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Of course not. http://www.bmwfilms.com/

Oh. My. God. Clive Owen would OWN sa the Spy Hunter. I think he should be the next James Bond, too. And he can replace Mike Myers as Austin Powers while he's at it.

Well, that last one would be weird, but the rest would rock. BMWFilms kicks butt. Does anyone know where I can find the one or two that were pulled from release?

The yellow star ads can work well. I've found the movie previews and the BMW shorts films to be interesting.

I'm surprised that TiVo hasn't pushed harder on movie previews. Seems like there should be a entire section of movie previews, all paid sponsership by the studios and a source of revenue for Tivo, available on-demand. It'd be useful and interesting. I know I'd watch a bunch of them.

Try BMW Films. I recommend the movie from Season 1 'Star'. Madonna, Clive Owen - directed by Guy Richie. These are all in Quicktime format. And they're really good shorts.

It's a new advertising model. I downloaded them, and I'll show them to people every once in a while. They get me to advertise for them.

I've found more and more over the years that I spend less time at some of the "big" sites and find more value in the content from smaller organizations.

99.9% of the web users are clueless users who suffer spam, popups, "hit the monkey" banners, and all the other dregs of the web. For them, this will be another annoyance they will have to live through. Some, like Pavlov's puppy, will "enjoy" the adverts and eagerly look forward to more (remember BMW Films?).

As for you cerebral, "733t" "h4x0r5," your day will come when you get a nice cell in Camp X-ray for stealing internet content without paying by watching the adverts as you were told to do!

BMW has done an entire series of those here in the states. One of them even had Madonna in it. You can find them all here at BMWFilms.com

They siphon off the excess evil that is in each artist's Deal With The Devil contract. They then refine the evil to a more pure and usable form. The Devil can always be relied upon for spilling extra evil on his contracts with artists.

Interestingly, it's all text anyway, and doesn't really need that much space, unless they think they need to get creative with the end credits.

BMW Films uses a text stream for their credits, wrapping the package the great QuickTime format that has other goodies like subtitles, director commentaries (and subtitles to it), each on different streams that can be turned on/off.

Theoritically one can create a codec that would OCR the credits, save it as text and render them in the standard scroll at the end of the film, (not forgetting hacking a support into the popular media players), if one is so inclined. Unfortunately no one's going to bother doing that for a bunch of peoples' names.

I believe it's a Union thing, everyone must have their name credited.

I don't know if anybody's seen BMW Films, but that's the sort of interesting thing that I think we're heading for. Basically, BMW hired a bunch of film directors (John Frankenheimer, John Woo, Tony Scott, Guy Ritchie, etc.) and had them creat short films featuring BMW vehicles in prominent roles. They're actual shorts, with discernible plots, and no superimpositions of the specs of the cars or announcer voiceovers. They've had some success getting various cable and satellite channels (DirecTV even had a special channel that just looped them continuously) to show what amounts to a series of 10-minute ads for BMW.

In a related vein, DaimlerChrysler is shopping a series of films which were entered into a competition. Apparently, they had a contest where owners of Chryslers could send in homemade films featuring their cars for a prize. Some of the entries were good enough, in DC's estimation, to warrant packaging them into a series.

If by 'valid' you mean 'effective', yes. So are many other forms of fraud and deception.

Sorry, you're wrong. Viral marketing is often quite entertaining and rarely pushy. The true point of viral marketing is to make something that people WANT to to show their friends.

Here's an example: John West Salmon

That ad is perhaps the best example of viral marketing I've seen. I've seen it on TV three different times, not as a commercial, but as 'content'. Month after month this thing turned up in my user's mailboxes. Even now there are a ton of sites that you can download it from. I just got over 100 hits for it on Kazaa. John West isn't buying airtime to show the ad, it's got a life of it's own. It't viral.

No need for fraud or deception. Just killer content. Look at BMW Films for another example.

www.bmwfilms.com, of course. My favorites are Guy Ritchie's and Ang Lee's under the "Season 1" link. Good times.

Make better commercials!

Make me want to watch them.

I actually went out of my way & spent over an hour watching the BMW short films on their web site (BMWFilms). I even watched the director voice-over & "making of" extras. They rock!