New Honda Insight Ad - 'Let it Shine'

Beautiful new ad for Honda by W+K Amsterdam. Filmed in the desert using thousands of headlights, the team created a huge animated 'led screen', with a beautiful soundtrack. However, the really impressive part of the campaign is the page takeover they have done on video hosting site vimeo. Similar to the Wii Warioland 'shake it' takeover done on YouTube, the takeover dominates the whole page and is really effective. Take a look for yourselves, and learn more about the making of the video below.

Puppy Pulling Power - Sony Ericsson's new camera phone with 'Smile Shutter'

Interesting campaign from Sony Ericsson to promote their new C510 Cyber-Shot model, which claims to be able to take a picture at the exact moment the subject smiles. The premise is that two guys try to find out which is the best puppy for getting smiles from girls using the phone attached to the dog's collar. The result is a strange collection of videos as they gather their 'data' and plenty of gratuitous cleavage shots as the girls bend down. For the full story, or just to see the aforementioned cleavage shots, visit the puppy pulling power blog. Feels a little bit like the recent Lynx campaigns and is a little bit odd, but clever 'use' of the technology.

What are T-Mobile up to? Trafalgar Square Flashmobbing

Just spotted this video suggesting those sneaky station-botherers T-mobile are up to another one of their flashmobbing events. The video leads with the line 'Remember the dance?' and invites people to be part of their 'next event' by being at Trafalgar square, tomorrow, between 6 and 7pm. Who knows what they've got up their sleeves.

Signs of life - No. 7

Need somewhere new to set up your business?  Why not try one of these lovely, spacious office suit's?  Oh and look, there are long and short term lease's available. Perfect.

If walls could talk - interactive Jameson's ad

Nice outdoor effort from Jameson's Irish Whiskey.  Pretty high maintenance, but couldn't be more personalised for the audience!

New Heineken 'Walking Fridge' ad

Smart continuation of the viral success of the recent Heineken 'Walk in Fridge' ad.  First extended with this fantastic 'user generated' spoof (below), this is another clever little ad.

The popularity even resulted in this spoof from the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team in the States:

But, as is often the case with viral campaigns, the original is best.  

New Compare the Meerkat ad - Sergei's New Server

Compare the Market's latest ad from Aleksandr at Compare the Meerkat shows their (not so) shiny new server, which they've had to install to handle all those pesky car insurance searches they're receiving.  Must be down to the huge success of the campaign, with recent reports suggesting that quotes were recently up 90% on the same time last year.  With brand awareness surely higher than ever before and the brand now penetrating the mainstream, site traffic must be hitting dizzy new heights so I think Sergei deserves it.

Signs of life - No.5 - update

Now, I wouldn't want to blow my own trumpet, but the above company's sign was featured on this blog less than two weeks ago and since then has transformed in to the bobbydazzler above. Gone is the misspelling in 'Tel'. Gone is the confusing freephone number. They've even parted company with the random asterisk.  Was this blog the start of it all?  

A quick search for fix it nerds reveals nothing, however, if you do an image search, I'm number 1, so maybe, just maybe, this blog has done something useful!  Who'd have thunk it.  Look out signs of the world - I'm coming for you.  And so are both of the megapixels in my iPhone camera.   

Thetrainline.com - 'Lambient media'

Following on from this little beauty, @Chris_Reed pointed out the above effort from Thetrainline.com.

It reminded me of the 'bumvertising' idea in the States in that it utilises everyday sights in an unnatural way to deliver a message.

Although not as memorable as the LED viral from Samsung, this is a very clever, presumably low cost example of innovative advertising placement.  It's obviously in a reasonable position with thousands of daily commuters passing throughout the day and certainly raises a smile, but does it deliver the message?  We will have to wait and see.   

Samsung Disappearing Phone Viral

Mobile companies and service providers are going to town with the virals at the minute. Following on from T-mobile's Dance ads, the recent Vodafone efforts and various others, Samsung challenge you to solve the 'mystery' of the above video.

The video has been put together to promote the new I8910 HD camera phone with a built in 8 megapixel, HD camera. In order to solve the mystery, Samsung suggest using the HD quality version of the uploaded YouTube video.

Certainly makes you think!

Via Alex at Funkadelic Advertising.

The fast and the infuriating - MSN interrupts movie trailer

Brilliant idea promoting the new film-selling service VOD in French cinemas. As you will see from the video, it certainly draws the attention of the viewers, and seems to be well received.

Via Adverblog.

IKEA Paris Parachutes Viral

Discovered via Adivertido, this viral appears to be for IKEA. I've tried to find some more details on it as my Spanish/Portuguese is not the best (as is clear from the fact that I can't work out if it's written in Portuguese or Spanish), but to no avail. I did, however, manage to find a secod video, below:

Nicely put together, but I'm hoping for a big reveal at some point to direct the buzz generated to the company responsible.

Smart Car URL Shortener

Clever little idea from Smart. Simply type in your URL and this site will shorten it for you, allowing you to 'park' large URLs in small spaces. Nice tie in.

Signs of life - No. 6

Wrong. All wrong.

What do you do guaranteed?

I love stuff like this. Massively pretentious people telling you why they're better than you, and how you can be more like them. Cheers pal. Reminded me of this.

Happy Easter.

Following my re-post the other day of the classic Honda commercial, Stan at Brand DNA alerted me to this fantastic Rube Goldberg-esque contraption created as an entry to Cadbury's 'Unleash the goo' competition. Having taken 6 months and 200 takes to produce, it definitely gets my vote.

Tasty Tweet

Fantastic use of twitter by London bakery Albion. Developed by agency Poke, the clever technology allows staff at the bakery to send a tweet to all subscribed followers, letting them know what's just come fresh out of the oven. Another great example of how businesses can use social media to interact and build relationships with consumers.

I thought that perhaps something similar could be used by restaurants that are having quiet nights or launching particular specials, similar to the technology being offered by many SMS services, but with a less intrusive, relationship building approach.

Are there any other examples of technology like this being used cleverly by companies/organisations?

Signs of life - No. 5

You'll have to look closely for this one. I originally took the picture as 'Tel' was spelt 'Tell'. This, on it's own, was enough to make me shake my head with despair, not to mention the random '*' that they've put in for no reason. However, after looking again I realised quite what a beauty this is. Who is going to pay to 'Tell' you if there's a Freephone number? Madness.

Sound Familiar?

That's because it's the original inspiration for the new 118247 ad below.  This has been around for a long while, surely advertisers aren't running out of ideas, are they?

I'm sure there are loads, but what other ads are taken from things that have been big on the web?

Alpine Legend - Xbox Snowbombing Viral

Very clever tongue-in-cheek viral from Microsoft Xbox, promoting their Snowbombing music event.  If I'm honest, I secretly wanted this game to exist...

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance

Start Monday with a nice warm feeling. This video is incredible. 

Facts about the video from Oren's Myspace page:

* The video was shot all stills - roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.
* It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.
* It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minutes computer sequence, frame by frame.
* Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.
*Each of the wonderfully talented people above have worked on the video for a fraction of their normal rates (except Oren who worked for his normal rate of zero).

Look out Twitter - here comes Flutter!

Microblogging is dead. Thank god for Flutter.

Did you know?

I know I'm a little late with this, but after the last post I thought I'd better try and make this one a little more grown up.  Being a bit of a geek, I love nothing more than interesting facts and figures so really enjoyed it.  Watch and learn - fascinating stuff.

Like a Boss - Lonely Island

The latest song from Comedy band The Lonely Island.  Pretty funny, but still not as good as the epic 'Jizz in my pants'.  As you'll see from the video, they've now released an album, which I'm dying to get my hands on.