This week’s top five sweep of innovative work includes a Game of Thrones washed-up dragon skull, Heineken’s Departure Roulette stunt and Ecuador’s Banana Ambassador campaign.
Number 5) Game of Thrones Dragon Skull washes up on beach
In another smart Game of Thrones stunt, Blinkbox in the UK placed a 40ft-long dragon skull on Charmouth Beach, Dorset’s famous coastline for fossil fiends. Appearing to locals as if it had been washed up overnight, it must have given the morning dog walkers some fright.
Via The Inspiration Room
Referrer: Clara Martello
Number 4) Tweeting cigarette
R/GA has developed a connected e-cigarette that Tweets whenever you take an electronic drag. E-cigarettes heat up flavoured nicotine and water and turn them into vapour for smokers to inhale, without the all the other nasty chemicals found in real ciggies. Through an arduino microcontroller, this gadget connected the e-cigarette via Bluetooth to an iPhone app which allows you to track your smoking habits, as well as sending a tweet to the @TweetingCiggy Twitter handle. Perhaps a little unusual, but it could be a handy way to monitor consumption as well as use social stigma to help people quit.
Via PSFK
Number 3) Heineken’s Departure Roulette
Heineken’s Departure Roulette stunt at JFK airport invited passengers to abandon their plans and travel to a completely random destination instead. Unsurprisingly, most people politely declined the invitation to cancel everything and hope for the best. Those that apparently took the plunge appear to have mixed reactions about their spontaneous destination…
Via Adweek
Referrer @AmandaPedicino
Number 2) Pronunciation Book’s Cryptic Countdown
In a bizarre stunt that’s been driving internet geeks wild with intrigue, YouTube channel the Pronunciation Book is releasing daily cryptic messages telling us something is going to happen in 63 days today (and counting). The Pronunciation Book has posted over 700 simple videos since 2010 explaining how to enunciate English words. But last week it started posting one creepy, cryptic video a day, counting down from ‘77’ until September 24, 2013.
A 36-page Google doc has been created of people’s attempts to find out what on earth is going on with someone even running the silence in the video through a spectrograph to determine whether the resulting images form some kind of picture. Assuming this is an elaborate marketing stunt, I hope the reveal is worth it!
Via The Daily Dot
Referrer @y0z2a
Number 1) Banana Ambassador
How can a small country with a modest marketing budget promote themselves to the rest of the world? In Ecuador, the Ministry of Tourism had a cunning idea to do this by converting their biggest export into their biggest media channel. Each year the country exports 24m tons of bananas to countries whose inhabitants they’d like to entice over to spend their tourist cash. So they came up with a cunning plan of attaching a QR sticker to every banana exported. Scanning the code apparently reveals enticing content about the banana’s home country, turning every Ecuadorian banana eater into a potential tourist.
Via Springwise
That’s it for this week. As ever, if anything screamingly awesome has been missed out, let us know in the comments below. Or feel free to ping any recommendations for next week to @jamescfilmer.
James Filmer
Chief Innovation Officer
UM