Coupons! Deals! Discounts! Oh MY!

Is everyone else as sick as I am with the constant bombardment of Daily Deal sites? With some of these sites you have to supply them with an email address before you can even check out the deals. Not so cool in my books.

Now, I am one for a good deal, but I am over all the spam in my inbox. Seriously done with it.

But Monica (I hear you ask) How will you know when you can get cheap OPI nailpolish - one of your favourite things in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD?

Ah ha my friend! I have found a way.

Readers... Meet Chelsey.

I found out about Chelsey today. She's a pretty classy site which is aimed pretty much bang on my demographic. Must admit, I was always a little jealous that the boys have Get Frank and we get nothing. Well, no more.

I'm getting off topic. Sorry.

Chelsey has aggregated all of the coupon/deal/t'shirt and even booze offers on one page:

Sweetbix right? I'm setting this page as one of my open on startup tabs right next to Gmail, FB, grabaseat and Reader.

This is especially good as there is no need to supply your email address just to check out the deal.

Brilliance. Thanks Chelsey.

Oh, guys. Haven't forgotten about you. Get Frank also do a deal aggregator.

BNZ - Find Your Start

What a delightful treat to stumble upon Friday evening.

There in Aotea Square was a tasty projection for BNZ and a short story competition thingee (Literacy Awards) that they are running called findyourstart.co.nz.

Unfortunately it wasn't a perfect evening for such a fantastic ambient piece, but I still thought it was rad.

Projected on the wall was this:

and if you continued to watch, you got the start of a short story already written for you (also, there were people coasting around the square handing out cards and story starters on them).

The BEST part of all of this? The story starters which were projected onto the wall were being written off the cuff by a couple of creatives in a van:

Who, from what I can tell, were writing from about 6.30pm to 11pm. That's a lot of off-the-cuff writing.

In case you all missed it and want to check it out, I even took a video. You're going to have to excuse my laugh half way though. It seems as though the guys in the van were drawing inspiration from people who were walking past, which was awesome when it was the people obviously coming out of an evening at the Civic, but when they were talking about the crew I was with... even more hilarious.

So nice work BNZ. What a wonderful promotion (people don't know how to use their words anymore, it's great to be encouraging it) and fabulously executed. I love interesting and different ambient ideas. Totally my favourites.

The Awesome Reaction Opportunities of Online Advertising

Jeepers, what a news day! Hows about that Obama unscheduled announcement at 3-something this afternoon? That was a ripper.

News started coming through Twitter about 2.30 this afternoon about the unscheduled announcement from Obama and then very quickly the rumour mill went into overdrive in that it was to announce that Osama Bin Laden had been killed and the US had the body.

This kind of news of course spreads like wildfire on the internet. The announcement was to be streamed live on The White House website, which of course was delayed for almost an hour. During which time, everyone was hungry for information, which meant publishers had to turn information around SUPER QUICK.

As @tweetdaniel pointed out, TV3 didn't manage to get it quite right:

I would recommend clicking on the link above so you can check it out in full, but basically, it reads:

"We are currently experiencing extremely high traffic due to the announcement that Barack Obama is dead. Please bear with us we will be back up soon."

Whoops.

Not sure that was right.

Now, if you've read my blog before, you will probably know that I don't have a lot of nice things to say about TVNZ. I still don't, because when I tried to watch a live stream on tvnz.co.nz this afternoon it wanted me to report the error in loading, which I tried to do a number of times. Le sigh.

However, they did manage to do something right today (shock horror I know).

There I was, reading Mashable.com on what was to be announced and what do I see, but a One News banner run through the Google Content Network:

I do not tell a lie, this was up within half an hour of me first reading about the rumour that Obama was going to announce the death of Bin Laden. Now, it's not the prettiest of banners, but it's bang on. All the information you need. Up to date. Relevant.

I think it is awesome and just shows how online is the best medium for this kind of immediate response. Press also gives the opportunity for quick reaction turnaround, but for that, we're talking the next day, not within the hour. This is just too good. Brilliant work.

This doesn't change anything though TVNZ. This is clever, but all is not forgiven...