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.
