It’s inevitable. Every holiday, Christmas is no exception, marketing agencies and big corporations shell out the big bucks and long hours to make a splash in people’s busy holiday lives.

I keep stumbling across various holiday greeting card sites (or colossal wastes of time, whatever you want to call them) and thought I would share a few. They may not be the most tasteful, and certainly not in the spirit of what I consider Christmas to be, but their technical merit alone warrants a look.

First, and most impressive (though disturbing on many levels) is R/GA’s Tattoo Santa. I have no idea how they figured out how to map text and images to moving video, but it’s impressive.

If you’re feeling scroogey, you can plaster your face on a dancing Scrooge at OfficeMax’s Scroogeyourself.com. They also have (I think it was last year’s campaign) Elfyourself.com, where you plaster your face on a dancing elf, and can even call in to leave an audio message that will get included in your message. Interesting… all I can say.

AdMission put together a matching game.

Thought has an evil looking santa with a chainsaw game (Red Christmas). Not one for the kids for sure!

Hmmm. You know… All of this is not leaving me feeling very festive on this last day of work before vacation. Maybe I should call it quits here.

Anyone have any others worth sharing? Post ‘em below. And do have a Merry Christmas!

• Introducing Video Sitemaps
  Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps
  (tags: google Video search sitemap sitemaps)
• Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input
  Consumers want to feel they are being heard, and they love having an impact on the future development of products.
  (tags: marketing socialmedia viral)
• Top 5 Viral Video Ads of 2007
  (tags: viral video ads)
• 5 Tips to Make the Most of Your Online Video Advertising Campaigns Online Marketing Strategies and Tactics : eMarketing and Commerce
  The following are a set of best practices to ensure that advertisers, advertising agencies and marketers get the most from their online video ad campaigns.
  (tags: online video advertising)
• Price Survey: What Do Web-Video Ads Cost?
  What does it cost to advertise in the Web-video medium? The answers vary as wildly as the range of Web video content itself.
  (tags: video advertising pricing)

• ERBERT & GERBERT’S Human Flipbook
  Wisconsin based sub sandwich shop chain creates the first human flipbook video to promote it’s restaurants.
  (tags: advertising Video youtube flipbook design stopmotion art)
• Viral video marketing: Learn as you go
  Nathan Wright talks about “viral” video creation, expectations and a few lessons learned.
  (tags: viral video marketing youtube break)
• YouTube opens up revenue sharing to amateurs
  Kevin Nalts discusses YouTube’s recent announcement regarding opening up its video revenue sharing model to more contributors.
  (tags: youtube video nalts revenue)
• 9 Tools for Uploading Videos to Multiple Video Sites
  9 separate sources that you can utilize in order to automate the process of uploading your video to the various video sharing sites
  (tags: marketing Video tools sharing videos upload)
• RexNET.tv - real estate video portal
  RexNet.tv is a new video portal for video property tours… currently only in Virginia.
  (tags: video real estate property tours)

Genius. Pure genius!

(Thanks to Nathan T. Wright for the heads-up!)

It’s that time again, so here’s a little video reminder for you this month!

The Central Iowa Bloggers meetup every first Friday at Panera, 6740 University Ave, West Des Moines, IA - 8am - 9am.

P.S. - I chickened out. Didn’t want to brave the elements today. (Had enough of them driving home last night.) I guess I’ll see you all next month.