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Orange Brings Wind Power to Phones of Glastonbury Revelers

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For last weekend's Glastonbury Festival, GotWind.org partnered with mobile firm Orange to launch the REcharge Pod, a mobile phone recharging station powered entirely by wind.

The companies pitched a windmill-mounted tent where people could charge phones without using ordinary power sources. The pod recharges 100 mobile phones per hour; any unused energy is stored in its Manbat battery bank.

This was the REcharge Pod's second year at the Festival. Thanks to in:fluencia for the tip.

by Angela Natividad    Jun-30-08   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Events, Good, Mobile/Wireless, Trends and Culture

Jim Beam Becomes Patron to Those With Stuff Inside

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In a significant move, distiller Jim Beam will re-focus future advertising from hyping heritage, quality and integrity and, instead, "highlight individuals and organizations that share its own values and have 'The Stuff Inside'", which is not at all a nod to, ya know, the stuff inside a Jim Beam bottle.

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by Steve Hall    Jun-29-08   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Campaigns, Cause, Good

Boys Will Be Boys And Boys Will Get What Boys Deserve

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OK. Guy with acquired class along with hot girl enters Ritz Carlton pool. Guy with born and bred class approaches and the one up-manship begins. Both men devolve, as many men do where a beautiful woman is concerned, into classless buffoons. In the end, the right one wins.

It's the next "film" in a series from the Ritz Carlton and American Express.

by Steve Hall    Jun-27-08   Comments (9)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Brands, Good, Video

City Trees Transformed Into Carrots to Promote Farmer's Market

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Here's a bit of ambient street work for you. To promote a local farmer's market, Portland, Oregon-based Owen Jones & Partners placed plastic linings in the shape of carrots around the bottoms of several trees on a city block. In addition to the linings which make the trees look like carrots, the agency also placed placards over the antennae of automobiles throughout the city making them look like scrumptious barbecued vegetable skewers.

by Steve Hall    Jun-27-08   Comments (1)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Good, Outdoor

Become a Cop -- or Even a Lawyer! -- All with a Flip of that Burger

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Denver-based Cactus put together this promotional video for Westwood College, a vocational school for, you know, vocations.

Way better than those crap Western Career College ads (whose only legacy is this drunk guy). And if you find it tough to take degree recommendations from a guy in a diner uniform, sit tight: he changes clothes.

More creative here. One tagline we liked: "Go from making a living to MAKING A LIFE." Smooooth.

by Angela Natividad    Jun-27-08   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Brands, Commercials, Good, Online, Television

Street Art Meets Foot Fetish in NIKE PHOTOiD

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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.

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by Angela Natividad    Jun-26-08   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Consumer Created, Good, Mobile/Wireless, Trends and Culture

K-Swiss Drops the Ball on Roland Garros, Paris

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"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.

by Angela Natividad    Jun-26-08   Comments (1)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Brands, Events, Good, Guerilla, Strange, Video

Wawa Gets Groovy With HoagieFest

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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.

by Steve Hall    Jun-26-08   Comments (7)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Good, Online

Newsflash! New, 100 Percent Approved Work for JCPenney!

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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.

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by Steve Hall    Jun-26-08   Comments (3)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games, Good, Online

Image Fulgurator Could Slip Ad Messages or Mascots into Picturesque Statues, Portraits, Landscapes

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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.

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by Angela Natividad    Jun-26-08   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Good, Guerilla, Strange

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