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The Spot: Blake Got GameFly
IDEA: Blake Griffin is a spectacular athlete. Oddly enough, he's also a pretty good actor. "Some friends of mine directed a Kia spot he did," said Tim Ketchersid, a director at Gifted Youth, Funny or...
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Mobile Gaming Ad Network Chartboost Raises $19 Million
Over the past two years, Chartboost has built its own business by helping mobile game developers run ads in each others’ games to attract players and revenue. That business can be best described as an...
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Four Shops Vie for Sony PlayStation
About five years after hiring Deutsch/LA as its lead agency, the company is considering a change. The incumbent is defending its turf against three other shops; sources identified them as 180LA,...
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We Have Seen the Future and It's 3-D, Mobile and Waterproof
There were two big observations out of the annual Consumer Electronics Show last week. First, from media giants like AOL and Comcast emerged the common vision that 2013 will be the year content...
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Star Wars 'Gay Planet' Upsets Advocates and Opponents Alike
If you run a popular video game and you're on the fence about including gay themes, what's the best way to make everyone happy? Not like this. Bioware, creator of Star Wars: The Old Republic,...
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Data Points: Brand Fans
We're increasingly friending brands on Facebook—the average consumer has 29 brand friends on social networking sites, up from just seven a year ago. But that doesn't necessarily mean we're spending...
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Ad of the Day: Call of Duty
I hope The Replacer sticks around for a while. The titular character in 72andSunny's trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 - Revolution is portrayed by veteran actor Peter Stormare, who riffs on his...
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Xbox Aims to Bow First Original Series Within the Year
Online video has yet to create premium content. YouTube, Netflix, Hulu have all tried, but none has achieved the mass appeal and big-budget scale of a CBS. Last year Microsoft hiredNancy Tellem from...
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Syfy Bets $105m on a TV Series and Video Game [Updated]
At the risk of stating the obvious, $105 million is a lot of money. That’s about what Comcast and NBCUniversal have shelled out on the new Syfy series and video game Defiance, a hybrid unlike anything...
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Trailer for Sims 3 University Life Reenacts Popular Photo Memes
There's nothing new about marketers trying their hand at popular Internet memes. But Electronic Arts takes a pretty clever stab at it in the new trailer for The Sims 3 University Life expansion pack....
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PETA Urges Better Treatment of Arthropodal Killing Machines in Video Game
PETA is planning to hand out anti-abuse pamphlets at the launch of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, urging gamers to respect the game's pixelated extraterrestrials known as The Zerg. The pamphlet,...
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Samsung's Unicorn Apocalypse Game Is Now Real, Although Apparently It Sucks
Samsung's Unicorn Apocalypse, the fictional game featured in half a dozen ads that aired on the Oscars, was always begging to be defictionalized—and now it has been. Samsung held a developer contest...
View ArticleManny Anekal Jumps to MediaSpike
Manny Anekal has been named the chief revenue officer for MediaSpike, a startup focused on mobile in-game advertising. Anekal is one of the most seasoned veterans in the still-nascent world of...
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Google Chrome Turns Any Website Into a 3-D Marble Maze Game
Google's latest innovation in time-wasting fun—this time out of Japan—is the Chrome World Wide Maze, a browser experiment that turns any Web page of your choosing into a 3-D marble maze. You need a...
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Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer Deliver a Kung-Fu Ass Kicking in EA's New Golf Ad
Tiger Woods is a golf nerd, right? Right. But in fantasy video-game land, he destroys you and all your hoodlum friends, fake kung-fu style, because you're trying to steal his trophies. His charming...
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William Shatner Battles the Gorn Once Again in Ad for Star Trek Video Game
Gorn … but not forgotten! To promote a Star Trek video game launching this month, William Shatner and a guy in a lumpy lizard suit winningly reprise Captain Kirk's hand-to-claw struggle with the alien...
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J.B. Smoove Joins Peter Stormare as Replacer Wingman for Call of Duty: Black...
Activision needed some high-impact firepower to tout its downloadable Black Ops 2: Uprising content, which is set for release next week on Xbox 360. Two riotous "replacers" answered the Call of Duty....
View ArticleMicrosoft's XBox Music Service Goes Ad-Supported With TargetSpot
Streaming audio service XBox Music—which is not, actually, just for XBox—will now have in-stream advertisements. TargetSpot, which provides targeted ads for both CBS Radio and ABC News Radio, will...
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Loads of Companies Are Violating Children's Privacy
Children’s privacy is so sensitive that all it took for kids game Mobbles to pre-emptively pull its app last December was a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission by a privacy group. Four...
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One in Four Teens Use a Cell Phone to Get Online
Teens have been the most voracious online users for years. What’s changed in the past year is that they’re increasingly accessing the Internet on the go (thank Apple for that). A Pew Research Center...
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