Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Carlsberg: The Secret - The Music


Back in December I posted about the launch of the Carlsberg ad, The Secret. The ad premièred on Facebook and proved to be hugely popular. What was particularly interesting was the buzz that sprung up around the ads music. Well I am delighted to announce that I have been able to get a clean sample of the tune!

Either play it below or download it here...



In case you can't remember it, this is the ad itself...

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Vodafone Italy Domino Effect

A fantastic ad from Vodafone Italy to show their latest 'Smart' tariffs. Using a very elaborate Rube Goldberg Machine mechanic, the ad uses a brilliant domino effect to show a variety of cool apps interacting to bring the campaign tagline to life - 'piu smart conVodafone' (Smarter with Vodafone).

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Calvin Klein & Chatroulette

Chatroulette, the online chat platform developped by Russian student Andrey Ternovskiy, has spurred a number of high profile 'virals', all equally hilarious. however, the platform is also widely seen to be bursting with sex and nudity. So in a fun advertising campaign Calvin Klein now offers a small program that scans for nudity on Chatroulette and then hides it with Calvin Klein underwear. Brilliant!

Monday, April 19, 2010

Lonely Planet Offers Free iPhone Guides


Every now and then a company does something really cool. This is very much one of those times. With so many travellers stuck in foreign locations due to the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, the Lonely Planet has made 13 of its city guides available on the App Store for free. The move has been made so that these unfortunate folk might be able to make the most of their “unexpected” holiday.

Tom Hall, Lonely Planet Travel Editor, commented on the Lonely Planet "Volcano Relief Sale", saying:

“Travellers stuck in unfamiliar places need access to practical information as well as suggestions on what to do while stranded.”

These iPhone apps are usually priced between €10 and €15 but have been made available for free for the next four days (until 11:59pm GMT Thursday 22/04). The 13 free Apps are: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London,Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand, and appreciate, the marketing here - 4 days of free downloads could potentially generate huge later sales as users come to realise the quality and value of the Lonely Planet Apps, as well as generating public positive sentiment through the campaign. All that said, I still think this is a great initiative and something that other companies could learn from. I don't advocate profit from misfortune, but I certainly think that temporary goodwill gestures (whether they could have future positive sales impacts or not) are a very good thing.

Fair play Lonely Planet.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Nike Free Run+ & DJ Daito Manabe and co.


It seems that I've posted a lot of videos etc. all stemming from shoe and clothing companies. The truth is though, that's simply because it seems to be fashion labels that are pushing digital. It's fashion brands that are using digital as their primary and key communications channel. And so here we have yet another genius piece of marketing from a fashion label, this time Nike.

This is the new Japanese campaign for Nike's Free Run+ shoes. This is a smart and stunning collaboration with DJ Daito Manabe and co., and sees the crew pumping out the 'chunes' in the oddest of ways. Using specially outfitted runners equipped with the newest flex sensors (the new sensors change resistance when bent), the pair achieve awesome effects controls. Check this out, and try not to be imptressed!


(via Gav via Engadget)

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

52 Weeks, 52 Girls, A Whole Lot of Burritos!



A little while ago my mate Richie moved to London to a new job with We Are Social. I was lucky enough to be over in London back in February and I can safely say that London suits Richie perfectly. He clearly loves the place and I have a sneaking suspicion that London loves Richie. You see back on the 25th March Richie attended the London Twestival. Not anything too strange or exciting about this, so did 464 other people. So who showed Richie the love?

At the twestival the nice people of Chilango, the Mexican food chain, donated a super prize for a giveaway in aid of Concern. The prize was a year’s worth of free burrito meals. I presume you can guess where this is going. Richie was the lucky winner! It being a Twitter event the news was out on the web pretty fast, and as you can imagine Richie's initial plan to selfishly stuff his face with burritos was soon dashed. So in a moment, of what Richie described as equal measures weakness and greatness, the decision was made to share the prize. Of course the question remained, how best to share out 52 weeks of burrito meals?

Being a young, good-looking, marketing professional, Richie came up with the genius (whichever way you want to look at it) idea to take out 52 different girls for burrito meals - 1 girl every week for a whole year! And so was born the story of the 52 Burrito Dates

I won't spoil the story here by sharing any of the amusing tweets that Richie has already received but you should pop over and check them out. I'll be posting regular updates as the story unfolds (including how his first date with @photogirluk goes!) but for all the good bits you really will need to get to Richie's blog.

Enjoy :)

Sunday, April 4, 2010

The iPad & Flash


It has already been covered a number of times on TechCrunch that the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, will not feature flash. A rather contentious point with many people when you consider the amount of content on the web that is Flash based. In fact, many critics have gone as far as to say this could be the downfall of the latest weapon in Apple's arsenal of world domination. All this may be mute, however, if you look towards HTML5 and the possibilities that it promises. The brilliant folk at Brightcove, for instance, have already set out a roadmap (see below) outlining how they will use HTML5 for streaming video when the viewing device is detected as an iPad. Furthermore, even on an iPhone browser video thumbnails will launch a Quicktime player.

Brightcove CEO, Jeremy Allaire, says, "HTML5 is great, it is an open standard, and firmly entrenched in the Apple device platform. Flash can’t reach those platforms for political and business reasons.”

While it's true that HTML5 can't do everything that Flash can (specifically in relation to supporting advertising, audience measurement and social sharing), Brightcove have promised that they will bring HTML5 video up to par with Flash for Brightcove users. Allaire says that this will take until the end of the year, going through a number of iterative stages to get there. First Brightcove videos will play back in a very basic HTML5 player when they detect an iPad. The next step will be to add audience measurement and advertising features. Then finally Brightcove will work on upgrading the actual interface so that iPad and iPhone users don’t notice the difference between it and the Flash version of their player.

The actual raodmap will go as follows...

Friday, April 2, 2010

adidas 'Street Where Originality Lives'


For those of you who were at the cinema today, you may have been lucky enought to see the new adidas 'Street Where Originality Lives' ad. It just went live across Irish cinemas and features David Beckham, Snoop Dogg, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, Agyness Dean, Ciara, Whitney Port (The Hills)......and other celeb types. Check out the video below, or for loads of behind the scenes interviews and footage with the stars of the ad pop over to the adidas YouTube channel.


If you're interested, and I know I was as it's a banging tune, the ad is soundtracked to the Pilooski remix of Dee Edwards’ “Why Can’t there be love”.