Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I'm the CTO of Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Anchorman's Friendster Marketing

Posted Jul 9, 2004

It looks like Dreamworks is using Friendster to promote the release of Anchorman, with user profiles for each of the characters. In addition to Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy, there are photos and descriptions for Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), and Champ Kind (David Koechner).

It looks like someone's logging in every day to approve every new friend request and testimonial. (So far, Ron Burgundy has 273 friends from word-of-mouth alone.)

Is this sort of promotional tie-in a first for social networking applications? Does anyone know if Friendster approved (or was paid for) the creation of the fakester accounts, which they officially forbid? (Thanks to James for the original tip.)

Update: Some users are seeing giant Anchorman banner ads, proving that it's an official Friendster tie-in.

12 Comments (Add Yours)

Jul 9, 2004
9:55 AM

witz wrote:

The Friendster accounts are supported by advertising banners, so I am positive it's paid for. Though Brian Fantana never approved me, bastard!

Jul 9, 2004
10:17 AM

Andy Baio wrote:

All Friendster profile pages have ad banners, it's not exclusive to these accounts.

Jul 9, 2004
1:05 PM

mat wrote:

Witz beat me to it, but I was going to note that based on the big ass Anchorman bannner ads...

Jul 9, 2004
1:09 PM

witz wrote:

I meant that they have banners POINTING to these profiles...it's definitely a pay deal.

Jul 9, 2004
2:08 PM

Andy Baio wrote:

Thanks for the screenshot, Mat! It's strange, I'm not able to see those banner ads at all.

Jul 10, 2004
8:43 AM

Nelson wrote:

For the past month I've been seeing ads for the Anchorman all over the net in odd places. It's clear someone in marketing is trying something a bit different. It almost worked on me - ordinarily I'd totally ignore a movie like this, but this time I got as far as reading the reviews :-)

Jul 12, 2004
2:52 AM

Chris wrote:

A Wired article on this just went up. It cites this blog post:

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64156,00.html

Jul 12, 2004
10:47 AM

Dalton wrote:

I recall Belle and Sebastian doing something like this in October for the release of their new album. "Dear Catastrophe Waitress". I don't know if it was official and OK'd by the Friendster people, Catastrophe is still up there, and she's got thousands of friends.

Jul 13, 2004
9:09 AM

astralgirl01 wrote:

The Anchorman characters are on MySpace.com as well...

Jul 15, 2004
11:09 AM

witz wrote:

http://tribalfusion.speedera.net/m.tribalfusion.com/media/181496/728_Brick.gif

Jul 26, 2004
2:51 PM

Anonymous wrote:

Giant anchor man banner ads alone doesn't prove anything.

Aug 26, 2004
5:39 PM

name wrote:

yup catastrophe has 1900 friends

Waxy Links

November 7, 2009

NYT visualizes the unemployment rate for different demographics — 48.5% of young black men without a high school degree; 3.6% of college-educated white women over 25

November 6, 2009

Another World level ported to Javascript — in other emulation news, a NES and Gameboy emulator in JS and SNES9x ported to Flash (via)

Blocktronics' ANSI art tribute to RaDMaN — powered by Viewtronics, Peter Nitsch's gorgeous new Flash 10 ANSI viewer (via)

Aaron Straup-Cope leaves Flickr, joins Stamen Design — one of my favorite geeks joins one of my favorite companies

Unreal Engine 3 development kit now free for non-commercial use — huge announcement, along with the recent free release of Unity Indie

The Big Picture's series on Martian landscapes — Kai's Power Tools in real-life (via)

November 5, 2009

Preview of McSweeney's Panorama, their one-shot newspaper — as expected, looks incredibly great (via)

The Grant-Pattishall Award — congrats, Kellan! (via)

Birdhouse for Your Soul — Greg Knauss finds one small piece of the historical web

Google open-sources Closure Tools — JS compiler, along with Google's huge widget library (via)

Video montage of actors speaking the movie's title — great comments with some missed opportunities; "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to The Taxi Driver?"

The Morning News' Cloud of Atlases — impossible to guess, but look at all the pretty colors

American Airlines fires UX designer for explaining why their UX isn't great — a lapse of judgment from both American Airlines and an employee who cared too much

November 4, 2009

Overheating, photo series of gadgets thrown through walls — from issue 6 of Amusement, the incredible French gaming culture magazine (via)

Ricardo Autobahn's The Golden Age of Video — insane pop culture video mashup

November 3, 2009

The Last Days of Gourmet — sad photo series, reminds me of the dot-com carnage photos

Put This On — first episode of Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor's Kickstarter-funded video series on clothing

Jono Bacon's The Art of Community released for free download under CC license — looks fantastic and worth buying (via)

Eric Testroete's papercraft portrait Halloween costume — incredibly creepy, like videogames leaking into the real world (via)

November 2, 2009

Mark Pilgrim's history of the IMG element — told through annotated conversations from 1993 (via)

Every vandalism edit to Nickelback's Wikipedia page — I wonder which edits managed to stay in the longest without detection

November 1, 2009

Mike Pusateri's Halloween costume data collection — for the fifth year, he's collected every costume name; this year, "nothing" spiked to #2

XKCD's movie narrative charts — here's a more serious attempt at Primer's timeline

October 30, 2009

GameCity Squared's 15-Pixel Megamix — extremely minimalist interpretations of 12 different games

October 29, 2009

Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat — it measures your smile and stabs you if you're not smiling sufficiently (via)

October 28, 2009

Auto Tune de Nieuws — needs an angry Dutch gorilla

Facebook prank memorializes living person — the Facebook team should allow an email veto, or at least require better documentation (via)

2D Boy's pay-what-you-like World of Goo results wrapup — don't miss the breakdown by OS and country (via)

FreeForm's short film on the Open Internet — impressive set of interviewees, directed by Jesse Dylan of Yes We Can fame

Using Flickr as a paintbrush — coloring overhead maps based on the dominant colors of photos taken on the ground (via)

Anchorman's Friendster Marketing

12 Comments (Add Yours)

Leave a comment