Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. I work with Expert Labs, helped build Kickstarter, founded Upcoming, made an album, and other stuff too.

Contact Me: Email, AOL IM, or follow me on Twitter.

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

February 8, 2012

Double Fine's Kickstarter project to make a new point-and-click adventure — best project video ever; I backed it so hard

Interactive ASCII fluid dynamics animation — based on this JS simulation (via)

What Popular iPhone/Android Apps Know/Transmit About You — ignore the awful visualization and skip to the table; Angry Birds sends your contacts to third parties!?

Path apologizes, deletes user address books — they never should've done it in the first place, but this is the right way to handle it

BBC tracks down an Internet troll — as the Daily Dot points out, he's more of a racist asshole than a troll (via)

February 7, 2012

PressPausePlay — stylish documentary on the digital media revolution of the last decade

February 6, 2012

Restored Disneyland footage from 1957 — only open for two years in this video

Robot readable world — found footage from machine-vision tests

February 3, 2012

Avería, the average font — preview them all (via)

February 2, 2012

How and why Mark Jaquith became an atheist — gripping personal story of the life-affirming shift from faith to evidence (via)

Where's the Pixel? — find and click on the black pixel; you may need to clean your screen first (via)

ARTINFO on the chilling effect of the Prince v. Cariou copyright ruling — the journalist mentions me and Kind of Bloop

Darkness — a brilliant 24-hour comic by French cartoonist Boulet (via)

January 31, 2012

Nano quadrotors flying in formation — don't miss the figure 8 pattern at the end (via)

Bootstrap 2 released — here's the announcement

Jeff Atwood on the risks of unmoderated communities — left to their own devices, popular online communities get taken over by cheap, easy gags (via)

How and why J.D. Roth sold Get Rich Slowly — interesting tale of a founder selling his site, but unable to share the details for years

Yahoo lays off in-house Flickr support team — from what I hear, it was done with 10 minutes' notice to Flickr management

Mapstalgia — videogame maps drawn from memory

January 30, 2012

Shit Programmers Say — strikingly similar to Shit Rocks Say

Impressions of Corporate Logos by a 5-Year-Old — "a cheetah, a cheetah, a cheetah"

Bellbot — web app that beeps when you get new signups or sales

ScratchML — markup language for recording and replaying turntablism

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? — nice piece of Quora fiction (via)

David Carr on Kickstarter's film funding at Sundance — 10% of the festival was funded on Kickstarter, with two optioned by HBO

Why ten-year attendee Mike Pusateri's skipping SXSW this year — I made the same decision to skip this year; I may regret it, but it just wasn't fun last year

MegaUpload's user data set to be destroyed by Friday — collateral damage in the copyright war

Blogging declines across the Inc. 500 — too bad; Twitter and Facebook aren't a replacement for longer-form communication

January 29, 2012

ChatChat — Terry Cavanagh's multiplayer game about being a cat (via)

January 27, 2012

Identifying Ice Cube's "Good Day" — process of elimination

Anchorman's Friendster Marketing

12 Comments (Add Yours)

Leave a comment