Among the marketing archetypes, such as The Giveaway, The Ego-Booster, and The Reveal, the entertainment biz is particularly fond of The First. That is, making something old seem new enough to plausibly claim that it’s being done for the first time. Done right, Firsts typically deliver two nice bonuses: They appeal to jaded consumers, and they can generate added value via PR hits. Take, for just one example, the Simpsonize Me application Fox and Burger King rolled out to as part of the promotion for The Simpsons Movie. Was it truly the first time anyone could have their image transformed in a particular branded style? No. But it was brilliantly executed and it felt enough like the first time to prove a huge viral success.

And this, naturally, was followed a year or so later, by a variety of popular “Obamacon” image makers; one example here.

In our long run as marketers, the Stradella Road partners can claim a few such Firsts of our own. What follows are some of the campaigns that we’re particularly proud of…

LORD OF THE RINGS. At a time when “social” was not yet part of the new media lexicon, studio legal departments regularly sent out cease-and-desist letters to anyone who posted Star Trek images, and “fan” was considered another word for “copyright infringer,” we convinced studio management to work with fans in a new and completely open way. We would offer a continuous flow of information, create a dialog, and tap–simultaneously–into the passion of both the filmmakers and the core audience. Most people thought we were nuts… but it all turned out pretty well.

WEDDING CRASHERS. When it comes to putting your image into a branded video or animation, you probably think of the terrific OfficeMax Elf Yourself campaign. But this modern digital spin on those old wooden carny figures with a hole cut out for you to insert your face and have a picture taken appeared first in our promotion WEDDING CRASHER, itself a long overdue revival of the raunchy R-rated comedy. CRASH THIS TRAILER was a big hit with consumers (4 million+ video views), bloggers, and the media, in part due to a clever seeding effort.

SNAKES ON A PLANE. There were a lot of unique aspects to a campaign that grew into a surprise pop-culture sensation—and a low-budget B-movie that ended up with 95% consumer awareness by the time of its release. (And there is still some debate over just how valuable all the hoopla was, with naysayers pointing to the fact that the movie didn’t make $100million theatrically, or even half of that. We point, instead to the fact SNAKES earned double to triple comparable titles and continued to outperform in ancillary windows as proof of the campaign’s impact.) But the First we want to focus on here was the “Get A Call From Sam Jackson” gag that used a clever piece of technology to allow consumers to personalize a message to send to friends and family from Mr. Samuel L. Jackson himself (since redone by Alec Baldwin for 30 Rock, amongst others). This went so viral so fast we almost developed whiplash.

For SNAKES, we also created the first ever hommage (you see how this works?) to the first ever internet viral video. That piece of history was called ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US. Our take, ALL YOUR SNAKES ARE BELONG TO US, yielded 5 million+ video views on a budget of less than $5,000.

TRAILER REMIXES. One of the advantages to covering “new” media is that you can sometimes get away with things traditional marketing departments either couldn’t or wouldn’t. After overcoming a number of internal obstacles, we asked the very talented British DJ/VJ team AddictiveTV to remix our trailer for TAKE THE LEAD and the result was a terrific and fresh music-video style piece that played perfectly to the target audience. We liked the piece so much, that we engaged the guys again on SNAKES ON A PLANE and SHOOT EM UP. Now? Everyone uses them! Some of my favorite pieces they’ve done for other studios include FAST & FURIOUS, IRON MAN, and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, and now other marketers are jumping on the bandwagon, including RED BULL, Europa League Soccer, and even the OLYMPICS.

AND THE BEST OF THE REST…

• For THE GOLDEN COMPASS, we took the age-old “if you could be any animal…” idea and transformed it into the first ever Daemon Generator, which generated more than 10 million page views around the world.

• For TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY, we released the first ever faux anti-Piracy public service announcement, JACK BLACK ON PIRACY, which racked up millions of video views across dozens of web sites—as well as numerous calls to the MPAA asking about their hysterical new campaign (they called us and were very good natured about it when we explained the situation). We also commissioned the greatly talented Rob Schrab to create an original video series of “Hell O’Clock News” reports to support the film that went on to develop their own cult following.

The unique thing about the BFCA is that many members attend movie studio press junkets each week where they interview celebrities about upcoming releases. This gives these members personal insight into stars that consumers find highly engaging. Our recommendation was to employ social media to support BFCA members by activating individual critics and expanding their social profile through sharing celebrity anecdotes and film news.

At the start of the campaign, the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards level of awareness was essentially zero across social media platforms. Stradella Road assisted in generating an increase of 32% in the number people following BFCA members on social media venues like Twitter and Facebook. By the time of the awards show, awareness was at 76% across microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), our primary focus, and coordinated messaging from the BFCA membership served as an effective marketing platform for the awards show.

Beyond the awards push, BFCA members continue to be active in social media, driving personal relevance and connecting them to a younger audience than they were reaching via traditional media channels.

“At the BFCA, our goal was to support our membership in staying relevant to consumers as they lead increasingly digital lives. Stradella Road supplied innovation and insight in delivering both short- and long-term strategies for us. They empowered the individual media professionals in our membership with social media prowess and the ability to pull work from multiple mediums into a timed social media distribution campaign that supported our annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards program. The strategy assisted in increasing TV viewership of the awards by 39%. More importantly, it has given our 235 members a sustainable platform for relevance in digital media, helping them to drive awareness and syndication for their professional work,” said Joey Berlin, president of the BFCA.

Unfortunately, this demo is total vaporware, not even remotely possible given current technology. Instead, the early AR applications we’re seeing tend toward the banal. The AR for the Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios might entertain kids for a minute or two, which is much longer than the time necessary to get the thing up and running. Paramount’s Transformers 2 AR app, which “allows you to wear a virtual Optimus Prime mask, watch footage from the film with a mini-virtual Bumblebee, and more”… OK, that’s fun for, well, not that long, really. The McDonald’s-Avatar collaboration is marginally better, but note how even the promo video spends more time on the install than the experience, a sure sign that the cost-benefit scale isn’t where it needs to be.

The promise of AR is still largely in its potential. But you can begin to see hints of where it could go in applications like the Layar Brower, and Mobilzy’s Wikitude and games like Arrhrrr! from Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab. We can imagine marketers hiding things in plain site, and then revealing the secret in a dramatic way for those who know where to look—with virtual 3D models jumping off of billboards or embedded phrases like ”We see things nobody else does…” with embedded glyphs in physical objects that reveal, well, something really cool when viewed with an AR-equipped device.

On the flip side, there will surely also be a raft of totally practical uses of AR, and that’s sexy in it’s own way. Things like AKQA’s Virtual Box Simulator for the U.S. Postal Service, which let’s you figure out what size box you need for whatever it is you want to mail, and Zugara’s Web Cam Shopper, where you can (kinda sorta) see what you would look like in different outfits.

Clearly, we’re still at the “look at this cool technology” phase with AR. But get it straight: AR is a tool. Like the fisheye lens, computer generated imagery, bluescreen, to become truly valuable, the technology needs to move out of the spotlight and become part of the storytellers toolkit. Hopefully, some creative types out there have become so worked up by the phrase we used earlier (“not even remotely possible given current technology”) that they’re already well on their way to proving us wrong. We sincerely hope so!

So… Yes, we like the look of the thing. A lot. But two immediate concerns trouble our sleep:

1. The Return Of The Walled Garden. The device fairly well screams “paid content” and that’s understandable. But swell as the platform must seem to those with something to sell, walled gardens (AOL, anyone?) require us to give up much of what made us come online in the first place–the open-ended internet with its browser uncontrolled by anyone but the end user. As one of our team members put it, “It’s with a bittersweet sense of awe that I look on the iPad, in the same way one might be impressed with the technology of a Blackhawk helicopter, but terrified of what it means when used as designed.”

2. Flash appears to be MIA. We didn’t get caught up in the Apple-Flash fracas when it was restricted to the iPhone/iPod Touch, since those small screens are ultimately meant for snacking on the web. But when Mr. Jobs calls the iPad “the best way to experience the web” and then shows a demo clearly lacking Flash support, it feels like we’ve dropped into some alternative universe. Whatever your feelings about Flash on the web, the reality of it is that millions of sites, and some 75% of online video, rely on it. No flash = no Disney, Hulu, Farmville, ESPN, etc. And, as our friend Ian Shafer points out, online ads are “almost 100% rendered in Adobe’s Flash.”

Something’s gotta give, right? The idea of going back to the bad old days of having to build out every digital asset six times to get them to work on various and sundry proprietary platforms is in no way appealing, not to the marketers and creators that have to pay for it, the agencies and studios that are always expected to do more for less, or the consumers who expect their goodies to work whenever and wherever.

Okay, deep breath. It’s early days. Much remains to be seen. Perhaps David Pogue said it best in his New York Times blog when he described the iPad as “a 1.5 pound sack of potential.”

We’ll have more on this as the story develops.

While there were any number of big, thin, sexy hi-def TVs on display, the emerging ebook-slate-tablet-netbook scene struck us as more newsworthy. It remains to be seen which combinations of design, form factor, and interface will win the hearts of the crowd, especially with Apple’s entry still a semi-mystery. But here’s a look at some of the promising early entries:

Skiff e-Book Reader
Plastic Logic Que Reader
Nokia Boolet 3G (one of our fave netbook designs)
Lenovo IdeaPad hybrid tablet…thingie
nVidia Tablet
Sony’s Dash
HP Slate
Dell Slate

For sheer futurific wow-factor, it was hard to beat this prototype laptop with a transparent OLED screen. Of course, the odds of getting your hands on anything like this soon are plenty slim.

The “connected” TV was also fairly ubiquitous. We doubt these hybrids will kill the PC, but some services are no brainers, like the Skype TV touted by Panasonic. Of course, as TV’s get more sophisticated, something’s got to be done to improve their interfaces and input devices. Today’s remotes won’t fly, but something like this from Sling (via from your cable or sat provider) or this remote/interface combo from Boxee could provide the missing link.

The cultural and commercial impact of the iPOD and IPHONE revolution was fairly obvious on the convention floor. In addition to endless cases, carriers, earbuds and headphones, skins, and the like, we particularly liked these clever i-extenders: the Evenno Fingerist, a sharply designed “guitar amp,” and the iDiscover keboard/music studio.

For just-plain-fun, we found the AR Drone, a cool copter with an onboard camera remote controllable via iPHONE, to be hard to beat—if they can really get the thing mass-produced and delivered for Xmas like they promise. (Honest-to-God quote from a guy demoing the thing: “Some Hollywood guy told us he HAS to have this before anyone else, no matter what the cost.”) Failing that, we may have to settle for the faux x-wing Striker fighter, if Lucas doesn’t shut them down first.

Lego is a quality company showing plenty of imagination, and we loved their demo reel for their upcoming Lego Universe MMOG (“launching in 2010″), another great example of how brands can now live online and offline and every dimension in between.

Last, but not least, was a little trend we think has big potential: the mini projector. The ShowWX was one memorable examples; roughly iPHONE sized,  this class of device could provide a bridge connecting the personal and public possibilities of all those portable media devices already referenced.

1. The Rise of the “Read-Mostly” Devices.
Kindle, Nook and Sony eBooks, the JooJoo Tablet and maybe even an Apple Tablet will all be bumping and bubbling up to find their place in the market. Credit the iPhone and iPod Touch for creating the “Read-Mostly” device—a tool that mostly consumes media but is also capable of creating it to a limited extent (photos, tweets, short videos). These devices are suitable for snacking on media; immersive and interactive experiences will remain the province of computers, game consoles, and televisions.

2. Dataphones Finally Get Serious.
Texting doubled in the USA over the past year or two, —and cell phone call times decreased to 2.3 minutes. Which is to say… the death of the “minute” is coming down the pike, and we can expect to see more and more phones sold with plans measured in Gigabytes rather than minutes. Buy a 5GB plan and do what you want: VoIP? Texting? Whatever. Expect Sprint and/or TMobile to kick in with a plan like this in the coming year.

3. The Al La Carte End Run.
Like a cool breeze on a late summer day, there’s a sense of a change ahead. Some of the signs are here already: Netflix Instant Watch surpassed DVD rentals, according to Feedflix, and rumours swirl that Hulu and YouTube are moving to pay-per-view offerings. Remember that recent seismic shift in the music business, where iTunes is now the largest music retailer? In 2010, we’re finally going to see what “A La Carte” video means to companies like Comcast and Time Warner—as well as HBO, CBS, NBC and all the others. Sure, the politicians in the hip pocket of the cable industry don’t like it but the harsh reality is that IP delivery of media over relatively “dumb” pipes is where we’re going.

4. More Decoupling of Budgets and Outcomes.
In 2009, we saw two movie-making extremes. On the one end, we got Avatar for a reported half-billion dollars in production and marketing expenses and Transformers for not too much less. And both of those made out okay financially. At the other end was Paranormal Activity, reportedly made for $15,000 and raking in more than $100 million. The former outcome has been the norm for a while; the latter phenomenon tends to be more rare. But in 2010, largely thanks to the pervasive use of social networks and an increase in paid digital distribution channels, we look forward to seeing more low and micro budget films attaining a higher degree of financial success.

5. Facebook Levels… and Maybe Even Contracts.
The huge run-up in Facebook membership fundamentally altered how we use the internet. At 350 million members, it has over 10 times more users than AOL did at it’s peak (26.7 million), and, in the same way AOL brought the Internet to the masses, Facebook has mainstreamed Social Networking. That said, in 2010, Facebook will finally start to get some competition in the English-speaking world, with a consolidation of smaller players as they align to draw the inevitable disenfranchised former Facebookers into their webs. Remember, nothing goes up forever.