As per usual each bakery is assigned a unique number to identify them for judging and voting purposes. Then people can vote for their favourite bakeries by texting. This public text voting and expert bakery judges determine the winners.  A special People’s Choice Award is determined through online voting.

Gingerbread Ed is right up there with their previous years campaigns of the Gingerbread Gangsters and the Gingerbread Haka.

For ANZAC Day this year the Returned Services’ Association were letting people make an online donation at www.anzacpoppy.com. In return for making the donation, they would plant a poppy on your behalf in the online Field of Remembrance.

When donating you could choose from some ANZAC memorabilia for your phone. You could choose either rings tones, including the “Last Post” Ringtone or wallpaper images for your phone.

You could also leave messages on the Wall of Remembrance. I am of the opinion that they could of represented the Wall of Remembrance in a way more visually engaging way.

There were also badges available to help spread the word about the campaign.

The Retweet was pointing people to the Girls Toys Blog to win an Ecostore pack of goodies. I was very interested because I use the Ecostore products myself. And besides freebies are exactly what a mother needs and every little bit helps!

Ecostore Prizepack
There were three ways of entering to win the Ecostore product giveaways. As a minimum requirement all you had to do was the 1st step, and then you could receive a second and third entry by following steps 2 and 3 below:

(1) Signup to their newsletter

(2) Follow them on Twitter and tweet about the contest.

(3) Join the Girlstoys Blog Network on Facebook and leave a comment there to let them know that you’ve joined.

I liked the way they make you step through a few painless social networking signups in order to get entries into the competition. Yes, the newsletter signup was simple, as is joining the Facebook group and it only takes a few seconds to send a Retweet on Twitter. I honestly cannot remember the last time when entering a competition was so easy.

Twitter Buzz
The benefits of them posting the competition link on Twitter sends people to their Blog and getting people to Retweet the giveaway gets their Twitter username more exposure as more people enter. To top it off they also get more followers on Twitter.

The Dick Smith site had been blacked out, as well as the prices for the Hot Deal products. Even the guys glasses on the Dick Smith logo had been blacked out. In order to find out prices on the Hot Deals you had to go into the shops. Well done Dick Smith for creating some advertising that plays on the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign. Makes me wonder if they blacked out their site for the real Internet Blackout protest.

The humourous approach of taking the piss out of budget airlines and their hidden fees and silly clauses hidden under the asterisk symbol * in the small print, I think works as it’s something we can all relate to.

There is no mention on the SaverJet site as to who is behind the fictitious site. I wonder what was the reasoning behind Air New Zealand not acknowledging themselves. Maybe they could of quietly stated in the small print under the asterisk that they were responsible for this site.  I learnt the other day that this could be termed as a ‘dark viral’ meaning the brand isn’t actually acknowledged.

Apparently viral marketing campaigns should entertain, inform and incentivise us enough to pass the viral on. I think the SaverJet viral is fairly entertaining, but I don’t think I’ve been informed. There doesn’t appear to be any incentive to pass the viral on either. Despite this, if I’d known about the viral at the time, I think I would of let other people know about the fake SaverJet site.

This is a follow-up on my post about the Creative Freedom Foundation’s Campaign against Guilt Upon Accusation Laws in New Zealand. To try and fill you in quickly, the Creative Freedom Foundation are protesting against Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act that is due to come into law in New Zealand on February 28th. This ammendment to the law would mean that ISPs would be able to cut off internet access and web sites of anyone who is repeatedly accused of copyright infringment, based purely on accusation alone, without evidence or proof of guilt. It will be a three strikes and you’re out system. On the third copyright infringement the ISP will automatically cut off your internet connection, without being proven guilty in a court of law. Completely outrageous indeed. The same kind of legislation has been rejected in other countries such as Germany and the UK.

The campaign started out with the Creative Freedom Foundation asking people to protest by signing an online petition called Not In My Name. They also wanted people to spread the word about the campaign by either joining them on Facebook and MySpace, writing to a member of parliament or displaying an animated banner on your site.

Now the campaign has taken on a new phase calling for people to join the INTERNET BLACKOUT N.Z PROTEST from the 16th - 23rd February. They want people to BLACK OUT their Facebook, MySpace and Bebo avatars, your Twitter account and web sites.  It is proving to be a very powerful addition to the campaign as the protest has turned into a global viral, due mostly in part to celebrity actor, comedian and author Stephen Fry.

Day 1 of Campaign

• According to Mohawk Media, Juha Saarinen asks Stephen Fry to tweet about #blackout

• Stephen Fry shows support for the campaign by turning his avatar black, changing his Bio to: I’m blacked out: Stand up against “Guilt Upon Accusation” for New Zealand http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html and talks about the internet blackout campaign on Twitter. This helps push the campaign global.
• He also tells people to Digg this

By doing this Stephen Fry gains 15,000+ friends overnight and he comes in as No.3 on Twitterholic with just over 200,000 people following him. Twitterholic tells you who the most popular - Top 100 Twitter users are based on followers.

Day 2 of Campaign

• #blackout becomes the #1 search trend on Twitter, beating Heroes, 24 and Dollhouse
• The Internet Blackout campaign makes it into Wikipedia as a definition for Blackout
  
• People start blogging about the Internet Blackout protest including Richard McManus at ReadWriteWeb and Cory Dotorow at Boing Boing.
• A Guilt Upon Accusation anthem called the Copywrong Song is realeased under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License. A Copywrong Remix Challenge is issued calling for people to make the ultimate remix of the Copywrong song.

Day 3 of Campaign

• Chelfyn Baxter at Mohawk Media releases his ‘Kangaroo Court’ animation, a protest video for the campaign against Section 92 of the New Zealand Copyright Ammendment Act.

Day 4 of Campaign

• On Thursday 19th February, a public demonstration took place on the grounds of the New Zealand Parliament in Wellington with the ‘Not in my Name’ petition handed over. People were asked to come along in bright clothes and black placards.
• Stuff’s Blackout news story ‘Stephen Fry rails against NZ internet law‘ hits the front page of Digg.com

Day 5 of Campaign

• More web celebrities & supporters join the Blackout campaign including author Neil Gaimen, and Xeni from Boing Boing.

Day 6 of Campaign

• Cartoons start appearing about The Guilt Upon Accusation Law including Dylan Horrock’s and Mike Moreu’s.

Day 7 of Campaign

• Preparation and instructions go out on how to modify your web site for the final day of Internet Blackout protest.

Day 8 of Campaign

• New Zealand Political blogs and other web sites Blackout their sites including Public Address, Scoop, Kiwiblog, The Standard, No Right Turn, Frog Blog, Whale Oil, Not PC, No Minister, Just Left, The Hand Mirror, Roar Prawn, Policy Net, Kiwi Politico.
• Prime Minister John Key announces that Section 92A will be delayed until March 27th

Posted in Facebook, MySpace, Political, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Viral Tagged: Internet Blackout, NZ Copyright Law, Protest

SPRANQ, a Dutch creative communications company have developed a new font called Ecofont. It has been designed to use up to 20% less ink when printed. This means that you will save ink, therefore Ink toner or Ink cartridges could last longer. What an awesome idea this is!

As you can see from the image above, the font has small round holes or circles in it. The concept was to see how much of a letter could be removed while maintaining readability. They found the best results were achieved using small circles, after extensively testing with all kinds of shapes.

The Ecofont is intended for business purposes and works best when using font size 9 or 10, but the results vary depending on your software and the quality of your screen. It works best for OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007 and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results.

Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans font and is free to download and use.

Do you illegally download music, movies or software over the internet? If yes then watch out, because New Zealand government is set to bring in rediculous new legislation regarding copyright infringment on the 28th of February.

Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act assumes Guilt Upon Accusation. This means that ISPs will be able to cut off internet access and web sites of anyone who is repeatedly accused of copyright infringment, based purely on accusation alone, without evidence or proof of guilt. There is no penalty or punishment for false accusation either and could be wide open to abuse.

So, if you download anything that is copyrighted without paying for it (which alot of people do)  you could be affected. It will be a three strikes and you’re out system. On the third copyright infringement your ISP will automatically cut your internet connection off, without being proven guilty in a court of law.

On the 18th December 08, the Creative Freedom Foundation was launched. It was founded in response to Copyright law and it’s effect on creativity, the economy, and public rights. They advocate on behalf of artists whose creative freedom is affected by major Governmental decisions made in their name, and in the name of protecting creativity.

Even though the Creative Freedom Foundation represents the views of artists, they have launched a campaign against the Guilt Upon Accusation laws in New Zealand.

Part of the campaign has involved them setting up a petition called Not In My Name.  Artists and non artists alike can sign it. Just over 4300 people have signed the petition at the time of writing this post.

They also want you to spread the word about the campaign by either:

• writing to a member of Parliament
• joining them on Facebook and MySpace
• using the below animated banner ad on your web site or emails

Please do take the time to have a read of the Creative Freedom Foundation site and sign the petition. It might just save your internet connection being cut off.

Murder Burger is still probably the newest burger joint on Ponsonby Road in Auckland. I blogged about how Murder Burger’s job advert ended up going viral on photo sharing site Flickr, when they first opened their shop late last year.

So, anyway about a week and a half ago they did some billboard advertising that ended up being short lived. Within 24 hours of their ‘Free Range Tastes Better’ billboard advert being up, it was taken down by the billboard company iSite.  I reckon someone other than iSite probably would of ended up complaining about the poor old bloody headless chicken . No-one (except for Murder Burger) will get the chance to complain now since it’s been taken down.

The Murder Burger web site says: “The iSite person said they would give us two hours to change the image somehow - by putting a paper bag over the chickens neck or something - so that the billboard could stay up.  We told him to go fuck himself.”

If you are already familiar with the Murder Burger site, then this is totally the kind of humourous response you would expect from them, along with their we don’t give a shit what you think type attitude .

As they say themselves, they got better coverage by them taking the billboard down than they would of got from leaving it up. This kind of controversial advertising tends to get alot of attention.

An online auction for a Jesus Christ Pita Bread on Trade Me came to an end yesterday. The winning bid was $215 and it had a reserve of $1. Reading through the hoards of Question and Answers on the auction, it emerged that the seller wanted to donate a portion of the money from the sale of the pita to an animal charity. Funnily enough the auction generated quite a bit of media buzz and attention around the world.

Even though this auction is not a commercial marketing campaign as such, there is apparently a marketing lesson to be learnt from these kind of auctions. Over at the Herd and Servant of Chaos they both say something similar along the lines that the Jesus Christ Pita Bread auction is a reminder that marketing is based entirely on emotion and we make decisions not based on what we know but on what we feel. That the auction seller engages his audience into a feeling about the item through the auctions Question and Answer section.

As you can see from the image below, other related products also began to pop up…

.

…including a set of Jesus Christ Pita Bread holders.

And it also looks like there will be more to come according to the sellers last comment below.