Oreo teams up with Adam Young of Owl City with a the Oreo Wonderfilled Athem and a sweetly animated video that asks the question, “What if I gave an Oreo to you?”

We’re taken through various scenarios of giving an Oreo to the big bad wolf, a vampire, a great white shark, along with other monsters and creatures. Would they make friendlier choices? Probably not, let’s be honest, they’re all carnivores, but it’s still a cute and playful concept.

Oreo recently reached viral hall of fame status with some quick thinking during the 2012 Superbowl blackout and a clever tweet.

Oreo does a great job of creating great content relevant to their brand, showcased in both this spot and in the tweet above. The “Wonderfilled” animation is beautifully done, and the song is adorable.

And to answer your question, Oreo, if you gave me one, I’d eat it.

Audi and Star Trek team up to bring you this week’s ad of the week featuring Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto, the two actors who play Spock in the Star Trek TV show and movies.

The spot pits the two actors against each other as they bet lunch on who will make it to the golf course first. Quinto has an Audi and Nimoy has a Mercedes Benz, one of Audi’s main competitors.

As a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise, I love seeing these two interact on and off screen, and I especially enjoyed the quote Nimoy throws out, “I have been and always shall be your friend,” a line he says in both generations of the movies.

Naturally, the Audi makes it to the golf club first, but Nimoy pulls a little Vulcan nerve pinch which leaves Quinto to crumble to the ground, proving he’s still got it.

The ad is playful, funny, and gives great nods to fans of both Star Trek and Lord of the Rings (See: The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins). Audi and Star Trek do a great job cross promoting the automobile and the new movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness, which opens in theaters on May 17, 2013.

Fascinating.

1. Lionsgate

Key message and emotions: galactic, fantasy, science fiction, a higher power

Lionsgate’s animated logo is a glorified version of the Universal Studios logo. It takes you on a linear journey through space to find the gem in the clouds.

2. Pixar

Key message and emotions: ingenuity, creativity, imperfect, resourceful, embedded

Pixar focuses on their masterful craft of storytelling to give some personality to their logo. As the lamp jumps in to create the “i,” it realizes the bulb is burnt out and needs the help of another Pixar character to fix it. This playful interaction makes Pixar feel more friendly and “human.”

3. Jerry Bruckheimer Films

Key message and emotions: uncertainty, adventure, serendipity, spark of life, excitement, travel

As you travel down the road, you’re surprised by the bolt of lightning that brings life to an adjacent tree. This is an unexpected effect that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats.

4. Bad Robot

Key message and emotions: mystery, discovery, chaos, stop to see the world, uncertainty

With the Bad Robot animated logo, you’re taken on a journey of uncertainty. As the robot runs back and forth off in the distance, you’re unsure where it will end up. At the end, the robot appears front and center and you’re relieved that the mysterious robot was coming for you all along. The ominous sound effects keep the viewer guessing and wondering what’s in store for the robot. Keep watching…

What’s your favorite animated logo? Let us know with a tweet @setdottv

This week’s ad of the week is from Ikea Stockholm’s “Bed For Life” campaign. The story follows a boy from infanthood to grownuphood, chronicling all the beds he owns along the way. It has an upbeat, slightly chaotic, and extremely heartwarming pace as we are taken on the bed journey of this man’s life.

The spot transitions smoothly from the 70s through the current day, ending with the man’s own child’s bed, completing the circle of life. I especially love the moment in the montage where his college buddies all jump on his bed in strange outfits- pretty accurate depiction of college.

What makes this ad so effective is that it connects the viewer emotionally to the brand while successfully demonstrating the use of a product. It’s relatable and practical. As the viewer I can see myself in a lot of those situations. It’s something Apple and Google do beautifully. Ads that don’t communicate an actual use case for a product often miss the mark, and Ikea hits it dead on here.

Enjoy the ad, buy a bed frame.

New Era, the sports cap retailer, and ad agency Pereira & O’Dell hone in on this fact and pay homage to Jackie Robinson in the latest “First Changes Everything” campaign.

An unknown character walks down a New York street as various strangers in respectable positions tip their hats to him. Fireman, police officer, handsome man with his son, etc. Turns out it’s a kid in a Brooklyn Dodgers hat and a Jackie Robinson t-shirt. All the feels.

With the new Jackie Robinson biopic, 42, out in theaters, the ad airs at an opportune time to resonate with many people remembering Jackie Robinson for all the firsts he achieved as the first African American to play in Major League Baseball since the 1800s and a prominent Civil Rights Movement leader.

Hats off to you, New Era, for a well done and poignant piece that should inspire us all to remember the firsts that paved the way for great changes in history.

SET’s collaboration with Nielsen enables predictive ratings point forecasting and campaign reporting for media buyers.

New York and San Francisco 04/16/2013—SET Media, a video advertising technology startup headquartered in San Francisco, announced the addition of Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings^TM to SET’s video measurement solution, Velocity ^TM.

Under this collaboration, SET will provide advertisers with the ability to forecast Gross Rating Points (GRPs) by program type (e.g., sports, automotive, entertainment) and individual videos in addition to post impression analytics. By adding Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings data to Velocity, SET has developed technology for measuring GRPs at the video level.

“As advertiser interest in digital video grows, it’s becoming more important that brands understand the performance of the content they sponsor,” said Andrew Feigenson, Nielsen’s SVP, Digital Client Service. “SET is the first ad technology company analyzing, reporting, and measuring ratings at the video and content category level.”

“Our customers want standardized metrics and we’re seeing significant traction with broadcast buyers looking to move into digital video,” said Michael Mathieu, SET’s Chairman and CEO. “This collaboration enables broadcast buyers with familiar insights into digital programming, and digital planners with more data to optimize campaigns.”

As the advertising industry moves to integrate traditional broadcast and digital media buying processes, SET’s work with Nielsen comes at an opportune time. This agreement gives advertisers the ability to predict campaign performance and adjust media plans accordingly. Brand advertisers can see how many points they’ll reach by targeting Sports content versus Home & Garden content, for instance, before a campaign runs.

SET’s video ratings solution is the latest addition to the company’s robust data suite, Velocity, which pulls data from multiple partners to offer comprehensive analytics to clients. Last month SET delivered a complete upgrade to its digital video advertising platform, Guide, to provide video-level performance analytics to brand advertisers.

About SET Media

SET is a digital video technology company that connects brand advertisers with consumers through high quality, targeted, and brand safe campaigns at scale. SET”s proprietary classification and video-specific reporting platform enable brands to see every video they’ve sponsored, ensuring complete brand safety and certainty in digital video advertising. SET was founded in 2007 with offices in San Francisco and New York, and is backed by Crosslink Capital and Highland Capital Partners.

Visit http://set.tv or follow @setdottv for more infomation.

If you’ve ever been a part of a company with a sales team, you’ve probably heard the bells or gongs that are sometimes used to celebrate various accomplishments. The process is very simple. When you close a deal or secure a new client the person who closed the sale rings the bell or hits the gong. The idea is to add energy and excitement into the workplace and motivate the rest of the team to strive that much harder for the next sale or client.

At SET, we’re known for developing one of the most innovative video targeting technologies in our space, so we wanted to create our own unique version of this common celebratory experience. We dedicated evenings and weekends to creating the ultimate sales motivator. The ideation process began where it often does, the dry erase board. The initial inspiration came from an existing product, the “Cash Grab Game.” We added a police light, a siren, laser-cut SET logo and a plexiglass case.

Next step was to build the prototype. As we learned in art school, rapid prototyping with cardboard is king.

Here’s the first version of our prototype.

This version failed miserably and we embarked on a journey of physics and air flow 101. It was an incredibly enlightening experience. It also became readily apparent that we needed far more blowing power than a simple box fan could produce. With the new blower and additional parts in had, we charged forward…

Once the museum-grade podium was fully constructed at TechShop SF, we returned to the SET office for assembly. We also ran some critical tests on the blower hose (see photo).

The second test was much more promising, but we still had a long way to go. We learned that the airflow exiting the top of the case was crucial. It was still unclear how to create a consistent tornado or circular airflow within the case.

Without fully proving the current design, the plexiglass case arrived and we installed it. It wasn’t perfect, but we went ahead and tested with the final materials in place.

After many iterations and re-positioning the hose input we struggled to find the perfect combination of air volume and entry/exit airflow angles to create a swirling of dollar bills.  After hours and hours of attempts, we discovered our VP of Engineering has a degree in Physics. That would have been good to know when starting the project!

With the dollar bills swirling to our liking, we put the finishing touches on the “Ultimate Media Sales Motivator.” Voila!

While we were physically building the project, there were some amazing technical integrations coming together. The first integration we needed was a way to remotely power on/off the machine. We enlisted a WeMo device and some perl scripts to handle this. Secondly, we needed a way for our remote sales team to “virtually” sound the alarm…enter a Salesforce integration that communicated directly with the WeMo device whenever an opportunity in Salesforce was changed to the “closed” status.

The Ultimate Media Sales Motivator is complete. WeMo powered. Salesforce Integrated. SET branded. Thanks for reading this!

If you’d like to build your own, I’ve compiled a list of parts and materials you’ll need.

Parts you can buy online:

Acrylic display case
WeMo switch
Blower fan
Police light
Loud siren 

Parts you need to acquire in-person:

Wood for podium
Paint for podium
Laser-cut logo
Laser-cut top
$$$ bills (crumpled)

PS. We’re going to open source the code and designs so anyone can create their own.

The narrator in the video says that they’ll use 30,000 technicians to watch the videos and narrow down the submissions.  It’s a very labor intensive undertaking and thankfully it’s fake. At SET, we’re constantly analyzing this infrastructure challenge and building solutions to watch thousands and millions of videos automatically so advertisers know what they’re buying.

In order to mimic the scale of our automated video classification system, you would need to hire 4,791 employees who work around the clock. No breaks. No vacation. SET currently employs 25 people. No April Fools joke here.

SET Media Adds New Tools To Optimize Video Ad Campaigns

We’re stoked to have Ryan Lawler from TechCrunch cover our rollout of the new Guide. We’ve worked really hard on creating a more effective analytics and planning platform, and are really excited about the results.
Here’s a snippet.

“SET wants to provide an unprecedented level of targeting to advertisers, instead of the broad-strokes category buying that exists at other ad networks. In the end, SET wants to make video ad buying easy, but also to make it as effective as possible. It can do that by giving advertisers the tools to optimize campaigns themselves, or through its technology to automatically optimize campaigns as they happen.”

Check out the full article here.

San Francisco, CA—[March 13, 2013] SET Media, a leading video advertising technology company, today announced a new product release of their advertising planning & analytics platform, The Guide. SET’s Guide has been in market for the past year, characterized as the first-ever platform to deliver video-level insights to advertisers, offering an unprecedented look into media buys.

 Previously, SET could forecast impression levels for campaigns, and with the arrival of the new Guide, SET can now forecast and preview actual videos that will run in a campaign. This gives advertisers deeper insight into the content they’ll run on beforehand and equips them with the information necessary to plan more efficient campaigns, similar to planning a TV campaign.

SET also provides in-depth analytics on how each individual video performed during and after a campaign, allowing for real time optimization. The Guide reports on metrics like click-through-rate (CTR) and video completion rate (VCR) per video, in addition to metrics like impressions served, player quality, and video location on a page. Key campaign criteria can be modified in real-time to drive greater performance.

An industry first, only SET’s Guide can show each video where the brand’s ad appeared, and key metrics and performance data per video. Other existing methods of reporting offer only a broad stroke category look at how video ad campaigns perform, and indicate little about the actual content or its level of quality. SET is uniquely positioned to offer its partners inventory level analysis and granular performance metrics before, during and after every campaign

SET’s product launch is in line with the company’s strategic goals of making digital video buying as seamless as broadcast buying, and giving advertisers the means to make media planning easy and valuable. The company will continue to enhance the video buying process by working to automatically optimize campaigns based on individual video performance and plans to roll-out a self-serve analytics interface soon.

To learn more about SET’s offerings, visit http://set.tv or e-mail info@set.tv today.

About SET

SET Media is a video technology company that connects brand advertisers with their audiences through high quality, targeted, and brand safe campaigns at scale. By leveraging computer vision with proprietary scene classification, SET targets and filters digital videos using object, facial, and motion detection, enabling advertisers to run ads on only the most relevant content to their brand. Exclusive to SET is the ability to show customers exactly what content they’ve sponsored by individual video. Their unparalleled reporting gives deep insight into campaign metrics and real time performance, making SET the only company of its kind to ensure this level of maximum brand safety and control.

SET was founded in 2007 with offices in San Francisco and New York, and is backed by Crosslink Capital and Highland Capital Partners.