Yesterday Pepsi released a new music video called ‘Oh Africa’ performed by Akon and Keri Hilson. All money provided by downloads of the song will be donated to different associations.

The clip is also an attempt by Pepsi to be part of the football world cup this year in South Africa ….. Coca-cola is the official sponsor of the event.

In this music video we can see Didier Drogba and surprisingly for an African music video about football, Fernando Torres (Spanish player).

It is a good idea, but badly timed, why release this video only one day after the African Nation Cup?

Annually, since 2007 the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) association has organised this famous strip tease video in order to promote its message through internet (PETA’s 2010 State of the Union Undress) .

This concept is a pretty original one and very cost effective… and will probably have an impact on people who are not normally concerned by the treatment of the animals.

This year you can see Michelle Obama on the video!

Please finds blow the YouTube version:

I realised think it would be a lot cheaper and (probably more effective) for any alcohol campaign organised by the government health service (NHS here in the UK) to use these shocking videos, as seen on Youtube…

Watch the video below and let me know if you think it is more shocking than any other videos from the NHS?

For the release of its new game ‘Trivial Pursuit team’, Hasbro has launched a funny website where you can play Trivial Pursuit online. It is a worldwide game where women and men battle against each other, and right now the women’s team is winning.

It is a very nice idea for a global launch. Hasbro also released a funny video about the battle of the sexes.

In the Paris Metro today many black and white pictures of clowns were displayed. These pictures are without any slogan but with a cryptic website address: www.jesuisunclown.com (I am a clown)

Once on the website, surprise, nothing is there! The website displays videos explaining the experience of successful French Internet entrepreneurs. This idea of “I am clown” comes from the people told who them that their ideas wouldn’t work – “Your idea is just a clown’s thing”.

This website try to tell the new entrepreneurs to believe a little be more their ideas although other people may think it is ridiculous.

It is a very nice idea with an excellent media campaign. The question is how are they paying for all of it? Weirdly, the campaign was paid for by the successful outcome of a lawsuit .

Crazy French

After the recent hacking of Gmail accounts in China, Google envisages leaving this new market with financial consequences.

Effectively some the human rights activist’s email accounts were hacked. Google suspect the Chinese government of being behind this attack.

This announcement by Google to stop any operations in China arrive only one day after the declaration of Hillary Clinton who was concerned about charges by Google that China is censoring web search results – “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation”.

Google’s retreat is probably welcomed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin who has publicly been against the Google activities in China since the beginning.

The possible exit of Google from China will obviously help the search engine Baidu, but only for the short term because without any serious competitor Baidu may not be driven to expand as quickly.

At the end of the day Google has a chance to change its image by becoming a company with values. This change would be probably very profitable in terms of reputation when presently we hear more and more negative press about Google’s monopoly of the online world and its omnipresence (web, phone, computer…)

Let see what happens over the next few weeks and wait for the reaction from the Chinese government

Google has launched a new website section on what we can do on/with Google. They are actually doing a PPC campaign about this new advice page.

This new section is called “Google things to do.” It is a list of clickable sentences like “Share your YouTube favourites on the bus” , “Keep your family videos in the family”, “Flight arrival and departure times in real time”. Every time that you click on one of these sentences, a little box opens with the explanation. Sometimes it is a video or goes directly to the application.

Google Things to do

This new “Google things to do” is a great idea because it is pretty hard for a user to keep up with all the new Google applications and functions.

The way they have organised this page is not clear though, we have too many diverse functions/applications on the same page (e.g.: Google map, image, Google Doc, YouTube, the search engine…). They probably should have created a page by categories.

More positively, this page shows the impressive number of innovations that Google has developed. Clever Google.

By looking at the Google trends tool we can see that the weather is a popular topic when it is snowing in England.

The number of online searches about the weather has exploded these past two weeks. Never before has there been so many people looking at weather information online. For example, the BBC has five times the usual number of visitors to it’s weather section.

Unsurprisingly, every time that it is snowing the number of searches increase significantly. Good time to advertise on the weather websites…

Google Suggest - Universal Search

This Google update is pretty simple. When you are on the home page, Google will suggest some ideas for keywords and shows some universal results even before you have pressed enter.

This new update is only available for the .com and doesn’t work with Google UK. It is also very limited; just useful for the weather and some basic functions (conversion rate…). It is far from what I would call a ‘universal’ search… if you are looking for ‘Nike logo’ nothing shows up (same for ‘London map’ or ‘tiger wood news)’.

Google Suggest - Universal Search

Anyway this function has the possibility of expanding, and consequently being more useful, with more media integrated into it (map, news, football result, image, video…)

Right now this update is too limited and very few people will even see it. However, at least Google is trying to do something a little bit different from Bing or Yahoo

The new Google live search has finally appeared on the Google UK results page. It is just a little window with a continual feed of information. Most of the results are from Twitter and news websites.

Google UK Live Result - Tiger Woods

It is hard to say if this is a good initiative, obviously the quality of the links can be very poor because the content is judged the same way as a traditional website. You just need the keyword to be on your Tweet to be on this little window. I think that a lot of scam will happen with this new functionality as well.

Anyway, it is a new and interesting function that shows that Google can crawl extremely fast through a different number of sources, but in the long term I don’t see the additional value of it compare to the traditional Google news result