Today is the deadline for The Amazing Pitch II and we’d love to see your series pilot in on the action! We have some awesome entries already, but you still have a few hours to get yours uploaded.

We’re giving away $1500 to the best video, and $500 to 5 runners-up. But more importantly, we’ll be optioning the best submissions and taking them around to our many brand partners and working deals to get your show sponsored. You could get $30,000 to develop a 6-part series!

While you’re thinking about how to polish up those final edits, I’ll leave you with a pretty wild success story I’ve been reading about today thanks to a tip from Steve Bryant at Reel Pop. Three young guys in New York made a no-budget video series last year in their apartment called “We Need Girlfriends“. After millions of views, thousands of fans and a handful of YouTube and MySpaceTV front page features, their show got bought by CBS in a development deal. Wow!

The New York Times just published a pretty cool backstory about how these guys made their show successful. It’s a fantastic read. If you’re looking for some inspiration, this is it! Here, watch the first episode:

Tags: amazing pitch, xlntads, video, series, we need girlfriends, sponsorship

Armed with a user-made fan video with over a million views on YouTube, McDonald’s enters the wild world of consumer-generated advertising with this brilliant little piece of work promoting the wonders of Chicken McNuggets:

We’re very excited to see one of the world’s top brands using this kind of advertisement. Sure it’s raw, but so cool and funny! This piece is getting airtime on major networks all over the country. If it’s good promotion for McDonald’s, folks, it will be good promotion for your brand, too. CGA, FTW!

Tags: video, viral, advertising, mcdonalds, funny, success, mcnuggets

Our friends at AdPulp wrote today about Tay Zonday’s Dr. Pepper Cherry Chocolate Rain video that echos some of our thoughts on the video and how this is a vision of things to come. To wit, mining for talent on YouTube is fun! And inexpensive! My favorite line from the AdPulp post is: “Strategies are being written by the brand team and execution is being handed off to DIY consumers and culture makers. Isn’t disruption fun?”

Yes. Why yes it is! Learn more about how XLNTads is shaking things up.

Tags: adpulp, advertising, tay zonday, dr. pepper, cherry chocolate rain, xlntads, trends, viral

Apple’s getting clever with new rich media banner ads. They’re pretty much videos, but they’re actually banner ads. Very clever. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the coming months. Both from Apple and from others as video advertising becomes more commonplace. Crazy that the YouTube clip showing the banner ad has already gotten over 30,000 views in 24 hours. Wow. Think about that for a second. Talk about viral!

[Thanks, TechCrunch]

Tags: advertising, apple, mac, xlntads, funny, innovation, banner

All over the blogosphere today, we’re seeing this report. Blendtec Blenders, the brand behind the now famous viral video campaign “Will it Blend?” have reported that since the making of their videos, online sales of their blenders have gone up five-fold!

Proof. A powerful message doesn’t have to come from a big-budget production!

The famous iPhone blend:

For this week’s edition of Creative Inspiration, I wanted to point out a great ad that AgencySpy wrote about. It’s not CGA, but it captures something special in simple, elegant terms with an on-the-fly production. It’s a great lesson in keeping your eye out for creative opportunities wherever they might arise:

A new Adidas viral ad features All Blacks rugby union star Dan Carter shooting the s**t with his father in his backyard. It’s an unscripted spot viral spot that took the agency 180 Amsterdam about 30 minutes to capture. It was almost an accident, as they were really in New Zealand to shoot a full fledge commercial. We just love the use of opportunity here.

Tags: agency spy, xlntads, creativity, advertising, cga, adidas, video

Heinz ran a months-long, highly publicized and rather expensive CGA campaign for it’s new television commercial. The winning video got it’s 30-seconds of fame when it ran primetime during the Emmy Awards. Truthfully, it’s a pretty decent ad, one that beat out 4,000 competing videos promoting the ketchup brand. But, seriously, guys. You should see that awesome ads we got for our much briefer XLNT Brands contests. Our creators are kicking butt. More on that in a moment.

Tags: heinz, ketchup, cga, advertising, marketing, video, xlntads

I just came across the WTF? Network - apparently an effort by Whole Foods Market to get some rich media content from engaged consumers to spread around virally (join the club, friends). Unfortunately, they chose one of the most annoying names ever (as Angela Natividad points out on AdRants, “The channel lives up to its acronym, and not in a super-cool way”), and they’ve only garnered 9 videos with 400 views between them all. Perhaps they haven’t put any energy into it.

I was just thinking, Whole Foods should probably just get all their hip employees to make videos about how fun it is to work for them. I’m sure they’d come up with better, funnier and waaaaay cooler concepts than these videos. At least they’d have more focus. Or, better yet, they could contact us and get the XLNTads community to get cracking on producing some really awesome ideas and content.

So far, this is the best the WTF? Network could come up with:

Tags: whole foods market, viral, video, wtf? network, advertising, cga, consumer, video, youtube, xlntads

LendingClub, a web site that facilitates peer-to-peer money lending, just completed a successful consumer-generated advertising video contest. They note a couple of interesting metrics on their blog. For example the contest garnered 18 competitors and 100,000+ views during a four-week run and with an incentive of $8,000 in prizes. It’s important to note, too, the contest received some major blog coverage today, because the valuable PR gave the site an additional ROI in addition to the marketing they used to publicize the contest across Facebook and YouTube.

Here’s a look at the winning entry. It’s pretty well made. In fact, the professional filmmaker and popular YouTuber Chris Barrett created it and won the contest on a pretty good concept. I think it could have been more tightly edited, but it did get over 17,000 views on YouTube. Slyly, or perhaps smartly, he included the attention-grabbing tag ‘Paris Hilton’. That helped. Here’s an interview with the filmmaker.

If you’d like to see the other videos that won prizes, you can watch them all here.

Tags: lendingclub, chris barrett, video, viral, advertising, cga, case study, xlntads, contests