There’s a reason why we’re not embedding this ad for Tostitos Salsa. Click that link and you’ll see why – it’s definitely worth it.
(And yes, YouTube did it first with that Wario ad a couple of years back. But since that spot’s not online anymore, and since Vimeo did something similar with Honda last year, [...]

With only four days until SXSW (which we’ll be tracking live at our Twitter profile – follow us!), the hottest tech services are primping in order to make a good impression in Austin. And, with a slew of SXSW sessions covering location-based services, the leading LBS vendors are clearly doubling-down.
For starters, let’s check-in with Foursquare, [...]

A quick programming note: We will be covering the upcoming SXSW Interactive Festival via Upshot’s Twitter profile. Please follow @upshot_agency to get up-to-the-minute updates from Austin!
A couple lingering points from our Here and Now (with Foursquare) Potty Posting, before we get back to your regularly scheduled awesomeness.
One caveat that we didn’t get to in the [...]

After our “Cause Marketing Gets Bigger. And Smaller.” post from last week, a couple of subsequent examples popped that were worth passing along.
For starters, we mentioned that a number of cause marketing efforts were tapping the wisdom of crowds to generate unorthodox solutions to daunting social problems. PechaKucha, who we’ve profiled before, recently brought together [...]

As we’ve mentioned in our discussions of Immersive Sensory Experiences, the increasing prevalence of engaging technologies has driven consumers’ expectations through the roof.  No longer confined to early adopters, it’s the everyday consumer who now expects evermore immersive experiences from all forms of media.
While Steve Jobs can’t take all the credit for this trend, we’d [...]

A: Um, everything. Duh.
eMarketer (via Cone) recently considered this question across a number of different categories (including many of our clients’ industries), and the results are unanimously un-unanimous. The data suggests that consumers want information and entertainment, and incentives, and a forum for feedback, and even marketing in these “new media” spaces. (Demanding, aren’t they?)
While [...]

Brands, are you really confident about the quality of your products and services? Are you certain that you could send your customers into your competitors’ arms, and they’d still come running back to you?
You’d better be. Welcome to the world of Ubiquitous Connoisseurship.
See, there’s a reason we made this trend #1 in our 10 Trends [...]

Maybe it’s because I just cleaned up some pretty significant soy sauce spillage at my desk, but I’m especially receptive to Heinz’s announcement that they’ve just reinvented the ketchup packet. (For the first time in 40 years, no less.)
Citing the old packets as “the bane of our consumers,” especially for those eating on the go, [...]

Oh, that’s right, we just dropped a geometry joke up in here.
C’mon, you’ve got to admit that was pretty solid.
Get it? Solid??? Because three dimensional objects can be… ah, nevermind.
In addition to our awesome comedic chops, we also seem to be refining our predictive powers over in The Source. Case in point: one year ago [...]

‘Round these parts, we’re always big fans of Google’s Zeitgeist, since it provides an intriguing view of the world through the lens of web searches.
Some of the top results for 2009 are to be expected. Michael Jackson dominated Google the same way he dominated other forms of media this year, while other top searches can [...]