"No pants day; batting, owling and planking; people thinking they are vampires and zombies; the world's gone crazy ... No! The world's gone Four Loko!"

So begins the press release for Phusion Products' new Four Loko beverage campaign, the brand's latest in an ongoing effort to clean up its image by mocking its image in the media.

In a true bit of irony, the brand is now doing almost exactly what it told us a year ago it "made a conscious effort to reject."Continue reading...

It was only last week that we asked, "Has Ford's Focus Spokespuppet Doug Jumped the Shark?" Turns out, he has jumped ship entirely.

Ford has decided to shelve Doug, the orange spokespuppet for the Focus, after a six-month run that did wonders for consumer interest in the car, exceeding the company's initial expectations.

Brandchannel has learned that the denouement of Doug's story will be told on Thursday with the release of the last new video in a series of many.

Ford released the penultimate chapter today, a Doug-less video that featured only "John," the human handler for the smart-alecky mascot, bemoaning the departure of his friend after Doug drove off himself in a 2012 Focus.

"The video today tipped it off," Scott Monty, Ford's head of social media, told brandchannel. "Tomorrow we'll have the concluding video."Continue reading...

“Verge culture,” as in young, digital, influencers and brand-savvy hip youths, is poised for a social media guerilla takeover — if Karmaloop TV has anything to do with it.

An offshoot of the Karmaloop.com retail site, KarmaloopTV.com is an online video-based network that's vying for broadband and video-on-demand distribution in the US. It aims to be a full-blown 24-hour cable TV network, and is now pitching cable and telco TV operators that it can help them “reclaim” the 18-to-34 year old audience that lives online, on digital, on mobile and on social.

In a similar vein to Vice TV, it aims to offer an in-depth look (and insights) into global street culture. The website also features exclusive interviews with designers, brands, artists and musicians — musician/producer Pharrell Williams signed on as KarmaloopTV's creative director in May.Continue reading...

In honor of today's kickoff game for the NFL's 2011 season (go Packers!), we invite you to watch the stupendously awesome video, "One More Yard."

It features Paul Cunningham, a former photo editor for Major League Baseball who (lovingly) makes and sells artisanal footballs (and baseballs, naturally) on his Etsy shop, Lemonball. Even if you don't like football, you'll love this video.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you add value with branding ... and tell your brand story with video. For inspiration about how a video like this could help your brand, check out one of our new favorite blogs: F**k Yeah Made In USA.

With the spring/summer 2012 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week shows getting rolling in New York, here's a viral video that's timely and trending on YouTube.

To promote the grand opening of Westfield Stratford, a behemoth of a retail shopping center in London, The Viral Factory created this promo to showcase "100 years of East London style in 100 seconds."

The video delivers just that - decades of fashion in a zippy 100 seconds that's a delight to watch. Check out the photos below for stills of each decade's fashion.Continue reading...

The Hulu mission, “to help people find and enjoy the world's premium video content when, where and how they want it,” and “to create a service that users, advertisers and content owners unabashedly love,” has a yen to expand. Undeterred amidst domestic bidding acquisition battles in the U.S., Hulu has just launched a subscription service in Japan (at hulu.jp), the company’s first international foray. 

Japanese subscribers will have access to thousands of U.S. television episodes like 24, Bones, Criminal Minds, Desperate Housewives, Fringe, Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, Heroes, LOST, NCIS, Private Practice, Prison Break and Ugly Betty; and hundreds of feature films like Pirates of the Caribbean, Armageddon, Men in Black and more.Continue reading...

Madres y Comadres is an eight-part original Spanish-language miniseries from Kmart targeting Hispanic mothers and the unique challenges they encounter raising a family in America and remaining true to their Hispanic heritage, as seen above, housed on a dedicated YouTube channel.

With Hispanics now the largest minority in the U.S., the webisodes are humorous and sensitive to the prevalence of extended families in the culture, hence the title: 'Madre' meaning mother, and 'Comadre,' her female confidantes.

Evocative of a 'telenovela,' the scripted episodes tackle issues such as a heartbroken mom who discovers her son is trading homemade tamales for tuna sandwiches at school; a son from a Spanish-speaking home who gets a ‘C’ in Spanish and an ‘A’ in Chinese; a mother whose daughter really wants a sleepover, a practice not popular with Hispanic moms.Continue reading...

It's interesting to see the different ways that artists handle copyright infringement and illegal downloads of their music.

Metallica sued Napster over people "sharing" their music, a band who is clearly against piracy. Radiohead pioneered a "pay what you want" deal to download an entire album in 2007, and tweaked that with its latest release. Music labels and artists, meanwhile, are constantly swatting down YouTube videos on copyright issues, while file-sharing sites are constantly being shut down as new ones pop up.

One band who not only doesn't mind the copyright issue on YouTube, but actually rewards fans for it, is blink-182.  On August 2nd they released their first single ("Up All Night") in eight years, and the video (above) has already had more 200,000 views. The catch? The video is comprised of footage uploaded onto YouTube by fans, whose amateurs videos illegally used ... blink-182's music. Why did they do it?Continue reading...