The editors of the online culture network Flavorpill have just announced the launch of Activate, a weekly email digest that focuses on world affairs. It is certainly an interesting approach for a network that is known for art, lifestyle events and music listings to venture into politics.

With Microsoft’s recent purchase of Massive, lots of corporate sponsors are jumping into in-game advertising as a way to reach the younger demographic that is watching less and less TV. The problem is trying to figure out how to do it in a way where it makes sense and doesn’t offend the gamer. While many advertising agencies are scrambling to throw corporate dollars for product placement within existing games, game advertising company Play, a unit of Publicis’ new media consultancy, Denuo, is taking a slightly different approach.

First, as creators of Miller Beer Run, Play focused on creating an advergame that was specific to Miller Beer, but also paid homage to the TV spot created by Y&R taking an interesting storytelling approach where the narrative was played across multiple media platforms. Second, instead of hosting the game on Miller’s corporate website, Play worked with Yahoo and MSN to release the game on their game-specific portals, with the logic that the game would have a greater reach on those portals, rather than attempting to funnel visitors to Miller’s website via banner advertising. The result was successful from Play’s POV — with over 3MM game plays and 1.2MM unique players.

Branded entertainment is popping up in full force this year, and HP is part of the mix. Following the heels of the “The Computer is Personal Again” campaign launch, HP partnered up with MTVU to create a new reality show called Meet or Delete. The premise is that by looking at the contents of another person’s hard drive, you will be able to find a perfect love connection, roommate or even musicians for your band.

(note: you must use Windows Media to view the premiere)