Social media can produce an amazing stage for advertisement campaigns.  This article at SimplyZesty.com shows off a variety of innovative and very successful campaigns run on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other websites.  The creativity was in how social media was blended with other components of the campaign to make them so successful.  Here is one example:

The campaign : In January 2009 Burger King created a Facebook application that rewarded people for deleting friends on Facebook. All you had to do was delete 10 friends to receive a free coupon for a Whopper Burger. Every time you deleted a friend it also sent a notification to their wall, informing they’d been sacrificed for a free Whopper. Sadly the application is no longer available on Facebook, as the developers were asked to change this key feature so Burger King decided to pull it altogether.
The numbers : A total of 233,906 Facebook friends were deleted, resulting in more than 23,000 Whopper coupons issued .
Why we love it : It turned social networking completely on its head, encouraging people to do the very opposite of what we typically use social media for. It also tested the strength of these online friendships and just how high people valued them the price of a burger, apparently.

Others include the high fashion trench coat manufacturer, Burberry, called for photos of people wearing their trench coats in fashion capitals around the world and explain the story about their coat.  It generated 7.5 million page views in 1 year.

Carphone Warehouse created a youtube channel that has received over 2.5 million hits.

CNN streamed the inauguration of President Obama and alongside the video was a live feed of Facebook status updates of viewers yielding 3,000 comments per minute, over 200,000 total. “Look Ma, I’m on CNN!”

Bing sponsored an ad in Farmville where players received Farmville dollars for joining Bing’s Facebook page.  31 million viewers.

Of course IBM took a shot at this too with the Lotus Knows campaign soliciting our input on what Lotus knows.  I don’t Know what that’s doing for Lotus.