CANAL DIGITAL: THE MAN WHO LIVED IN A FILM
Canal have been producing some kick-ass ads over the last few months, the grizzly bear director was a personal favourite. Their latest release is a quirky ad/faux-doco about a man that lives inside a film. Whatever activity he might be doing, from washing to driving, he finds himself within a movie plot from axes in doors, being stuck in the middle of a Jane Austen love triangle, the Grim Reaper introducing himself at a cafe or his car turning into a Transformer. I love this. If you haven’t seen the bear, watch it here.
CHANGE FOR A DOLLAR
“Change for a Dollar”, a short film directed by Sharon Wright, is picking up awards and inspiring a “pay it forward” ethos among viewers. An uncouth man sits on the pavement looking for loose change. What kind of change is he looking for? Follow a man as he affects multiple peoples’ lives with just one dollar, proving that it doesn’t take much to be the change in someone’s life. I defy you not to be in tears by 3 minutes in…
5,000 PEOPLE GET A FREE LUNCH IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE MADE FROM ‘UNSELLABLE’ PRODUCE
Elona Grondona, a school nurse, came to Trafalgar Square in London for one reason – to eat curry. But this was no ordinary meal, Friday’s lunch was served as part of the Feeding the 5,000 initiative, to encourage households and business to reduce food waste.
The Feeding the 5000 team – a coalition of Fareshare, FoodCycle, Love Food Hate Waste and Friends of the Earth, led by food waste expert Tristram Stuart– treated Grondona and 4,999 others to a free meal using food that would otherwise have been wasted, such as cosmetically imperfect fresh fruit and vegetables – in short, wonky carrots.
The misshapen ingredients were not salvaged from nearby skips but supplied directly by farmers who sell their goods to supermarkets. “The supermarkets have strict cosmetic standards, so if a carrot is too long or slightly bent, it either goes in the bin or is left out in the field and simply ploughed back into the ground,” Stuart says. “Today, that’s not happened and all that food is here to be eaten.” Each year, enough food to fill 11,720 double decker buses, or the Albert Hall 15 times over, is binned in London.
EBAY GIVE-A-TOY STORE
Ebay have created two amazing window installations in New York (at 35th and Broadway) and San Francisco (at 117 Post St) in an effort to evoke our sense of charity & good will at Christmas time. The interactive store windows provide a view into a rich, 3D Christmas scene, complete with toys,trains, snow and just about everything else you’d expect from a Toy Store. Only, this is a “Give-A-Toy” store and each toy has a QR code on it, that, when scanned from inside the eBay app, allows you to instantly donate that toy (or at least the value of it) on the spot, with the window lighting up and rewarding you for the donation. Brilliant. You can also donate via the website http://www.ebay.com/giveatoystore it’s easy!
OLD SPICE NPD: A BEAR-SHAPED DEODORANT HOLDER
Old Spice, looking to maintain the social media momentum that began with its breakthrough “The man your man could smell like” campaign from 2010, is making the leap from tongue-in-cheek advertising to tongue-in-cheek product releases. The product: A bear-shaped deodorant holder. That item, which looks like something that would have been a good Father’s Day gift in 1974, will go on sale on this week on Old Spice’s Facebook Page for $19.99. To get the word out, the brand and ad agency Weiden + Kennedy have created a faux informercial with a deliberately cheesy tone & completely bizarre premise
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FACEBOOK FRIENDS?
Facebook has this week released some pioneering social-networking, the kind that only a company with over 700 million active users and 60 billion connections could help produce. It looks closely at how we’re connected to those around us. The headline everyone pulled from the study was that the famous “six degrees of separation” originally described by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s has been reduced to less than five or even four in some cases on the social network. In the study, which Facebook did in collaboration with a number of researchers at the University of Milan in Italy, the network looked at the connections between all 721 million active Facebook users, or more than 10 percent of the world’s population — a staggering 69 billion “friendships.” As the company noted, this makes the research by far the largest social-networking study ever released. Top linefindings include the fact that 90 percent of users were actually connected by four degrees, the median count of Facebook friends is 100 & 84% of all connections are between users in the same country
QR CODE HAIRCUTS
Yes, I’m serious. Bromley FC will be part of a unique sponsorship drive this weekend, when they take on Leyton Orient in the first round of the FA Cup. The back of each player's head features a custom QR code which, when scanned with a smartphone, takes the user to a Betfair page to bet on the game. Stylist Daniel Johnson, who also looks after the hair of bigger-named footballers Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley Young andJermain Defoe, has been chosen to shave the Quick Response codes (dubbed "QR Cuts") into the back of the player's noggins. And each intricate style will take over an hour to achieve
THE NEW ROLE OF THE TV AD IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Shiv Singh, PepsiCo’s Global Head Of Digital shares his thoughts on the changing role of the TV ad in the digital age. He predicts six big changes including; The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing. The narrative arch will change as we think of the advertisement as a trailer versus the whole story. Location-aware technologies will force a greater degree ofengagement on a format that had historically been passive, impersonal and certainly without any extensions. Check out the rest of his article.
GENERATION SELL
Millenials, Hipsters or whatever you want to call them are judged based on their style (skinny jeans, end-to-end tattoos & vintage bicycles) or their use of technology (digital natives, Apple Fan-Boys & multi-taskers) but all that aside, what’s their substance? What’s underneath it all?
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms. This youth culture is Generation Sell. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.
ADIDAS MI COACH: THE HUNT FOR FAST
The hunt is on to find the 11 fastest players in the UK. Some of the biggest names in Football such as Ashley Young, Lionel Messi, Gareth Bale, David Silva & Luis Suarez are urging young footballers to compete on the pitch with the new adizero f50 miCoach to earn a place in the fastest team ever assembled. To enter the competition, they’ll need to purchase the new adizero f50 and the miCoach speed cell, sign up on miCoach and join 'The Hunt For Fast' group. Then they justneed to lace up their boots, play football and make sure they upload their speed stats regularly. It’s a nice idea to push the take up of the mi-coach technology
REBRANDING BABY GIRLS
Fast Company asked several of the most creative ad agencies in the world to rebrand baby girls. Their mock campaigns recast girls as the No. 1 choice for consumers from China to the U.S. It’s an interesting topic especially for the Chinese with their one-child policy & general feeling of negativity towards the births of females, check out the ideas.
KOHLS: BLACK FRIDAY
It’s the year of the Black Friday.
Teen singer and Internet phenomenon Rebecca Black’s viral hit song “Friday” is being used in Kohl’s Black Friday shopping ads. The infectious tune has been given new words in order to convince shoppers that the department store is the place to be midnight before Thanksgiving.
“Black Friday, Black Friday, gotta go to Kohl’s on Black Friday,” the actress sings through the store, grabbing items off shelves. “Everybody’s going there at midnight, midnight.”
Advertising critics are wondering if Kohl’s hasn’t made a mistake by choosing “Friday,” a song whose main claim to fame is how annoying it is. Judge for yourself…
SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE: CREATE MY TWEET
Samsung are promoting their new Galaxy Note phone in a slightly novel way through a Twitter hashtag campaign & some artists. From 22nd to 25th November, between 9am and 6pm GMT, people can tweet #createmytweet @SamsungMobile to request an artist recreate their tweet through an illustration designed entirely on the phone. The intro video is a bit flat & boring but the idea is nice. Having said that, there’s no such thing as a original thought & it's clear that they have borrowed liberally from Orange Mobile & their hashtag experiments, which have included artists portraits, movie posters & ice cream vans.
INNOCENT: FRUIT PICKER
Innocent Drinks has this week launched a digital campaign on Facebook to promote its recently launched range of orange and apple juices. The campaign, created by Holler, features the Fruit Picker Game
Players must take control of a group of fruit pickers and carve a path across an orchard to harvest as many oranges as possible.
The "top pickers" could win free juices, Amazon vouchers, special edition glasses and an iPad 2.
The game will eventually have a total of three levels. Levels two and three arrive in 2012 with different fruits and game environments.
ADDRESS IS APPROXIMATE
A beautiful stop motion animation short using Google Street View made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins.
Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View. Visually stunning & hauntingly sad at the same time
RICHARD BRANSON: WE MUST LEARN THAT DOING GOOD IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS
Business can only hope to rescue the world from the escalating economic crisis if it consciously sets out to “do good” instead of merely concentrating on the bottom line. And companies that do so will actually become more profitable.
Utopian? Idealistic? Impractical? The sort of thing you’d expect to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Occupy protesters, or the Prince of Wales? Save your scorn. The person passionately putting these points to me is one of the world’s most successful dealmakers and entrepreneurs — Sir Richard Branson. He claims “If companies become a force for good, the people working for them will be that much more motivated and their brands will shine that much brighter amongst others” and that there needs to be “a massive generational shift that will blur the distinction between doing good and doing business”.
Canal have been producing some kick-ass ads over the last few months, the grizzly bear director was a personal favourite. Their latest release is a quirky ad/faux-doco about a man that lives inside a film. Whatever activity he might be doing, from washing to driving, he finds himself within a movie plot from axes in doors, being stuck in the middle of a Jane Austen love triangle, the grim reaper introducing himself at a Cafe or his car turning into a Transformer. I love this.
http://www.adverblog.com/2011/11/22/the-man-who-lived-in-a-film/
If you haven’t seen the bear, watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWOeEqyD_gM
CHANGE FOR A DOLLAR
“Change for a Dollar”, a short film directed by Sharon Wright, is picking up awards and inspiring a “pay it forward” ethos among viewers. An uncouth man sits on the pavement looking for loose change. What kind of change is he looking for? Follow a man as he affects multiple peoples’ lives with just one dollar, proving that it doesn’t take much to be the change in someone’s life. I defy you not to be in tears by 3 minutes in…
http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2011/change-for-a-dollar
5,000 PEOPLE GET A FREE LUNCH IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE MADE FROM ‘UNSELLABLE’ PRODUCE
Elona Grondona, a school nurse, came to Trafalgar Square in London for one reason – to eat curry. But this was no ordinary meal, Friday’s lunch was served as part of the Feeding the 5,000 initiative, to encourage households and business to reduce food waste.
The Feeding the 5000 team – a coalition of Fareshare, FoodCycle, Love Food Hate Waste and Friends of the Earth, led by food waste expert Tristram Stuart– treated Grondona and 4,999 others to a free meal using food that would otherwise have been wasted, such as cosmetically imperfect fresh fruit and vegetables – in short, wonky carrots.
The misshapen ingredients were not salvaged from nearby skips but supplied directly by farmers who sell their goods to supermarkets. “The supermarkets have strict cosmetic standards, so if a carrot is too long or slightly bent, it either goes in the bin or is left out in the field and simply ploughed back into the ground,” Stuart says. “Today, that’s not happened and all that food is here to be eaten.” Each year, enough food to fill 11,720 double decker buses, or the Albert Hall 15 times over, is binned in London.
http://www.psfk.com/2011/11/5000-people-get-a-free-lunch-in-trafalgar-square-made-from-unsellable-produce.html
EBAY GIVE-A-TOY STORE
Ebay have created two amazing window installations in New York (at 35th and Broadway) and San Francisco (at 117 Post St) in an effort to evoke our sense of charity & good will at Christmas time. The interactive store windows provide a view into a rich, 3D Christmas scene, complete with toys,trains, snow and just about everything else you’d expect from a Toy Store. Only, this is a “Give-A-Toy” store and each toy has a QR code on it, that, when scanned from inside the eBay app, allows you to instantly donate that toy (or at least the value of it) on the spot, with the window lighting up and rewarding you for the donation. Brilliant. You can also donate via the website http://www.ebay.com/giveatoystore it’s easy!
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/ebay-gift-a-toy-store-interactive-installation
OLD SPICE NPD: A BEAR-SHAPED DEODORANT HOLDER
Old Spice, looking to maintain the social media momentum that began with its breakthrough “The man your man could smell like” campaign from 2010, is making the leap from tongue-in-cheek advertising to tongue-in-cheek product releases. The product: A bear-shaped deodorant holder. That item, which looks like something that would have been a good Father’s Day gift in 1974, will go on sale on this week on Old Spice’s Facebook Page for $19.99. To get the word out, the brand and ad agency Weiden + Kennedy have created a faux informercial with a deliberately cheesy tone & completely bizarre premise
http://mashable.com/2011/11/22/old-spice-bear-deodorant-holder
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FACEBOOK FRIENDS?
Facebook has this week released some pioneering social-networking, the kind that only a company with over 700 million active users and 60 billion connections could help produce. It looks closely at how we’re connected to those around us. The headline everyone pulled from the study was that the famous “six degrees of separation” originally described by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s has been reduced to less than five or even four in some cases on the social network. In the study, which Facebook did in collaboration with a number of researchers at the University of Milan in Italy, the network looked at the connections between all 721 million active Facebook users, or more than 10 percent of the world’s population — a staggering 69 billion “friendships.” As the company noted, this makes the research by far the largest social-networking study ever released. Top linefindings include the fact that 90 percent of users were actually connected by four degrees, the median count of Facebook friends is 100 & 84% of all connections are between users in the same country
http://gigaom.com/2011/11/22/six-degrees-what-does-it-mean-to-be-facebook-friends/
QR CODE HAIRCUTS
Yes, I’m serious. Bromley FC will be part of a unique sponsorship drive this weekend, when they take on Leyton Orient in the first round of the FA Cup. The back of each player's head features a custom QR code which, when scanned with a smartphone, takes the user to a Betfair page to bet on the game. Stylist Daniel Johnson, who also looks after the hair of bigger-named footballers Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley Young andJermain Defoe, has been chosen to shave the Quick Response codes (dubbed "QR Cuts") into the back of the player's noggins. And each intricate style will take over an hour to achieve
THE NEW ROLE OF THE TV AD IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Shiv Singh, PepsiCo’s Global Head Of Digital shares his thoughts on the changing role of the TV ad in the digital age. He predicts six big changes including; The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing. The narrative arch will change as we think of the advertisement as a trailer versus the whole story. Location-aware technologies will force a greater degree ofengagement on a format that had historically been passive, impersonal and certainly without any extensions. Check out the rest of his article.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/the_new_role_of_television_adv.html
GENERATION SELL
Millenials, Hipsters or whatever you want to call them are judged based on their style (skinny jeans, end-to-end tattoos & vintage bicycles) or their use of technology (digital natives, Apple Fan-Boys & multi-taskers) but all that aside, what’s their substance? What’s underneath it all?
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms. This youth culture is Generation Sell. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepreneurial-generation.html?_r=2
ADIDAS MI COACH: THE HUNT FOR FAST
The hunt is on to find the 11 fastest players in the UK. Some of the biggest names in Football such as Ashley Young, Lionel Messi, Gareth Bale, David Silva & Luis Suarez are urging young footballers to compete on the pitch with the new adizero f50 miCoach to earn a place in the fastest team ever assembled. To enter the competition, they’ll need to purchase the new adizero f50 and the miCoach speed cell, sign up on miCoach and join 'The Hunt For Fast' group. Then they justneed to lace up their boots, play football and make sure they upload their speed stats regularly. It’s a nice idea to push the take up of the mi-coach technology
REBRANDING BABY GIRLS
Fast Company asked several of the most creative ad agencies in the world to rebrand baby girls. Their mock campaigns recast girls as the No. 1 choice for consumers from China to the U.S. It’s an interesting topic especially for the Chinese with their one-child policy & general feeling of negativity towards the births of females, check out the ideas.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/161/ads-that-rebrand-baby-girls
KOHLS: BLACK FRIDAY
It’s the year of the Black Friday.
Teen singer and Internet phenomenon Rebecca Black’s viral hit song “Friday” is being used in Kohl’s Black Friday shopping ads. The infectious tune has been given new words in order to convince shoppers that the department store is the place to be midnight before Thanksgiving.
“Black Friday, Black Friday, gotta go to Kohl’s on Black Friday,” the actress sings through the store, grabbing items off shelves. “Everybody’s going there at midnight, midnight.”
Advertising critics are wondering if Kohl’s hasn’t made a mistake by choosing “Friday,” a song whose main claim to fame is how annoying it is. Judge for yourself…
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/fashion/black-friday-2011-rebecca-black-song-friday-kohl-holiday-shopping-commercial-article-1.980713?localLinksEnabled=false
SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE: CREATE MY TWEET
Samsung are promoting their new Galaxy Note phone in a slightly novel way through a Twitter hashtag campaign & some artists. From 22nd to 25th November, between 9am and 6pm GMT, people can tweet #createmytweet @SamsungMobile to request an artist recreate their tweet through an illustration designed entirely on the phone. The intro video is a bit flat & boring but the idea is nice. Having said that, there’s no such thing as a original thought & it's clear that they have borrowed liberally from Orange Mobile & their hashtag experiments, which have included artists portraits, movie posters & ice cream vans.
INNOCENT: FRUIT PICKER
Innocent Drinks has this week launched a digital campaign on Facebook to promote its recently launched range of orange and apple juices. The campaign, created by Holler, features the Fruit Picker Game
Players must take control of a group of fruit pickers and carve a path across an orchard to harvest as many oranges as possible.
The "top pickers" could win free juices, Amazon vouchers, special edition glasses and an iPad 2.
The game will eventually have a total of three levels. Levels two and three arrive in 2012 with different fruits and game environments.
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1105075/innocent-brings-fruit-pickers-digital-game/
ADDRESS IS APPROXIMATE
A beautiful stop motion animation short using Google Street View made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins.
Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View. Visually stunning & hauntingly sad at the same time
RICHARD BRANSON: WE MUST LEARN THAT DOING GOOD IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS
Business can only hope to rescue the world from the escalating economic crisis if it consciously sets out to “do good” instead of merely concentrating on the bottom line. And companies that do so will actually become more profitable.
Utopian? Idealistic? Impractical? The sort of thing you’d expect to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Occupy protesters, or the Prince of Wales? Save your scorn. The person passionately putting these points to me is one of the world’s most successful dealmakers and entrepreneurs — Sir Richard Branson. He claims “If companies become a force for good, the people working for them will be that much more motivated and their brands will shine that much brighter amongst others” and that there needs to be “a massive generational shift that will blur the distinction between doing good and doing business”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8900854/Sir-Richard-Branson-We-must-learn-that-doing-good-is-good-for-business.html