WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS

TOP VIRAL VIDEOS OF THIS WEEK

Piggy – GEICO Commercial - US insurance ad with a whining piglet

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill - Impressive bike stunts coupled with Band Of Horses music

Antoine Dodson’s Commercial For A Sex Offender Tracker App.

Yoda – ‘Get you there he will’ - Yoda lends his voice over services to SatNav firm TomTom.

LEBRON JAMES FOR NIKE ‘WHAT SHOULD I DO?’

This week saw the release of a Nike Youtube video featuring LeBron James entitled ‘what should I do’. In the commercial, Lebron remineses on his high school days along with the choices that he has made to date; questioning what he thought was right vs what the public thought was wrong. It’s racked up almost 5 million views in just a few days already.

He probably didn’t think he would get a response but….he did:

Michael Jordan responds – ‘maybe it’s my fault’ (1.5 million views)

The citizens of Ohio respond (3.7 million views)

South Park spoof

3D PROJECTION MAPPING MOVES TO THE NEXT LEVEL (FINALLY)!

I’m a bit over the whole projection mapping thing, it’s been done to death & is essentially a passive experience which looks nice….until now. With the release of Xbox Kinect, projection mapping has become interactive. Check out this ‘making of’ video, which explains how they created a giant 3d projection mapping interactive game people in the street could play with in Germany. 

12 PART DETECTIVE STORY PRINTED ON BEER BOTTLES

Massachusetts brewery Just Beer has released a new IPA called “The Case of the IPA.”  But instead of doing the old boring label, Just Beer decided to print a long-form story.  In a 12-pack, each 20oz bottle contains a little more of a 20’s-style detective serial, each label acting as a page.

FACEBOOK LAUNCHES TARGETED PUBLISHING

Most relevant to those who have a global page…

On Wednesday, as a Thanksgiving ‘present’, Facebook launched targeted publishing via their API, which means those using third-party tools to manage their Pages can now send more relevant posts to specific users – for example, they can select only users from London, or only users that have German set as their language (or combinations thereof). Syncapse were the first to update their software so that their customers can utilise this, but Vitrue and Buddy Media followed suit soon after 

NISSAN JUKE IAD – DEMO

This is a fantastic example of the possibilities of the iAd platform. Nissan have created an interactive game about racing around to get donuts…it not only engages people with the car (the Juke model) but also gives them a simple, comedic & fun experience all via an advert! This is advertising mixed with gaming mixed with video mixed with social mixed with product demo mixed with music etc etc

It’s awesome.

GOOGLE BUYS GROUPON

Not 100% confirmed but if the rumours are true then this gets Google straight into the local digital vouchering space in a way that their ‘Tags’ feature in Google Maps has only managed to do in a limited way
 

NEVER SAY NO TO PANDA

I love these ads. Arab Dairy created the ‘Never say no to Panda’ ads to promote their Panda Feta, Istanbully, Cheddar, Parmesan and Mozzarella cheeses, with five commercials featuring a Panda bear in an office, hospital, kitchen and supermarket. When people say no to Panda, Panda is not happy, despite his love of the Buddy Holly song, “True Love Ways”. The campaign has been viewed millions of times on YouTube & won a Silver Film Lion at Cannes 2010 and has now picked up a Gold for Film at the 2010 Epica Awards.

VIRGINS PROJECT MAGAZINE FOR THE IPAD

This week Virgin released their highly anticipated ‘PROJECT’ Magazine designed specifically for the iPad. The content pillars are technology, entertainment, entrepreneurs & design. Check out the video walk through here…(start from 1 minute in)

WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS

14 Social Commerce Examples from Social Media Today

Good creative stimulus for social commerce planning

I AM PLAYR 

Social gaming becomes high entertainment.  I Am Plyr is a football based game from We R Interactive, it’s a mix of online gaming, social integration, interactive videos and story telling through a pretty cool looking first person perspective. Check out the trailer...

THIS IS NOT REAL

Although it’s quite hard to believe, Alex Roman’s commercial for Grupo Cosentino’s Silestone brand countertops is all CGI, none of it is real….amazing

20 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT BROWSERS & THE WEB

In an attempt to teach the average person about the fundamentals of browsers and the web, Google has released an interactive online book entitled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. It’s a step-by-step explanation of the web and how it works. Created by the Google Chrome team using HTML5, but it also features a lot of clever illustrations by award-winning German illustrator and children’s author Christoph Niemann.

FACEBOOK & MYSPACE ANNOUNCE ‘MASH UP’ PARTNERSHIP

Facebook and MySpace finally announced a partnership (or “mashup” in their words), that’s been rumored for over a year. The collaboration will include a connect with Facebook button on the MySpace homepage that will allow for a variety of customization options, and opportunities to share content with your Facebook friends, as well as the placement of “Like” buttons on MySpace pages so that music and entertainment preferences declared on one network will be shared back with the other.

GAP & COOLHUNTING OPEN POP UP STORES IN NEW YORK

New popup stores are launching all over New York City in advance of this year’s holiday shopping season. Gap and Cool Hunting have partnered on a unique gift shop which officially opens Friday, November 19th on 5th Ave. Curated by the staff of Cool Hunting, the store stocks the work of New York based companies known for offering innovative products or goods with a high level of craftsmanship. Within the space you’ll find everything from bicycles to pickles.

TIM BURTON’S CROWDSOURCED TWITTER TALE

Tim Burton has taken to Twitter to create a crowd-sourced tale to promote an upcoming museum showing of his work.

The Twitter project is titled “Tim Burton’s Cadavre Exquis,” which translates to “exquisite corpse.” An exquisite corpse is a game adored by the Surrealists in which a group of people add phrases to a slip of paper in turn to create a story. Images can also be used to create eclectic beasts.

WE ALL WANT TO BE YOUNG

Compiled by Brazilian research company BOX1824, ‘We all want to be young’ is a video overview of their recent research into GenY/Millenials. It’s not new news & contains a lot of the information we already knew but it’s done in such an engaging way using old film footage, iconic events & music, it’s perfect for introducing clients to this demographic & their behaviours

SOCIAL SCORING WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE

This week, Klout began pulling in Facebook data to get a fuller picture of an individual’s social media footprint and they also have their sights set on LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, and even Youtube, for future integration. It’s both interesting & scary at the same time, check it out.

WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS

FACEBOOK LAUNCHES ‘FACEBOOK DEALS’ VIA PLACES 
Facebook last week launched Facebook Deals, the much-anticipated new service which allows “stores, restaurants and businesses to offer promotions and discounts to users of Facebook’s location tool, Places.” Using Places, users can see what offers are nearby and share them with their friends, and can claim deals by simply checking-in to a business on Places and showing the business a voucher. (US ONLY UNTIL 2011)

GAP GIVES AWAY 10,000 PAIRS OF JEANS ON FACEBOOK PLACES 
Facebook Places launched ‘deals’ last week, which allow brands/businesses to reward people for checking in. First on board were GAP, all you had to do was check in to a GAP store in the US for your chance to win a free pair of jeans and, even if you didn’t manage to be one of the first 10,000, you still got 40% off!

FACEBOOK MESSAGES LAUNCHES (IT’S NOT EMAIL) 
Facebook has launched what it calls the “Modern Messaging System,” a product that integrates e-mail, IM and texting in a unified inbox.

CHECK-IN APPS NEXT STOP: THE SUPERMARKET AISLE 
Consumer foods players are following in the footsteps of retailers like Gap and starting to acknowledge the potential location-based apps have for them. PepsiCo, Tyson and Seventh Generation are among the major companies teaming up with the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and CheckPoints, promoting programs that reward consumers for picking up products and giving them added incentives to put that product in their cart.

WHY LOCATIONS APPS OF THE FUTURE WILL DO SO MUCH MORE THAN CHECK-INS 
Sparkle is new location platform launching today from Location Labs that enables developers to more easily build sophisticated location-based iPhone and Android applications by tapping into Sparkle’s geolocation technology. It provides geofencing and messaging technology, offers support to control voice, data and SMS services for handsets, and can even detect mobile phone motion and velocity
So try thinking outside of check-ins when planning for geo/location…

BURGER KING: KING OF THE ROAD 
CP+B have teamed up two of their clients, Burger King & Microsoft, for a month of giveaways, content creation & experiential activations. Burger King is giving away an Xbox Kinect every 15 minutes for the whole month of November through in-store activation & purchase. In addition, CP+B have come up with the idea to send ‘The King’ on a road trip across the US to give away even more Xbox’s & to help them create social content which they’ll seed via Foursquare, Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube, Stickybits etc

5 BIG BRANDS THAT ARE ROCKING THE SOCIAL MEDIA SPACE 
Mashable rounds up their top 5 social media savvy brands of 2010 as part of their annual awards

HOW MUCH INFORMATION CAN YOU FIT IN YOUR BRAIN? 
A neat little infographic which shows the average amount of information we can fit in our brains in the course of 1 day (3.6 zettabytes!)

CAN MEDIA BE MORE UBIQUITOUS BUT YET LESS INVASIVE? 
The creative brains at Dentsu London and Berg London have teamed up to produce a pair of short films on a decisively lofty topic: the future of media surfaces.
They visualize a world in which information is somehow both more ubiquitous and less intrusive. TV screens will double as Twitter feeds and Foursquare check-in logs. Shop windows will be quietly animated. And train-ticket machines will do the unthinkable: They'll tell you where to find your train and when…

HOVIS’S 122 SECOND TV SPOT WINS UK’S TOP EFFECTIVENESS AWARDS 
Despite the decline of traditional media and the scaling down of budgets, an epic two-minute TV commercial by Hovis was the big winner at last weeks Institute of Practitioners in Advertising awards, the U.K. ad industry's prestigious effectiveness prizes. The spot is 122 seconds long, because it encapsulates the last 122 years of British history, in the form of a small boy running home from the bakery with a loaf of Hovis bread under his arm. In the street he passes by suffragette rallies, the troops marching off for World War I, the blitz, the swinging 60s, and the strikes of the 1970s. The tagline is "As good today as it's always been." It shows that if you can create a great piece of content then people will always watch it, advertisement or not…

5 MUSTS FOR MOBILE APP MARKETING 
Some great tips to keep in mind when promoting an app in a very cluttered space. Start before the app has even been released, don’t wait until after it’s hit the marketplace.

WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS

34 CASE STUDIES THAT PROVE SOCIAL MEDIA ROI
A great post which gives a brief overview of 34 different social media case studies (with links) which proved successful based on sales uplift (with exact numbers)!
E.G. DOMINO’S: Credited Foursquare with a 29% pre-tax profit through promotions that encourage people to check in to their stores

CADBURYS COCOA HOUSES 
Similar to the ‘new look’ Starbucks I sent around last week, this week we’re seeing another brand extension in the form of Cadbury’s Cocoa Houses which are due to open across the UK this month. Each venue will feature hot and chilled chocolate drinks and a rotating menu created with the help of Welsh restaurateur and food critic Simon Wright; featured items include traditional afternoon tea, bacon butties and knickerbocker glories…time will tell if it will be successful.

NOKIA N8 – THE COMMUTER 
The Commuter is a 7 minute action-packed film starring Dev Patel, Pamela Anderson, Charles Dance and Ed Westwick. Its distinguishing feature, however, is the fact that it was shot entirely with Nokia’s new flagship smartphone, the Nokia N8. The resolution of the video is 720p; the scenes shot in daylight look fantastic, while the interior shots are a bit grainy, but Nokia has definitely proven that the N8’s 12-megapixel camera is capable of doing great things

I SPREAD YOUR IDEA BECAUSE… 
A great, punchy blog post from Seth Godin listing 20 reasons why people spread ideas, worth looking at if you’re thinking about creating digital content/apps etc, does your ‘shareable’ idea fit within one of these 20 reasons?

WHEN ARE PEOPLE MOST ACTIVE ON FACEBOOK (I.E. WHEN SHOULD YOU BE TALKING TO THEM)? Social media management company Vitrue released a study that identifies the days and hours users are most active on the Facebook channels maintained by companies and brands.
Here are some of the big takeaways:
§ The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
§ The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
§ Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
§ Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

Read the article for more stats...




Normally I'd have more to share but with this week being Melbourne Cup & also super-busy, my brain has been stretched!