Whatever you think about advertising, there are some pretty amazing examples and more than a few which make the hair on your neck stand up. We all get this emotional response when we come up with a good idea. Much more rare is that other people get the same feeling when all is said and done.

Either way get over to the Cannes site, watch the videos and get learned. Believe me it’ll be the most productive 2 hours of this year.

Quite simply, The Dark Knight ARG was unique. A potent illustration of how deep the rabbit hole can go, given that rare confluence of the 3 C’s - content, cash and client.

It will forever mark a new chapter in (film) marketing history and fill fanboys’ wet dreams for years to come. If Lucifer himself decided to walk amongst us as an ad-man, I doubt he could’ve done better.

10 million unique participants across 75 countries and 500,000,000 (yes that’s half-a-billion) organic media impressions sets the bar against which we should all be judged. This is the future of advertising so often talked about and so infrequently executed.

The Dark Knight ARG is oh-so-much more than the 31 spoof websites shown above, and you could do much worse than read the Cannes submission that helped it take out this year’s Titanium Lion. Well deserved to 42 Entertainment.

I don’t play video games (honestly, where do people find the time?) but Prototype one looks like a cracker! Nice art too…

Interactive youtube vids have been around for sometime now, and whilst there have been some notable exceptions - boone oakley and Youtube Street Fighter - the majority of them are pretty crap.

Cue the ultimate BBoy battle between arch-enemies ‘the’ Batman and the Joker. It takes the Street Fighter concept several steps further in terms of both interactivity as well as out-and-out production values.

I promised myself I wouldn’t do a MJ tribute post, but Billie Tweets is just too good…

Its definitely the coolest use of twitter I’ve seen in ages - basically a mashup of we feel fine’s keyword search and twitter’s real-time-y-ness with a good dose of MJ-rhythm for good measure - in short, Billie Tweets searches Twitter and then pushes the resulting tweets out word-by -word to the beat of Billie Jean.

Very very very good and brought to us by the talented kids over at 9astronauts

I wonder how long they were sitting on this idea before poor MJ (R.I.P.) kicked the bucket and they thought fuck it its now or never! Like the truth about MJ and those kids, I guess we’ll just never know…

C’mon, it won’t take a sec…

the-affair is an indie label out of East London striving to rid the world of boring and dumb popcorn tees. They produce in limited runs of only 200 per design and each one is based on literature - hence their slogan “the thinking man’s brand”.

They’ve just dropped Batch.04 / Obscurity in time for the northern summer. The 3 new designs were begun from slightly more obscure sources than usual, but the results speak for themselves.

Strange Aeons is based on H.P Lovecraft’s very particular form of tenticled horror in The Call of Cthulu.

Whilst We comes courtesy of their insatiable fascination with dystopic fiction, this time via Zamyatin’s novel of the same name, widely agreed to be the inspiration for Orwell’s 1984.

And finally Corto’s Crash SS09 is a brand new aqua colourway of their best-selling (and now sold-out) Corto’s Crash.

Get on over there and grab yourself one before they’re all gone…

Full disclosure: I am one half of the-affair with my partner in crime Dave Black

White Void’s (new?) folio is perhaps the most elegant use of Papervision I’ve ever seen. As an interface, it feels like the future simply because it is so damn intuitive. Oh, and the work’s not bad either :-p

RabbitHoles 3D is some pretty cool tech, but waaaay under-utilised IMHO.

“The pieces are printed in the amazing form of RabbitHoles state-of-the-art digital motion holograms, which display 1280 frames of full-color, 3D imagery with up to ten seconds of fluid and seamless animation on a completely flat surface.”

Why is it that tech-leading artists have such a horrible aesthetic? The only artist that actually thought about the medium and what makes it interesting is Nape of the Neck by Jeremy Engleman (around 05:28).

Anyway it will be interesting to see if and how it gets picked up moving forward.

Craig Barber has just launched a new service titled Laptop Friendly Cafes, which is quite simply “a website that lists great local spots to set up shop with your laptop”.

A good idea for sure, kinda like SF-Bay culture for the rest of the planet :)

I am however a little underwhelmed by the content. Not the list of cafes themselves, but what is (not) said about them. As they stand, the reviews are very functional.

But if I am going to use this site repeatedly, I want to know things about the cafe:
- What is the coffee like?
- Whether or not I can sit all day like a major tight-arse on 1 one coffee?
- Or if they have a 1-drink-an-hour policy?
- What’s the music like?
- Are the staff surly and aggressive or tree-hugging hippies?

IMHO this is the type of content that will make the site a success and make me want to come back again and again.

In digital, placement is everything. Yet it’s much rarer in TV-land to find the same level of creative placement. This ad for Optalgin (Israel’s leading pain killer) shoots that theory to shit.

It is so simple but i’ve never seen it before - an ad for a pain killer delivered during the live UEFA Championship Final only when the players are rolling around on the grass after a foul. Apparently the tagline reads “Tough pain? Optalgin for tough pains”.

The only thing that would make this better is if it was for a method-acting supplement - “Tough script? Optalgin. For acting.”

Meet the coolest digi-analogue clock. Ever! The Clock Clock.

There’s no shortage of Twitter-bashing going on at the moment. One of my personal favourites is this insight from Modern Toss

Rubberduckzilla! is a fun little homage to the Japanese Godzilla movies of old, courtesy of Oasis. The line is “For people who don’t like water” and its the (illogical) continuation of the Cactus Kid campaign. IMHO they must’ve been watching too much lesbian porn and sold this idea through solely on the first shot - cause i’m as confused as the giant rubber duck is…

“You know what they say - never meet your heroes, especially in a gimp mask”

Great irreverent advertising-that’s-not-really-but-kinda-still-is advertising (some people call it ‘content’) from Kickers and the creators of Modern Toss. The kind of stuff that could only be made in Britain - pithy incisive and self-deprecating writing, great voice talent, and only around 1000 views between them in a month :(

Not sure how much they would’ve spent, or even if these are running on TV but you’d expect a better response than that… Either way, the flys are gold - pure gold just like out of CB4!

via Contagious

Super interesting article over on Contagious that the true value of twitter is actually as an immediacy search engine? Think google in real-time. Yep, the penny drops and you realise why they turned down half a bazillion.

“$500m seems like small fry when you may have accidentally stumbled on the latest evolution of a cash cow as gigantic as search marketing.”

Anyway some clever lad has created a firefox plugin that puts Twitter results directly into the google results page. Its the dog’s bollocks, trust me. It fundamentally changed search for me. Go on, give it a whirl

via contagious

Ok now this is funny. The agency responsible for the brilliant launch campaign for 42 Below Vodka has just lost the account to a new start-up here in London-town. That start-up is very good, and I am sure won the business hands down. However the incumbent obviously doesn’t see it that way…

Has anyone else found the same thing to be true? And if so, surely there is a little widget somewhere that would allow you to cue up emails based on territory to spam out at this most auspicious time? Anyone know what it is?

via hollrr

I will always have a soft-spot for #68 “Aussie Party” :)

The First World Wide Web Site Where Nothing Happens

I love the extended loading screen. You’re waiting and waiting and thinking something ‘amazing’ is going to happen, and then… Nothing! Brilliantly simple execution of the tagline “Have a break, Have a Kit Kat”

via adverblog

Every year we wait with baited breath for Contagious magazine to release their Most Contagious roundup of the year that was 2008. I’m only half-way through it, and its worth every bit of the wait.

No surprise that the Most Contagious crown went to Obama’s near flawless campaign. Unfortunately I was travelling for the final weeks, so missed all the meatiest stuff. If anyone can point me to a good round up I’d be most appreciative…

Anyway whatever you are doing - stop it immediately and go and read this report. You will not regret it.

The ever insightful Ian Stevenson gives us this beautiful start to the new year. It may not be good advice for all the struggling retailers out there but it made me smile. And if you’re not scared of losing customers to Aldi, you could do worse than to follow it as a differentiating strategy…

Its been just over 2 years since I joined de-construct London back in the heady summer of 2006. Remember, the only decent summer in northern europe this century? At the start of this year I was given the opportunity to creatively lead and help startup de-construct’s Amsterdam office.

The experience has been fantastic, and I have learnt so much about the ‘business’ of advertising but after 8 months I’ve decided that this city is just not for me.

So it’s back to Ol’ Blighty for me as of next Monday. I am extremely fortunate to be taking up the position of Associate Creative Director of R/GA London. They are doing work that is quite simply unlike any other agency I’ve ever met and I’ll be working on some amazing clients. The combination of (relative) youth and raw desire in the management team was too-good to refuse. Well, that and the fact that they walk away from well paying jobs when the client wants to dilute the idea beyond recognition. These are the type of people everyone should work for, but not many do…

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is poverty. Rather than comment on financial poverty and helping the under-priviledged, I thought I would write a bit about poverty of truly original ideas in advertising because that is what I know (something) about.

Known politely as ‘inspiration’, and not so politely as plagiarism - largely depending on whether you’re the originator or not - our industry is driven by the fuzzy grey line between the two. There are countless examples, from Fallon’s bunnies to today’s news that BMB is being sued by the makers of iBeer for stealing their awesome idea and ‘recontextualising’ it as a piece of branded content.

The fact is that lot of good, even perhaps great, advertising is the recontextualisation or mashing-up of other people’s ideas for commercial purpose. Contrary to what most practitioners believe, advertising is not often at the cutting edges of creativity, characterised by a few flashes of brilliance in between long periods of failure (being anything but one of these flashes). We’re too concerned with the commerical imperatives of the client to be in the lucky position of being able to fail until we get it right.

In itself this is not necessarily a bad thing. What is a terrible shame is that the industry as a whole is just not very good at giving credit where credit is due. It could be fearful creatives desperately trying to defend their positions/process, or account men and women being good at their jobs to assuage the client’s distress, or project managers trying to manage their never-big-enough budgets. Or it just might be that the person who’s idea you are appropriating just isn’t interested in commercialising their work. And this must also be respected. But whatever the reason, this poverty of ideas - and in their vacuum, poverty of legitimate credit - has to stop.

I don’t have any magic pills that can change any of this, and I don’t think anyone does. Sure longer timelines would help. As well as not working with pedestrian clients wanting just a-n-other “one of those”.

All comments welcome on how we might address this? I’d love to know your thoughts…

Still off-topic on the political tip, but at least this comes courtesy of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. They’ve made a whole bunch of ads against McCain, but this is the pick IMHO. And like Tina Fey’s hilarious Palin impressions, its unbelievably scary because the humour is actually just the reality.

I loved Matt Damon in ‘Team America’ and didn’t think he could actually do anything better. But he’s back with some succinct observations on Palin’s nomination. A sad indictment indeed on the general state of American apathy and I can only hope that his celebrity will convince some people to get up and vote this November…

In March I wrote about the launch of Analog Folk, and the seemingly unbelievable situation of a new agency - with digital at its core - not having their (excellent) content embed-able.

At the time it seemed to me a gross oversight, so I’m happy to report that Ed Ling, from Analog Folk, has just written to say that they’ve updated the functionality. Sorry Ed, but you could’ve done a bit more with the graphic design.

Anyway here it is. Sit back and enjoy Matt Dyke’s insights on gaming and the rediscovery of analog play. He charts the evolution of game-play from the button mashing of the 80’s and 90’s through Xbox Live and the connection of real humans, past the Wii and into the future of biofeedback and the thought-interface.

I’m not really a big twitterer yet (but I think my new iPhone will change that), but I just came across this ingenious bolt-on idea called bkkeeper, which turns your twitter into a broadcast of your book reading habits.

But apart from sharing the titles you’re currently reading, they’ve also built a system which allows you to digitally dog-ear / bookmark pages. Its a great way of sharing with people in real-time what was previously only a solo experience.

Apart from the fact that I haven’t figured out how to get an account there yet (am I just completely stupid/blind?), the only thing that could improve this would be some webcam integration to read the ISBN number for you - you know, like Delicious Library.

Watch this through and you’ll think the Wachowski’s were perhaps more than just a little prescient. Kevin Kelly from Wired looks at the fact that the current web is only 5000 days old, and posits what the coming 5000 days will bring.

If you don’t have the time, then it pretty much goes like this -

“There is only One machine.
The web is its OS.
All screens look into the One.
No bits will live outside the web.
To share is to gain.
Let the One read it.
The One is us.”

Word.

via in my atmosphere

In Australia, Stella Artois is the king of premium beers. But like any brand, they wanted to sell more (of course). They needed to up their game, and created a new sales team to focus on it. And of course, they needed some marketing materials to help them do the selling. So far, so traditional.

But the sales team didn’t really know about the legacy of the brand and the long association with film, especially in the UK. Instead of a series of sleep-worthy PowerPoints, they were each given a customised PSP loaded with film content. Not only could they educate themselves, but they could educate the bar owners as well. And importantly, have some fun doing it.

And it worked (from after the jump) - “analysis has shown that every sales representative who was given a PSP met all their sales targets for the relevant quarter. Anecdotal feedback also confirmed that without exception, the PSP was regarded as the best sales presenter ever received. As a result, Foster’s is now reviewing further rollout of the tool.”

This is a great example of an agency, in this case Lowe Rivet, stepping back from the brief and thinking about what needs to be achieved and by whom. Again, in digital we’re often too proud to offer clients ready-made solutions. But custom is not always king. Often - and increasingly more so as every single facet of digital possibility has a web 2.0 offering - it just makes sense to take something pre-engineered, and tweak it as required.

via i believe in advertising

In digital, I often feel that there is a tendency to overwork ideas. Longer non-linear time frames, coupled with clients who were sound alseep during the single-minded proposition part of their marketing degrees, don’t help the situation. Many many times I’ve sat in meetings that were overcomplicating an idea for on other reason than habit.

But not all ideas need to be ground breaking. Some just need to be simple, timely and well executed. And this new press campaign for Sony Walkman is a perfect case in point. Its not a new idea by any stretch, but its executed with a sense of calm elegance that elevates it above the clutter.

via i believe in advertising

Warning! More shameless self-promotion… 2 days after it launched and Everything Matters has already won the FWA! That’s gotta be a record turnaround!

UPDATE! Everything Matters makes the front page of Creativity Online as the Interactive Pick of the Day 05.09.2008

Brilliant piece of work responding to the gamers who posted a glitch in the EA game Tiger Woods that allowed you to play from the water like a modern-day Jesus. Rather than issue a patch to the game, they hit the problem head-on without fear in this simply awesome viral . “It’s not a glitch. He’s just that good.”, and frankly so are the agency and client behind this.

Warning! Shameless self-promotion!

Everything Matters is much more than a consumer-facing website. It is the entire comms platform for Panasonic Europe through to 2010. At its most basic Everything Matters is a content portal or hub, created to be a central repository for the various amazing brand stories that Panasonic has to tell, but has yet to do so.

The content was conceptualised to be varied in both form and depth - sitting somewhere between a print ad and a website. In other words, some information but with the visceral impact and simplicity of a print ad, aided where possible by interactivity.

Both in style and approach, it is a radical departure for Panasonic. There is very little product detail on the site and the soft gradients on white were dispensed with for a more tactile and human art direction. Major battles that we fought very hard to win.

Created by de-construct.

It might be about 5 years old now, but the Global Rich List is one of those ideas that just gets better with age - aided by the unfortunate growth in the rich/poor divide.

But what makes this such a brilliant piece of communication is the irony inherent in the mechanic. It makes you feel both good (rich) and bad (selfish) by ranking you against everyone else on the entire planet. And it is this duality that compels action. A very clever way to cut through the constant pressure of “keeping up with the Joneses” and highlight what a little change from your pocket could do for the world’s poorest.

An almost perfect gem from Poke London.

Someone has mixed politics and geek-ism to perfection in this wonderfully poignant film about ‘Imperial Fleet Week’. I wonder if any of the Americans watching this made the leap into empathising for the Iraqis? Or if it was just a really good bit of motion tracking?

via andreas

I’m currently reading Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by Michio Kaku. Though credited with making theoretical physics accessible, its clearly a relative concept because I don’t understand even the half of it. Thankfully some crazy cats at the LHC do, and what better way to connect with the disenfranchised youf than to rap about it? This is so geeky its beyond awesome :)

via viral video chart

For those interested, the wordpress support forums were great as was (mt) support. I am also now a big fan of the exploit scanner plugin. If you run wordpress, you should get it.

Brandtags is an absolutely genius idea by Noah Brier (a strategist at Naked). The idea is to chart public - a.k.a consumer - perception of brands via user-generated tags.

Where the project becomes really valuable though is in playing backwards. Here you have to guess the brand, and the tags become a chart of the efficacy of a clear and coherent comms strategy. Those that have got it right are immediately identifiable by a few massive tags. Those unsure of exactly who they are (and obviously have conflicting comms messages) are reflected in a mass of different tags.

Hardly a true and accurate cross-seciton of the population (yet), but nevertheless if i was a brand manager, I’d have this bookmarked and be charting change over time.

Big up to Naked as well, no doubt this idea was hatched on their time ;)

Seeing this makes me think of how my mother used to think spinning vinyl was ‘just not how you make music’. Nostalgia for real wax aside, it seems to me that this is a bit too clinical and (potentially) takes a lot of the skill out of DJing. Almost like being able to see the waveform is cheating, as you no longer need to ‘feel’ the music.

But in time i’m sure kids will grow up knowing that they can touch any screen, and expect it to react. Then this will be OK, and we will most certainly be in the future. Or maybe that will be when someone ports this software to the iPhone and tells Andrew Andrew (of the legendary NYC iPod parties) about it?

Converse has just unleashed a myriad of puzzling and irreverent urls. Get the overview here.

For example, Out of your league girl teaches the hapless about everything from being creepy, to confidence, motivation and passion. Then there’s the trials of Silky Steve and his very English dreams of becoming a superstar US basketballer.

But the most interesting idea by far is the spelling bee, where you get given a word and then have to google it and then click on an adsense ad to get to the next round. I wish it would work for me, but the doesn’t :( I guess because i’m not in the USA? If anyone is, then I’d love to know more about how it works.

I can only assume it was done by their agency, Butler Shine Stern and Partners.
via leigh.

“After the countdown at Whysoserious.com/Overture ends, the Joker “Jokerizes” nearly every single website in the game, some containing a puzzle piece. In addition, “Joker signals” are projected onto the Woolworth Building and Sears Tower. Solving the puzzle piece riddle leads to Whysoserious.com/Kickingandscreening, which offers free tickets to a pre-release screening of The Dark Knight.”

Everyone hates proving that they’re human. Captcha’s are those annoying sequences of letters, deformed beyond OCR, in every online form where you have to prove you’re smarter than the computer. But rather than use randomly generated sequences, some clever bod decided it could be put to better use by helping to digitise the world’s library, via a project called ReCAPTCHA

According to the site, “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent… more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” Put it all together and you get an endless distributed workflow, making good on their promise of “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time”.

A noble cause no doubt and a very simple and powerful idea. Honestly though, if these little puzzles are all that separate us from the machines, we’re fucked anyway, digitised world library or not.

Another one from Absolut and this time the seem to be right back on track! Be KANYE is a pretty fun piss-take on late-night infomercials. Its not quite as good as menergy, but the girl is hilarious.

Not much on the site except for some pretty good bad design and a countdown timer - to who knows what? The infomercial was enough to get my address so let’s hope its worth it! Well disguised branding until the end frame…

via viral video chart

4Creative are simply awesome. To advertise the Kubrick season beginning this week, they’ve recreated the set of Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ with mind-boggling attention to detail. The ad becomes a behind-the-scenes romp via all the main characters, resolving on ‘you’ being handed the script as the famous tricycle scene is about to be shot.

Its compulsive watching if for nothing else but to appreciate the sheer scale of a feature film. The ad itself was shot in one take as well which makes it all the more beautiful and breathtaking. Unfortunately its not embeddable, but you can watch it here.