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January 20, 2006
Advertising in the wild
An example of advertising in new media.
Heavy.com has what looks like a Beta version a social network, MySpace-like, Flash-heavy site called MyHeavy.com. I'm not sure if the content is really live or if its just a demo. Its somewhat of a Flash Desktop in the context of a MySpace community. The UI renders painfully slow and I guess you could do much of the (mostly useless) UI widgets with AJAX.
One cool aspect of the experience was the Playlist tool. This allows users to assemble a playlist of their favorite music... many sites have something like this.
Here's the interesting part... you launch a person's playlist and it loads a Flash music player in a pop up with advertising in the form of a branded animation synched with beat-tracking to match the music. In this screenshot you see an animation of a DJ spinning records branded by Honda. You also see banner ads displaying Honda's brand. The music playing is A Tribe Called Quest, and the playlist was created by "Ghostfucker." The animation is simply the hand spinning the record, cutting back and forth somewhat synched to the rhythm. There are lighting effects synched to the music too, though at the moment of this image capture it was a little dark.
Just interesting to see how people are beginning to monetize playlist creation and audiovisualizers.
Posted by jkinberg at January 20, 2006 11:55 PM
I am the Founder of 
