This is a great viral from Gillette, not too heavy handed with branding, in fact it compliments their advertising endorsements from tennis ace Roger Federer. The video of the Swiss tennis prodigy is a clear homage to the tale of William Tell, who used a bow an arrow to split an apple on his son’s head – an old Swiss legend.  But there are questions about whether the modern day Swiss legend – Federer – really performed the trick shot, or whether it is a cheeky bit of digital cheating.

Either way it has generated 3 million views and got people talking. Gillette will be happy with that.

As well as promoting sales on Amazon, with Foyles in conjunction with the The Times we promoted an exclusive London event with Peter Mandelson in association with to celebrate the publication.

The event is today (19 July) and has, we are delighted to say, sold out.

The campaign is a teaser with a simple teaser question which rolls down and offers a prize competition for answering a defence related question. The campaign will run in the lead-up to the world’s leading air show at Farnborough.

As well as leveraging the Whitehall and Westminster audience that MessageSpace reaches we offered our expertise in search marketing by assisting with a tactical buy on Google’s search result pages for a wide variety of keywords relating to the Air Show.

The Google search campaign again used a prize quiz format to attract people to look at an issue who would not normally be drawn into considering defence matters.

The Farnborough International Airshow takes place from the 19 to 25 July.

Political blogs are the newest form of political journalism and many of the their readers will aspire to become journalists. The adverts ran over the summer ahead of the new term.

MessageSpace was retained to do the ad buy and has been acting as media buyer for a number of tactical “hit and run” campaigns aiming to reach defined voter segments on behalf of the Conservative party.

A Conservative party spokesman said, “Our belief is that many people who will benefit from the plans we’ve outlined may not engage directly with the type of technology publications that will cover the manifesto in detail, but they would be drawn to specific pledges that are relevant to them. We believe this campaign shows our commitment to engaging with people well beyond our traditional activist base and that it underlines our belief in technology to help kick start our economic growth.”

The pre-electioneering for the 2010 General Election campaign has begun, and political parties have fired their opening salvos. It’s already hard to miss MessageSpace-affiliated bloggers on mainstream news channels – and we can’t wait to see where the next six months will take us.

To kick off the new year (and politically charged atmosphere), MessageSpace is following up from last year’s sponsored debate at the House of Commons in conjunction with the Henry Jackson Society and Delib. The second debate in this series, titled: “Technology not Policy will win Election 2010″ will look at the increasing need to spread the political word of the parties, but does that sometimes mean watering down the content? The event will be held on Monday 18, January in the Grand Committee Room in Westminster Hall.

The host will again be Danny Alexander MP (Lib Dem), and the panellists this time are: Rishi Saha (Tory), Kerry McCarthy MP (Labour), Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC) and Julie Meyer (BBC Dragon’s Den & Internet Entrepreneur).

We look forward to seeing your there!

Next Monday (14 December) will see crack teams of digital war-planners being extraordinarily rendered in black vans to an undisclosed location.  With only months to go before full scale political war breaks out, digital advertising and campaigns agency MessageSpace has, in the tradition of the trenches of the First World War, organised a truce with drinks.  After paintball.

Combatants from CCHQ and Labour’s digital teams will be fighting with leading bloggers and online campaigners from the political world.   It could be brutal, it will be fun.