Display Advertising: Interactive

This is a great example of an interactive Banner Ad for a banking product. The ad is for ANZ Now and was created by M&C Saatchi Australia.

There was also a television commercial, known as 'Credits', which features one of ANZ's Small Business Specialists. The ad can be viewed here.

Google Street View - Japan

This is a fantastic animated video from the Google Street View Japan people. Explains the whole Street View process perfectly and is looks stunning too. Absolutely loving this video!

Augmented Reailty: Yelp Monocle

At the end of August Yelp released what is the first iPhone Augmented Reality app. The latest version of Yelp allows users to access a features called Monocle. The app gives you a real time overlay of Yelp's business listings within your field of view, utilising the iPhone's digital compass and GPS to provide geo-location.

The most interesting thing about the app is that it's actually an Easter Egg activated by shaking the handset three times. The feature is considered an Easter Egg as Apple don’t actually provide an open API to allow developers to access a live video feed from the iPhone’s camera. This essentially makes it impossible to develop Augmented Reality apps for the iPhone without hacking their software development kit. The Yelp app is available to download here.

Mashable's Jenn Van Grove demonstrates Yelp here...



Also check out Jenn's personal blog here.

Contagious Magazine

For those unfamiliar with Contagious Magazine, it's just about one of the best publications (online and offline) that you can lay your hands on. Contagious describes its purpose as being "to explore the shifting relationship between brands and consumers, to predict the impact of new technologies and to make sense of the fragmenting media landscape". Contagious says it "exists to simplify and to advise. It is the global marketing industry’s early warning system; an intelligence resource for those attempting to stay ahead of all this change". Contagious comes out quarterly with a free DVD showcasing over 100 pieces of creative work per issue. The DVD highlights each of these campaigns in a ‘challenge/solution/results’ format.

The following video is the Q3 promo featured on the most recent issue's DVD. Shown are Ken Block's DC csampaign, Evian's Skating Babies and the Nike Paul Rodriguez 'Today Was a Good Day' ad. Also shown are previews of some augmented reality features and a Technophilia showcase.



If you enjoyed this, check out Contagious's YouTube channel.

It's All About The Beatles

Tomorrow may as well be called International Beatles Day! The 9th September will see not one, not two, but three HUGE Beatles related events ripple across the world, at what will surely be lightening speed.

The first event is the launch of 'The Beatles: Rock Band'. I posted about this back in June, and I am still just as excited. The latest of the Rock Band episodes gives you the opportunity to experience the greatest rock band of all time. You get to be part of the Beatles’ rise to fame and become the band that made music history. Play as John, Paul, George or Ringo; get your mates around, practise your harmonies, and enjoy newly designed custom-built instruments.

As part of the pre-launch advertising campaign, the latest ad has been released, and as with the others, it's pretty awesome. The ad takes the iconic photograph of The Beatles crossing Abbey Road and brings it to life.



I expect to be playing the game tomorrow night at the Irish launch event in Whelans, so I'll do an update tomorrow on just how good it is.

One of the most interesting things about 'The Beatles: Rock Band' is that it will feature over 45 original Beatles songs. What makes this interesting is that even though The Beatles are one of the biggest selling bands of all time, their music is virtually unavailable legally in digital formats. You simply cannot legitimately download a Beatles song. So that brings us to Beatles event number two: (as reported by a number of sources) iTunes looks set to finally have The Beatles back catalogue available through its iStore.

This in itself may actually be directly linked to the third and final Beatles event. As reported by Rolling Stone Magazine, 9th September will see the release of the complete re-mastered Beatles collection. What does that mean? Well, nearly 22-years later, all of The Beatles back catalogue will be available as digitally remastered versions of the original studio albums. The best part isn't just that they are remastered, each album will feature the track listings and artwork as it was originally released, but with the addition of an expanded booklets including original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a short time, all of the 12 studio albums will come with an “embedded” documentary about its making.

So whether you were there for the rise of The Fab Four, or you grew up listening to your parent's vinyls, tomorrow is an exciting day.