About as surprising as a traffic meeting on a Monday morning, Epoch Films, after talks with Cannes organizers, JCPenney and Saatchi & Saatchi, has decided to withdraw its Speed Dressing Cannes entry which was awarded a Bronze Lion. The ad, one of the best ever created for the clothing retailer since Saatchi & Saatchi won the account, was shot by Epoch films without, as all parties claim, the knowledge of JCPenney or Saatchi & Saatchi. It's not the first time a faux ad has been submitted, duped everyone and won but it has turned into one of the more high profile offenses.
more »
Earlier we explored messages that only appear in photographs. But hey, how about touch-sensitive tattoos or jewelry that interacts with your body?
All part and parcel of Philips' strange and suggestive Design Probes subsite, which experiments with new ways of wedding life to technology.
Though I agree with Thought Gadget when he argues this video doesn't really emphasize the many possibilities of touch-sensitive tats. Naked teens on a fondle-spree? There's a tired idea.
Capitalizing on culture junkies accustomed to a world they can manipulate with ease, AKQA shot Street Canvas, a promotion for Nike PHOTOiD.
To a cool beat and without narration, the video describes the following process.
more »
"Dude ... I think the tennis player in that ad just totaled your car with his oversized ball."
"Sucks, man. Wanna play tennis?"
"Sure. But before we go, let's buy proper footwear at K-Swiss."
"High-five!"
Orchestrated by TriBeCa for the Roland Garros French Open in Paris. More photos here and here.
Fun facts: Maybe because it's French, TriBeCa calls it "ambush marketing," not "guerrilla marketing," and the goal was to create a "Wahoo Effect."
I'm not really sure what "Wahoo" is ("Yahoo" without the awkward "Yang" association?), but maybe it has something to do with how people open their mouths and make no noise when they see something like, say, a car smashed by a giant tennis ball.
Via the hip cats at in:fluencia.
In a recent study conducted by product review online TV site, ExpoTV, it was found that, yes, some people do actually want to "have a conversation" with a brand. The study found:
- Consumers not only want to talk to brands, they want to establish a conversation: 55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands
- Learning about new products in the pipeline is a top priority: Respondents were most anxious to talk to the product design (49%) department, followed by customer support (14%), marketing (14%) and pricing (13%)
- Positive brand experiences can generate word-of-mouth buzz: More than 60% of those polled said they tell 10 or more people about the products they like while a third tell 20 or more people
- Listening leads to loyalty: 89% of respondents would feel more loyal to brands which invited them to participate in a feedback group, and 92 percent of those who have a positive experience communicating with a brand will recommend purchasing a product from that brand to someone they know
- Consumers are open to engaging with the competition: 93 percent of consumers surveyed would be interested or very interested in communicating with competitive brands that expressed interest in their feedback if their first choice is not interested in hearing what they have to say
After listening to this jingle and the rest of the tunes over at the Archer Group-created HoagieFest site for convenience store chain Wawa, you absolutely will not be able to get them out of your head. And, after all, isn't that the point? The agency hired jingle writer Parry Gripp to create the songs which are also available as ringtones and, in acknowledgment of the many already existing Wawa loyalist sites, embeddable MySpace and Facebook sound files.
It's all so very....groovy in a sort of squeaky clean way.
- This one's for all the obsessive compulsive spelling and grammar police in the audience.
- Give Hayden Pannetierre and friends a hand. Send a virtual origami whale, courtesy of Greenpeace, to the Japanese Prime Minister and ask him to stop whaling.
- Oh look. The Nokia N-Series solves all the world's communications needs. Yup. Just one phone does it all.
- Why does a cereal brand need a website? Who knows but this guy tries his best to explain.
- Disney may have another High School Musical on its hands with Camp Rock which was the most watched show on TV this past Friday night.
Despite this week's drama over the Saatchi & Saatchi - "created" faux commercial for JCPenney, Grow Interactive, working with Saatchi & Saatchi double assures this new work for the retailer is, yes, APPROVED BY THE CLIENT! Now that that's out of the way, take a look at Rock Your Look, a new website developed as a sort of karaoke contest which awards the winner a trip to the stage at this year's Teen Choice Awards.
more »
Oh for fuck's sake! Are you kidding me? "That's why we do more than just connect calls. We believe in connecting people." Seriously? Well, U.S. Cellular, if you are so great at connecting people and making the world a perfectly happy, feel-good place, why don't you dial up Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, Omar Al-Bashir, Pervez Musharraf, Than Shwe and the rest of the world's dictatorial idiots, feed them some of your feel-good crap and see if you can, in fact, help the world become a better place. That, at least, would be worthy of producing these sixty seconds of sugar-coated puffery.
more »
I knew this webmaster who was out in the forest one night with her digicam, taking shots of the landscape, when suddenly she realized there was something in the picture that wasn't there in real life.
"It was a UFO," she insisted, "just floating in the sky, perfectly still. And I could only see it in the photos I took."
I called bullshit at the time. But since then, Julius von Bismarck -- a seriously Che Guevara-looking dude -- invented the Image Fulgurator. It senses when a flash goes off, then projects an image onto the pictures people took.
See it in action.
more »
To promote certain houses on the Village Homes lot (Denver, CO), marketing director Barb Anderson said the company used a kiddie-ride. You know, like the coin-op space ships at grocery stores.
"One of the important influencers on a home purchase is the kids. At the end of the day ... the home with the kiddie ride is sure to get remembered by the home-buyer family," she said.
Gimmicky, but I can see the charm.
Kiddie Rides USA (KRUSA) of Denver, CO provides machines for this and other interested parties (doctors offices, car dealerships and reporters in midlife crises have also tried them). KRUSA also claims to be the last indy kiddie ride company left in the country.
|
|
