Promo Interactive

About two months after Pepsi’s Amp Energy brand began offering a free iPhone app that promised to teach men how to find social success with 24 different female stereotypes, the app has been pulled from iTunes because of an apparent flood of protests in blogs, in Twitter and on 24-hour cable business shows.

But the most interesting thing to me is that, having been damned because it did let one of its brands roll out this fairly cheesy app, Pepsi was then soundly damned because it didn’t—that is, didn’t insulate the parent company from this controversy but instead issued an online apology in a way that took it broader than just the Amp product line. more

A new social media campaign for Sara Lee brand’s Fresh ideas pre-sliced deli meats is bringing a bit of humor into the lives of busy, harried moms with satirical “video confessions” courtesy of players from Chicago’s Second City improve troupe.

The content actually comes via Second City Communications, the company’s business-services division, which worked with Sara lee to generate copy for three fictional-but-very-real-sounding “Mama Sagas” that poke fun at life’s mothering problems and manage to work in a pitch for Sara Lee’s Fresh ideas deli line to boot. more

Computer maker HP is ready to make everything about you famous—except your face.

In a campaign to promote its new “Artist Edition” HP notebook computer, the company’s “You on You” user-generated content contest has asked people to create Web videos expressing who they are and what they’re passionate about and upload them to HP’s YouTube channel . But in a twist that resembles HP’s broadcast commercials featuring only the hands of famous endorsers such as Fergie, Shaun White and Serena Williams, entrants can’t show themselves above the neck. more

Stride Gum, the Cadbury Adams-owned brand whose ads encourage users to chew more gum, wants to get consumers playing more video games too. And they’re putting up $25,000 as a prize.

Interestingly, that prize won’t go to the fastest killer of pixellated aliens, but to an actual privately-owned arcade. more

In case you needed a bit of perspective on how events like the Jackson memorial service feed (and feed on) interactive media, here’s a link to a strong post from the AppScout blog detailing the traffic counts and social links that the live event produced. The Facebook Live Stream referred to in the article lets viewers of video streams on other sites see a real-time discussion among Facebook members of the content they’re watching. After testing it during the Obama Inaugural, Facebook only rolled the feature out into general release about two weeks before the Jackson memorial service. more

Whether you think Facebook or any of the other standout social networks are a fad or a harbinger of a new way for people to share and connect, it’s an undeniable fact that right now, people are spending increasing amounts of time in online communities where they can share news about their lives and interests and pick up news about other people. And marketers—always interested in catching people at their most attentive and engaged—are anxious to start reaching folks in those communities and to start putting their social grids to work for them. more