TED Issues Open Challenge to the Global Advertising Community: Create an Ad Worth Spreading
Inspired by the viral success of TEDTalks and expanding on the conference's mission of Ideas Worth Spreading, TED today announces its Ads Worth Spreading Challenge, a contest that serves as an open invitation to the global advertising community to reinvent, inspire and engage audiences with a new definition of what advertising can mean in the digital age, using TED.com as its platform.
"We want to encourage development of ads-with-a-difference," says TED's curator, Chris Anderson. "Ads that engage our audience authentically, intelligently, delightfully. Ads that people will want to share because, like the rest of TED, they encapsulate ideas worth spreading."
TED invites the business community to submit their most forward-looking video campaigns to the contest by January 10, 2011. A judging panel will select up to 10 winning video campaigns, which will premiere at TED2011, February 28-March 4, 2011, for the gathered audience of 1500+ thought leaders, and will appear on TED.com for free for one week in March.
During the week of March 21-27, 2011, the winning campaigns will occupy every available postroll ad space on TED.com, garnering roughly nearly 7M in free advertising impressions. In addition to appearing as post-roll after TEDTalks, each ad will also have a permanent page on TED.com, allowing the ad to be rated, shared, commented on and linked to, perhaps earning large numbers of additional views.
Submissions to the Ads Worth Spreading Challenge must be made in the form of a video, which can vary in length from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, and submitted in a common digital, downloadable format as detailed in our submission guidelines.
Videos must be promotional in nature, but can promote a company, cause, product or idea. It can promote a product, company or cause, but is likely to do so indirectly rather than directly -- for example, by showcasing the values, motivations and questions of the organization's people. The ads may be commercial, PSAs or self-promotion.
The campaign should be new -- created between January 2010 and January 2011. Ideally, it should be new creative, but it is possible to submit campaigns that appeared elsewhere. Submissions must be received by midnight EST, January 10, 2011.
All entrants into the Ads Worth Spreading Challenge will be notified as to whether their video has been selected by Friday, February 25, 2011.
Full details and submission guidelines may be found here:
http://www.ted.com/adsworthspreading
