Redmond comes up lame, but not Visa

I like this Visa commercial airing on the Olympics featuring Derek Redmond because, well, the guy loses the race. Now you could get all treacly on me and go on about how, since his father comes out and helps him limp across the finish line he didn't really lose, but face it people, his hamstring popped. Good counterbalance to the usual Olympic hype.

Madonna stops by the AT&T Blue Room

For awhile now I've been subscribing to the ShareATT channel on YouTube, which, as advertiser content plays go, is pretty random. They might be showing a commercial, or some video about how AT&T is sponsoring Wi-Fi at Starbucks, or a series of interviews from the AT&T Blue Room featuring Panic at the Disco, Mariah Carey, or Madonna (above). While the videos are also available at this site, it's surprising how little play they get on YouTube. It's not as though the interviews are that fabulous, but as one example, a Mariah Carey video put up a week ago has less than 400 views. I'm not sitting on pins and needles waiting to hear about her creative inspiration, but I was under the impression a few other people were.

'Mediapost' shows product placement in situ

Just noticed this new (?) feature on the Mediapost Web site: a detailed look at weekly product placement, on TV. Compiled by iTVX, the video snippets currently on the site show placements for Visa (shown at right in a scene from "The Dead Zone"), Windex, Bud Light, Cadillac and Breyer's Ice Cream. As the video plays, it tallies up how long the product was on screen, and rates the quality of its screen time at that moment. The only problem—which I hope they work on—is that the interface is way too complicated (anyone care to guess what a dK Factor is?), and not every data point seems to be delivered, like the promise that it will tally the dollar value of the placement as though it were a commercial. Still, it's worth it for the clips alone, particularly if product placement is your gig.