YOU CAN NOW FIND ME HERE
WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS
The Butterfinger candy company has announced that it is developing a comedy-horror film called "Butterfinger the 13th," directed by Rob Lowe due for release on 13th October in time for Halloween.
"Butterfinger the 13th" will take its audience on a perilous journey with the film's hero, whose paranoia leads him to believe that someone wants to lay a finger... in more ways than one. It’s certainly different! Check out the trailer.
"Butterfinger the 13th" will take its audience on a perilous journey with the film's hero, whose paranoia leads him to believe that someone wants to lay a finger... in more ways than one. It’s certainly different! Check out the trailer.
Heineken have launched their new film, The Date, via their YouTube and Facebook pages.
The same team were also behind Heineken's The Entrance which won a Clio award and has been viewed over 5 million times in 130 countries online.
The film is backed by a Making Of video and set to the track Jaan Pehechaan Ho - taken from 1960s Bollywood. A music video for the track and twitter launch strategy based around #thedate will follow.
The same team were also behind Heineken's The Entrance which won a Clio award and has been viewed over 5 million times in 130 countries online.
The film is backed by a Making Of video and set to the track Jaan Pehechaan Ho - taken from 1960s Bollywood. A music video for the track and twitter launch strategy based around #thedate will follow.
In partnership with TomTom, Nike has launched their new GPS/tracker watch. It’s the next generation version of their popular Nike+ iPhone app, which promises a more accurate assessment of runs, accounting for corners and hills. It provides heart rate monitoring, computer plug-ins, distance etc.
Mastercard’s survey found that younger generations, specifically those between 18-34, are most at ease with the idea of phone transactions. In that younger age bracket, 65 percent of 18-34 year-olds feel more naked without a phone than without a wallet. The study failed to ask whether they felt more naked without their phone than without clothing, but in any case, it’s clear that the younger demographic will be the pioneers in the future of our commerce.
Puma has become the world's first major corporation to publish details of the cost of its impact on the environment.
The sports and leisure group said the combined cost of the carbon it emitted and water it used in 2010 was 94.4m euros ($134.3m; £82.8m).
The figure includes the company itself and its suppliers.
Puma said the figures would help it to build a more "resilient and sustainable business model", and prepare for potential future environmental taxes.
I’ve always wanted to be like Jeannie in ‘I Dream Of Jeannie’, being able to go anywhere I wanted in the blink of an eye…Now, a student from MIT has made it possible (kind of).
He’s created a clever little Google Streetview mash up which allows you to be taken anywhere in the world with a click a button. Simply tell the Global Genie you want to go somewhere in South America & you’re there!
Canon have teamed up with Hollywood big-shot director Ron Howard in an effort to create the world’s first short film inspired by user generated photography. The ‘Long Live Imagination’ campaign invites people to submit a photo based on one of eight potential categories (setting, time, character, mood, relationship, goal, obstacle and the unknown). The submissions will be judged by the director and Canon, with the final 8 images being used as the basis of inspiration for the film. Some amazing blockbuster-style TVC’s have already been created to showcase the idea and call for entries.
Video game company Activision has finally revealed Elite, a new social layer for its wildly popular Call of Duty games. Elite was designed to unite the massive community of Call of Duty players as well as provide tools to help gamers of all levels improve their skills.
Cross-platform services are becoming more popular as video game designers realize their community isn’t console specific. Web players want to test their mettle against console players and vice versa. Elite goes beyond the game to include social networks like Facebook. Users can link up their Facebook accounts to Elite to pull in Likes and automatically find friends who are also using the service
A very clever ad from Renault for their new range of electric vehicles, it highlights the ubiquity of electricity in our lives by pointing out the absurdity of utilizing petrol for our everyday appliances such as hair-dryers, TV’s & vending machines. Their message ‘we already use electricity for many things, so why not for travel’?
Diesel clothing stores in Madrid have launched a pilot program, which brings Facebook likes to real-world products. At clothing displays, mobile tags will be available for customers to scan and see similar items in the collections, as well as a Facebook like button that lets the shopper to share the item on their wall. Such a simple idea, which provides free peer advertising for Diesel!
Premium cable network HBO soft-launched HBO Connect on Tuesday, a new ‘second screen” experience that aims to augment the social experience surrounding shows like True Blood, Game of Thrones and Entourage. The site is accessible now, but will launch more features in June as the summer season gets underway.
This is a great campaign for Turkcell who were looking to promote their new smart phones bundled with mobile internet. In order to attract heavy internet users, who tend to avoid online advertising, they created a unique live competition through Twitter. The campaign featured the smartphone, which was packed in gift boxes and covered with post-its. Players had to tweet what was written on the post-its to unwrap the boxes, using the hashtag #turkcell Along the way contestants could take part in games, such as Pictionary, Trivia and word puzzles winning minutes and mobile data. The final challenge was to get a celebrity to retweet the message – winning the successful Twitter user a phone.
The campaign was live for 3 hours a day over 7 days and generated 56,734 tweets. Check out the case study video.
WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS
To convince mothers in Brazil that feeding their children Actimel from Danone for breakfast was a healthy choice, the brand created a line of toasters that would cook personalized messages into toast and gave these toasters to influential mums around the country along with a package of Actimel. They also provided the mums with an incentive of a months supply of Actimel if they tweeted/blogged about the toaster.
Volkswagen UK’s Infographic site experience, True Life Costs. The site invites you to learn about the cost of living – and how your decisions add up, with the following introduction: How do you know if something is good value? The number on the price tag might only be half the story. Maybe we should be thinking about the cost of things over time. What you eat, what you do for fun, and especially what you drive. You won’t believe how it all ads up. Your exploration of the site – and the costs involved in the average life of a UK resident – begin with the declaration that the average UK citizen will spend £1,758,914 in his or her lifetime. You’re then invited to explore what ‘life’ costs across different categories, based on some of the decisions you’re making.
The fantastical design & easy interaction make it an amazing brand experience.
“The web is what you make of it,” reads the parting text in Google Chrome’s latest commercial featuring Lady Gaga.
It’s a simple eight-word slogan for Google’s web browser but it represents so much more when you connect it to Gaga, who took to the web this year to create an inescapable marketing spectacle for her Born This Way album. The promotional juggernaut fostered partnerships with Zynga for the FarmVille-inspired GagaVille, Starbucks for a massive scavenger hunt, VEVO for exclusive premieres, HBO for a concert special, Rdio for free lifetime subscriptions, iTunes for a promotional countdown, Best Buy and Livestream for an album signing and Gilt Groupe and Amazon Cloud Player for deals.
Jell-O are looking to push the snack=happiness association even closer with a new campaign on Twitter.
Using a ‘mood monitor’ to scan the number of smiley “:)” or sad “:(” faces on Twitter, the Kraft Foods brand will ‘help spread the happy’ by sending jell-o pudding coupons out to sad tweeters. The promotion is only activated when the ‘national twitter mood’ drops with less than 51% smiley emoticons.
If you’ve been reading my updates regularly you will remember a piece of 70’s-style video content created by Nike in order to tease us about a new announcement called ‘The Pool’. Well the time has come!
Nike has transformed a down and out swimming pool in London into the Disney Land of skateparks. The temporary state of the art facility opened with some of the top riders in the BMX world who flew in for the opening. The Pool is now open to the public until the 12th June with a number of sessions allocated, including one for girls only, local youth groups and schools. Beginners are also encouraged to drop by and try out this growing sport and receive handy tips from the experienced coaches on hand. Bikes are available to borrow and the disused baby pool has been developed with new riders in mind with mellow transitions and few obstacles.
The Mercedes-Benz tweet race took place in Feb 2010 but the case study video has just been released. It was a really interesting idea & by the looks of it, a very successful one too. The campaign had almost 30,000 active participants with over 72,000 Facebook Fans and 77,000 Twitter Followers who generated over 150,000+ tweets to power the cars. The campaign videos generated about 2 million views, while the twitter reach pushed over the 25 million mark.
Hardcore fans of Warner Bros.’s Batman trilogy undertook code cracking of epic proportions Friday after the site for the next film, The Dark Knight Rises, hit the web.
When you first visit the site for the film — now in production for a July 20, 2012 release — you’ll land upon a black screen accompanied by a track featuring eerie chanting. Fans were originally baffled by the site, but one intrepid Super Hero Hype Forums member named “Riskproduction” used an audio program to discover that the spectrum in the audio spells out “#thefirerises.” Check the link to see what happened next…
In an attempt to launch their new digital music service, Amazon struck a deal with Lady Gaga to offer her new Born This Way album for just $0.99. It’s a clever tactic to steer buyers away from iTunes, however, it didn’t quite go according to plan. Amazon didn’t anticipate the high level of demand their system would experience, which has resulted in technical difficulties.
Downloads of the album are delayed, leaving buyers unable to get the entire album immediately upon purchase. User reviews have been hugely negative with many of them also stating their intent to buy from iTunes in the future, instead of Amazon — a state of affairs Amazon would have wanted to avoid.
Toyota has teamed up with Salesforce.com to create Toyota Friend, a private social network for owners of Toyota cars.
The network will be accessible through PCs, tablets and smartphones, giving Toyota customers the ability to connect with their dealerships, cars and Toyota itself. For example, your car could send you an alert when its battery needs recharging, and you would be able to connect to your dealership to get maintenance tips and service information.
Ford is looking to develop it’s Sync technology, which enables voice control of mobile phones and audio systems, to monitor people with health problems.
CW advertisers will be able to reward Shopkick app users with offers intended to drive them to stores if they watch select ad spots on the network.
TV viewers will be prompted to open the Shopkick application on their Android or iPhone devices before a commercial airs, then using the device’s microphone, it will recognize an advertiser’s spot and deliver instant rewards to the viewer. The relationship, arranged to help advertisers close the loop between TV ad buys and in-store purchases, is similar to the one forged between IntoNow and Pepsi for a TV ad-tagging promo last month.
Wood has two important qualities that make it ideal for The Boat Project, a public art initiative by Lone Twin for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. First, it floats. And second, as wood ages it holds memories, keeping them warm in its living grain.
Lone Twin is making a boat from any old wooden memorabilia you may have, which will become part of a collective artwork for the Olympic year. Anyone who wants to participate can turn up at donation days and bring along a wooden item, of whatever size or age, so long as you can tell a story about it. A wooden toy that belonged to your grandmother, a wooden spoon your mum stirs cake-mix with … examples collected so far include a mast from a Hastings fishing boat, driftwood from Thailand, an old hairbrush, and a fragment from Brighton’s West Pier. Everything that is donated will be used to construct a seaworthy yacht to be sailed along the south coast in 2012.
Starbucks starts a two-week scavenger hunt in partnership with Lady Gaga on Thursday.
When customers scan QR codes on in-store banners, magnetic chalkboards and posters, they’ll see the first of many clues in the coffee retailer’s seven-round scavenger hunt.
Players will be tasked to visit certain blogs and Starbucks digital properties, decode cryptic messages and put their math, logic, reading and pop culture thinking caps on.
The clues, arranged into rounds, have been calibrated to encourage group play. Round one starts Thursday — the first players to solve all the clues will be rewarded with Starbucks- and Lady Gaga-related prizes.
On the heels of its successful and well-received Ford Fiesta Movement and 2011 Explorer Facebook reveal initiatives, Ford has crafted yet another innovative social media campaign, this time to raise awareness and introduce consumers to the 2012 Focus.
At the center of the campaign is Doug, an irreverent and absurd tweeting, Facebooking & Youtube uploading sock puppet serving as the spokesperson for the new car. Ford has constructed multifaceted fictional characters in Doug and John. John is Doug’s human companion — the straight man of duo. Doug’s comedic, brazen and off-the-cuff personality is the perfect foil for John’s more factually-grounded act. Together, they flit about the country in a new Focus, frequently updating their social media accounts with an assortment of content and playful banter.
Facebook Groups have fallen a bit flat with no one really understanding the point of them. However, they might actually be relevant for something, and here is a really simple, really smart campaign that helps demonstrate just that. It’s called Facebook Blood Groups, a campaign aimed at acquiring group members based on blood type, so that when the government’s NATAL trauma center for victims of terror and war required emergency blood, they can find the required volumes of blood, by communicating instantly with group members, who then help spur each other on inside the group to quickly donate their blood!
Many in the U.S. know Ikea's TV spots, especially 2003's Spike Jonze-directed “Lamp”. Fewer may be familiar with its celebrated digital campaigns, most of which have dropped in Sweden, the U.K., and elsewhere in Europe.
It's a good moment to get acquainted that work, as Ikea will be awarded Advertiser of the Year next month at the Cannes Lions ad festival. The company won its first Cannes Lion in 1991, and has since gone on to take 50 of the awards in all categories.
This comes from our Naked Copenhagen office. They designed a real-time customized billboard for Nike iD. They crowdsourced sneaker designs from the Facebook community & encouraged everyone to vote on their favourites. The “most liked” designs were then graffiti’d in real time on a large format billboard. Check out the video at the link.
The billboard was part of an integrated campaign orchestrated by Naked’s Copenhagen office, an effort comprising of both own, earned and bought media, spearheaded by a massive social media outreach program with key bloggers and influencers designing and giving inspiration to contestants.
WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS
Orange have launched a Facebook-based competition which asks their fans to play a version of roulette with Facebook ‘likes’. Players are presented with two ‘like’ buttons, if they click on the right one they get rewarded with prizes, if they click the wrong one, their status is updated with a very un-cool & uncomfortable ‘like’ such as ‘Sarah likes’ YMCA, rotten eggs, shell suits or sweating. Play….if you dare.
Facebook updated its strict contest guidelines this week, stating that all contests must be hosted on a Canvas Page or Page Tab created inside Apps on Facebook. Contests must include a “release of Facebook” for every participant as well.
Along with that change, Facebook has placed a long list of restrictions on how contests are staged on the social network. Important reading.
While mobile has dominated the headlines over the past few years, another movement is under way in the living room —Internet-Connected-TV. Just as DVRs and on-demand programming have become the standard, soon we won’t be able to remember our TVs before they were web-enabled. This is a great piece, which covers off the trends & how we might evolve our use of TV in the next few years.
Leading up to the season of chocolate eggs this year, animal welfare company NOAH in conjunction with advertising agency Publicis Frankfurt stocked a very different type of vending machine all in the name of animal rights.
Hoping to highlight the exceedingly uncomfortable living conditions of battery-caged hens, the German equivalent to PETA created the Egg Machine and positioned it at the Frankfurt city centre. Stocked with live chickens users who interacted with the machine did not receive a chicken, or even an egg, instead the vendor distributed coins which detailed the four different farming systems of hens and eggs.
I was a terrible student. I’ve always believed that the current school system is a mess & entirely focused on repeatedly beating kids over the head if they don't conform to an unrealistic, standardised version of academic ability crafted 100 years ago. Hence I spent my time rebelling to the best of my ability.
Thankfully, there is now a growing consensus amongst educators is that creativity and conceptual thinking abilities will be the most important skill-sets of the future. A new project called “Imagination: Creating the Future of Education and Work” reconciles the differences between traditional education and this new school of thought. Lessons include some positive ways that teachers can implement social media and elements of gaming to entice learning amongst students.
11 minutes of time well spent.
Ever had the urgent need to tag the Coke can you’re holding in that beach picnic picture on Facebook? Well, now you can, as the social network has added the ability to tag Pages in Facebook photos. Starting this week (although the feature does not appear to be live yet), users will be able to tag Pages for Brands & Products as well as People (more options coming soon) in their Facebook photos.
Tagged photos will appear in the Photos tab of a Page, rather than on that Page’s Wall, and anyone can tag a Page — even if a user hasn’t “Liked” it. This move could definitely be beneficial to certain brands. Imagine if people started tagging themselves wearing, say, Levi’s jeans. All of those snaps would then go to the Levi’s Facebook Page and result in free advertising.
A surprisingly high number of branded YouTube channels are sparingly updated and have few followers. Meanwhile, a handful of brands don’t appear to have branded YouTube channels at all.
The following brands demonstrate why they are missing out on a big opportunity. A YouTube channel doesn’t have to merely be a vehicle for new commercials. It can house games, behind-the-scenes stories and, best of all, a new, visual way to interact with your fan base.
The biggest problem with Netflix is that movies cannot be downloaded--only streamed. For city slickers used to underground subway rides or travelers racking up frequent flyer miles, that's a huge headache: no reception means no Netflix. At the same time, the biggest problem with iTunes is that movies can only be downloaded--and not streamed. For those looking to watch movies instantly on the go on a variety of devices, this can be quite a pain: gigabyte-size space requirements, long download times, and the hassle of transferring content from gadget to gadget.
Today, at Google's I/O conference, the search giant launched a movie rental service in its Android Marketplace which addresses some of these core consumer frustrations with Netflix and iTunes. The solution, as Google explained Tuesday, is in the cloud.
Google’s long-awaited music service, Google Music, is in an invite-only beta stage, but the company has released a video highlighting some of the most important features.
The offering focuses on storing your music in the cloud, keeping everything synced automatically across devices (as opposed to locked by Apple) & it can even create instant playlists (without the Genius nightmare of purchased music only). Looks great!
International fashion retailer Topshop set up a virtual fitting room in its flagship Moscow store last week, an experimental move for the retailer.
The fitting room, which was built by Russian agency AR Door, uses Microsoft Kinect and augmented reality to let shoppers try on clothes without going into a fitting room. A built-in camera recognizes a human body and superimposes a 3D model of a garment; users can switch clothes using simple gestures, powered by Kinect.
Two social media heavyweights — Lady Gaga and Zynga - will partner for GagaVille, an offshoot of FarmVille.
GagaVille, a uniquely designed neighboring farm to FarmVille, that sports unicorns and crystals, according to Zynga, launches May 17. GagaVille visitors will get a first listen to unreleased songs from Gaga’s album Born This Way, available May 23. The full album also comes bundled as a free download when you buy a $25 Zynga game card at Best Buy.
WEEKLY DIGITAL/COMMS HIGHLIGHTS
Creating stories of benevolence and wider relevance around its technological prowess, Japanese automaker Toyota has enlisted the help of inventors Deeplocal for the latest in its Ideas for Good series. The engineers' Pittsburgh warehouse became a theme park for five weeks as the team took one Prius, stripped it to its bones before repatriating parts into a 70ft in-house roller coaster, designed to show off the power-generating capability of the car's Syngergy Drive System, which converts energy from brakes into juice used elsewhere in the car.
Braking from 15mph after a 10ft drop, the Prius-shaped coaster car was able to generate enough power (6,000 watts) to light low-consumption LED bulbs lining the track and car, plus a full theme park light show.
Braking from 15mph after a 10ft drop, the Prius-shaped coaster car was able to generate enough power (6,000 watts) to light low-consumption LED bulbs lining the track and car, plus a full theme park light show.
To launch its new Ringback tones service, which plays music rather than a traditional ringing sound when callers call a cellphone, Swedish telecoms brand Comviq teamed up with native pop star Veronica Maggio and Universal Music.
Maggio released her new single as a track that could be heard only when callers rang one cellphone number - belonging to a Swedish student and music fan, Firat Delen…genius. In addition, 56% of callers signed up for the ringback tone service, talk about success!
Visa is fulfilling its promise of being “everywhere you want to be,” beginning as soon as next week, when it plans to make an announcement regarding its mobile payments strategy.
Gaming platform SCVNGR has teamed up with American Express and Levi’s to create the first paperless daily deal redemption system.
If you’ve ever purchased a Groupon or LivingSocial daily deal, you’ve probably gone through the awkward process of redeeming your coupon. You have to print out the daily deal, remember to bring the printout with you and give it to the cashier, who may or may not be trained on how to redeem it. Plus, pulling out a coupon isn’t necessarily something you want to do on a date.
SCVNGR and American Express believe that they have found the solution. Starting today, SCVNGR’s daily deal platform LevelUp now features an option to sync your LevelUp account to your AmEx card. Once synced, all you need to do to redeem the daily deals you purchase through LevelUp is swipe your card. There’s no need to bring a coupon with you.
Foursquare and Google are joining forces to enable a trial of Foursquare checkins via near field communication (NFC). The test starts Tuesday at Google I/O, the annual developer conference in San Francisco. Foursquare and Google have outfitted the Moscone conference center with NFC markers at various check points. Foursquare users can tap their devices to the markers, so long as they have an NFC-enabled device, to check in to the location and earn a special Google I/O badge.
The “tap in” test run marks the first real-world consumer implementation of Foursquare’s NFC check in capabilities aside from internal tests at its New York headquarters.
Real people affected by melanoma share words of advice with their 16-year-old selves as part of Melanoma Awareness Month. Heartbreaking & amazing, it motivated me enough to book a check-up!
100 Interviews is a blog by NYC journalist and comedian Gaby Dunn, wherein she attempts to interview 100 brand new people in just one year. ‘Every person you see on the street, on the subway, at the doctor’s office — every person has a story. In October 2010 I got to thinking, ‘How many of those stories do I really know? How many am I missing out on?’ So I sat down and made a list: 100 types of people I knew existed in the world but had never met. A transgendered person, someone who had been to prison, someone who had saved a life, a one-hit wonder, a psychic, someone from a third world country.’
It’s a great blog, well worth a look.
A collection of mobile app interfaces to inspire you when designing a mobile app. You can sort them by features (sliders, graphs, navigation,maps etc)
Lynx have just launched a new mobile app called the “Lynx Stream”. It’s built around your big nights out, more specifically the ones that you can’t remember.
It tracks all your mobile activity on a night out, and plots it chronologically on the Lynx Stream, so that when you wake up the next day, you can re-live the entire night moment by moment.
The app aggregates everything based on the event you setup… Pulling Tweets, Facebook posts, photos, videos, text messages and even check-in’s onto the “Stream” before giving you the power to automatically generate a cool video of your unforgettable night out.
A large working farm will be taken over for the first time by web users across the world on Wednesday, who will vote on every key decision taken on its cattle, pigs, sheep and crops.
The MyFarm experiment hands over power at the National Trust’s 2,500-acre Wimpole Estate Farm in Cambridgeshire, UK. Up to 10,000 farming novices will choose which bull to buy, which crop to plant and whether to spilt fields to resurrect lost hedgerows.
The death of the check-in may be greatly exaggerated, because it seems, their remit is expanding. GetGlue received over 4 million check ins during April, up 55% over March. In the case of social entertainment, the check-in may in fact be one of the most important gestures that users can make. People have always socialized around TV, movies, and music, and by checking in to entertainment via GetGlue, they can open up conversations with others who are watching and others who are fans of particular shows.
Subscribe to:
Posts (RSS)