Red Bull Illume 2010 Promo

It's time to talk about the Red Bull Illume photography contest once again. The promo from a couple of years ago was pretty awesome, this year's was actually better. It's kind of interesting in a way to see the pasts analog promo up against the new digital promo. I think it just goes to show how all professional photography has really turned to digital. This year they partnered up with SanDisk to give away USB Card Readers and 4GB Compact Flash cards. Pretty awesome promo items to go with the press release. Of course, the press release and other data including 10 images from the previous years contest (which I have added to my wallpaper collection) were on the CF card. It's actually a very nice card reader too, which is good since my internal one goes on the fritz every now and then. It has 4 slots that take microSD-HC, SD-HC/MMC, MS/MS-Pro/MS-Duo/MS-ProDuo/xD, and of course CF. For some reason it is really hard to find a card reader that supports HC cards, so I was surprised this accepted them. Then again this was made for professional photographers who only use HC cards and the press release was on one. It's connected by a standard mini-USB wire and sits on a magnetic base that says SanDisk on it. As you can see it sports the Red Bull Illume logo down the side as well. The card reader is very small and light weight so I guess you can take it on the go if you needed to. The packaging was nothing really special but it's cool still.

(Yes, that is a papercraft of Gir and a Piranha Plant from CubeeCraft.)

Red Bull Illume 2006 Promo

Red Bull has an adventure sport photography contest every year called Red Bull Illume Image Quest. The submissions are quite amazing and are from some of the most talented action photographers I have ever seen. There usually is a nice promo device given away inside of each press release when they announce the contest for that year. I have received two so far. This one from 2006 and the new one for 2010. 2006 which is pictured above consisted of a hard plastic case (measuring 11.5"x14.5"x2"), 11x14 posters of the winner of each category from the previous year, a CD containing jpgs of those images and the press release, a kit to build a pinhole camera, and a roll of really nice 35mm color film. I originally thought the pinhole camera would be cheap and flimsy, but then I built it. It's really nice. It consists of thick, heavy-duty cardboard and plastic knobs/brackets. All the other pinhole cameras I have used in the past used photo paper inside where you could only load one picture to take. This one takes actual 35mm film which is really cool and useful. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures taken with it yet so I can't show you the results but there was a lot of pictures submitted to Illume taken with this camera and they are incredible. I never thought you could get such amazing shots with a pinhole camera but it makes sense since everything is in focus due to the lack of a lens.

$5 Rebate for Chicken and Transformers

This is probably the most bizarre rebate deal I have ever seen. You get $5 back if you buy Perdue Breaded Chicken and a DVD of Transformers 2. What the hell do these two have in common? There's no Robot Chicken (at least not in this case) or anything like that involved in the movie. I have no clue why Perdue decided to have this deal or why Dreamworks and/or Paramount agree to it? I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just a really bizarre promotion that makes no sense at all.

Intel Russian Dolls

Intel started working on a new, tiny processor for computers on October 15, 2007[source: Wikipedia]. They released it in April 2008. So they had some time to also think of different marketing campaigns for their new product. Someone came up with this really cool idea to make Russian dolls to show how their processors are getting smaller. So they went to FanBase who specializes in making Russian dolls (also known as nesting dolls) and kept the last one hollow. Painted on the dolls are what I believe are clean room developers/scientists with Intel Chip logos on them. The large doll has the Core 2 Extreme logo, the medium size one is the Core 2 Duo logo, and finally the smallest has the Atom logo.

Inside the hollow Atom doll they put an actual Intel Atom chip. This thing is tiny! I took some shots of it next to a penny (flipped the chip over so you can see both sides). I think this was a really cool idea for a marketing campaign. I'm not too sure if it helped with the Atom's popularity, but it is now the processor for most Netbooks. Which makes sense considering its size.

Is it successful: Somewhat. Like I said, it's a really cool concept for a promo piece. The only problem is that not everyone knows what a processor looks like. So most people don't even realize that it's a processor chip inside the last doll since it doesn't even look like a typical one. If you're familiar with computers and electronics, you'll get it. If not, it might need some explanation that it's an actual processor chip inside.