Smart street art.
This post just came up on Campaign Brief. To me, it’s a perfect execution of how not to use augmented reality (AR).
The ad consists of the typical artwork and a bad, instructional headline telling the viewer what to do, if they can be fucked. The then have to download an app for their respective App Store (Blackberry, Windows Phone, Symbian users needn’t bother). After they’ve gone through that process, they then have to run the app, hold their phone up to the ad like a douche, and wait for it to kick in. Their reward? An ‘exclusive’ 30sec TVC spot. As an added slap in the face, the user can also click through to view a poorly mobile-optimised website.
Hopefully this never gets out of the shopping mall the video’s featured in.
On to a much nicer execution (and an actual idea): The Mobile Medic Campaign by GPY&R Melbourne. Its directed at potential Army scholarship winners: scan the poster, diagnose the hypothetical medical problem correctly, and you’ve passed the initial entry exam. This is compared to going to your local army recruitment office, filling out paperwork, and eventually doing an initial test about a month later.
This (unsurprisingly) picked up a slew of Lions this year and I think for good reason – the AR is merely a tool to launch the idea. The same clunky steps may apply to get it running, but there is a tangible benefit for users to interact.
I listened to a great (albeit brief) talk last night from Eaon Pritchard, Head of Innovation of Sputnik. In it, he touched on great issue about emerging tech: The tools always come first, but the creative utilisation takes a while to catch up. A lot of the time the best creativity is from subverting the tools itself.
Hopefully, like I think was done by GPY&R, the creative can shorten this gap as much as possible.
I never got into Hot Wheels, as it came into popularity a bit late in my youth.
That said, this is awesome: Team Hot Wheels to attempt 2nd world record on Saturday as award-winning campaign continues.
Here’s the first record attempt, at the longest jump in 2011.
Google Maps - The street view icon on Google Maps has a surfboard and tropical shirt when in Hawaii.
/via fewbutripe
Cute
Each year alongside the main media categories, Cannes holds an under 30s (actually 28year olds and under, go figure) competition in half a dozen categories. Each country has a national comp first, and then the winners go to Cannes to compete on a new brief, with 48 hours to create their idea. For the cyber category, A developer and copywriter pair up.
The Cyber brief was for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All three winners are flash-based solutions. Here are the winners:
Gold: Poland. Saatchi & Saatchi/Interactive Solutions
Silver: Finland. White Sheep Isobar
Bronze: Italy. M & C Saatchi
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the other contenders are publicly accessible, but out of the winners above, Poland is definitely my favourite.
All of us need a story within us about how we fail and how it’s noble. We need a narrative about how we are people who have lost, but are not losers. No creativity can occur without the accommodation of failure. If you are not prepared to fail, you cannot succeed creatively.
“
| — | Alain de Botton, Cannes 2012 |
Hah! When I saw this here, I thought it was a tie-in promotion for the Adobe product. I guess I was wrong.
Besides the intriguing factor of “what the fuck is it”, I think this is a good example of pushing an idea a little too far. Maybe the creators are trying to get some free PR that will probably happen once it gets on Oprah, but give it a month and it’ll just be another RTD in the fridge. Also, the product really has nothing to do with air at all.
Judging from the fine print on the image-based landing page, there are currently (at least) two flavours: Club (thats cola), and Citrus and Berry. Considering that the water is carbonated, and they’re promoting it as low calorie, its really just a sugar free Bacardi Breezer, but instead of tasting like cordial, tastes like shit.
