance and arrive at their school "prom" in a stretch Hummer. Come, friendly asteroids, and fall on Earth. Christmas adverts are the retail industry's end-of-term disco, and they have undergone a similar transformation. Not so long ago they were bald sales pitches with a bit of tinsel Sellotaped to the edges.

Now the law dictates that any high street chain worth its salt has to bombard the populace with some unctuous cross between a feelgood movie and a Children in Need special. Take the John Lewis commercial. An advert for a shop. Advertising. The 2012 media watchlist | Media. When it comes to cracking the digital media code, 2011 involved more testing than learning. Media companies seem to be locked in a feverish search mode. Their sense of urgency is reinforced by the continuous depletion of worldwide fundamentals: digital advertising's encephalogram remains flat (at best); and when audiences grow, revenues do not necessarily correlate. As for legacy media such as quality newspapers that still draw 70-80% of their revenue from print, they are still caught in a double jeopardy: losing circulation plus looming downward price pressure on ads.

We see an unforgiving mechanism at work: on mature markets such as Europe or North America, print media currently absorbs about 25% of ad spending while time spent on newspapers falls well below 10%. Last year, we saw many efforts in the "right" direction – "right" being rapidly redefined. . #1 Paid-for news. Try to find a reliable business model with a so many factors in the formula ... #2 The Web App Movement. The Story Behind Lovemarks.

We have an extraordinary opportunity to make profound new emotional connections with customers. The unchanging emotional repertoire of human beings, our shared heritage, ensures that the world of tomorrow will be basically as familiar to us as the world of yesterday. One of my themes is the constancy of human nature. Why? Because to adapt best to a changing world, you have to know what should not change, and you should base that on what cannot change. I’m talking about people, and not consumers, very deliberately. Tapping Deep Into Human Emotion That’s not a revelation, right? Let me show you what I mean. The Love/Respect Axis The optimum relationship draws on both high love and high respect. The High Respect Quadrant is where most successful businesses fit. Stop Racing After Every Possibility Why? I believe that we must stop racing after every new possibility on the media map. Brands: Death of a Thousand Yawns Brands and branding are approaching the end-game. I Call Them "Lovemarks" Mystery.

Social networking in its oldest form. What Google Goggles Will Do For the Ad Industry. We know the nascent mobile advertising industry is going to make the owners of the networks (Google's AdMob, Apple's iAds) even more ridiculously wealthy than they already are. But what about the content? What creative ads will leave consumers agape with amazement? First up is a marketing experiment from Google's Goggles lab. Alongside a quintet of high-profile brands--T-Mobile, Buick, Disney, Diageo and Delta Airlines, this last one no stranger to Google bunk-ups--the firm is working out a way of using Goggles to provide a "deeper, richer experience" from print ads.

Let Goggles scan the print ad, and you'll be taken to a mobile site that gives you more information, more fun, and maybe even more bang for your buck. Which is also what this work from AR firm Junaio and German food outlet Sausalito has done. The basic idea of hidden content in a print ad accessed via your mobile device has become a promotional offer. Are you a social tool? Online advertising: the Litmus test | Technology. Over the past three weeks, I've been followed.

By advertising. Like many, week after week, I land on dozens of sites. Some visits originate from my set of bookmarks, others from the usual click hopping that defines internet serendipity. In numerous instances, I get the same ad in different formats. Litmus is owned by Salted Services, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company founded in 2005. I've been testing Litmus for three weeks now, on advice from my friend Kim Gjerstad, a great WordPress and emailing specialist.

They – in fact, the digital marketing firm they hired – installed tracking devices in my computer. After a while, I realised how saturated I was with Litmus ads when my synapses (slowly, I admit) finally added up the number of pages I saw carrying the company's rainbow logo. Tracking internet users is nothing new. Journalistically speaking, it's Hermès saddlery compared to the Huffington Post's leatherette. Just to frame the discussion, here are some of the WSJ findings: The Meccano Grape | Ryan Gander's The Locked Room Scenario and why it could be the perfect model for the future of brands. There Are Some Things Money Cant Buy... Wait, Nevermind. - Courtney Allen LA101H. The MasterCard "Priceless" advertising campaign, developed in 1997 as a response to the company's failure due to lack of public appeal, was revolutionary for its time. At the time, American Express and Visa, its major competitors, had campaigns that were highly focused on the materialism and consumerism of the current American culture.

Thus, MasterCard undertook "What Matters" research, consumer research in which the company asked people, in an open-ended manner, what was important to them, revealing a national tendency to rank certain intangible successes, such as having a happy marriage, over receiving a higher salary. With this revolutionary knowledge, the question thus became who could be the audience, the recipients willing to switch their affiliations to MasterCard, or create an affiliation to begin with. Initially, the target audience were people dubbed "revolvers" by the credit card companies, those who tended to have a balance remaining unpaid on their credit cards. Advertising visionary focuses on China|Business.

Updated: 2012-04-13 13:55 By Gao Yuan (China Daily European Edition) Head of creative group saatchi & saatchi wants to bring 'crazy' ideas to the fastest growing market Kevin Roberts once made headlines by shooting up a Coca-Cola vending machine with a machine gun at a black-tie event hosted by the prime minister of Canada. Another time, he brought a lion to a company meeting. Such eye-catching ideas and tactics have earned Roberts, the 64-year-old CEO worldwide of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, fame as an advertising visionary. Roberts is now eyeing business with Chinese clients who wish to expand overseas. "China is the fastest growing country in my business, close to 20 percent over the last year," he said during a recent interview at the company's Beijing office. "Our first target is Chinese companies who want to go abroad," he adds. China market Saatchi & Saatchi entered China 23 years ago with Procter & Gamble.

Chinese-led team He couldn't think of anything for Nathan.