To launch Sportsgirl’s new season, we’re tapping the 8Tracks.com community of budding DJs to help create the perfect soundtrack to kick things off.

Supported by high impact display and social media, 8Tracks and Sportsgirl are running an integrated contest to create the ultimate new season mixtape.

Music lovers simply create a playlist with their choice of 8 or more of the hottest tunes, add their own cover artwork, and then tag their mix with the word “sportsgirl”. Then they pop over to the Sportsgirl online forums and post their link to your mix.

The winning playlist will be featured online and streamed via a QR code in Sportsgirl’s new season mag (out February 2012). The lucky DJ will also win a $1000 Sportsgirl wardrobe.

A powerful way to engage youth audiences is to reward the native behaviour of a passionate community; in this instance, young people who love to create and share mixes to express their music tastes.

8Tracks.com was named as Time Magazine’s #1 web site of 2011, and we’re extremely proud to say is the latest addition to the Populace family.

8tracks is handcrafted internet radio — the social, curated alternative to sites like Pandora.

8tracks believes playlists created by people trump those automated by algorithm. Think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture in the years since. DJs get a platform for tastemaking, artists gain exposure, and listeners enjoy a unique blend of word-of-mouth sharing and radio — long the trusted means for music discovery — on a global scale.

Members pick at least eight songs from their own collections, upload them and share them as handcrafted mixes. You can find mixes created by your Facebook friends or simply follow other members who share your tastes.

Featuring 300,000+ mixes created by people who know and love music, the new 8tracks Android app gives you easy, free and mobile access to the best collection of playlists on the web. It sits happily alongside the ever popular 8tracks iPhone app.

Go on, send someone a mix.

Last week, Monster Children announced the winners of its inaugural photo competition and officially launched its 2011 Photo Annual. As one of the world’s most revered and influential art & design magazines, the works showcased were, not suprisingly, AMAZING.

The 2011 Photo Annual is out now, featuring all the finalists from the competition, alongside work from luminaries such as Peter Sutherland and Chris Searl himself (from Monster Children). After 3500 individual entries, bucketloads of national and international press and several giant cheques for $5,000, Monster Children looks forward to bringing this competition to life again in August 2012.

Jeep Wrangler has taken over Grooveshark and Hypebeast this month, with its campaign targeting well heeled adventurous types with inner city home postcodes.

The campaign is a great example of the unmatched creative impact delivered by Grooveshark player skins and the new Hypebeast homepage takeover (960×540 & skin), both with the ability to showcase video.

Populace today announces that deviantART has selected it as its exclusive brand sales house in Australia.

Founded in August 2000, deviantART is the world’s largest community of artists and art enthusiasts online, attracting 44 million unique visitors per month globally and a staggering 990,000 unique visitors per month in Australia alone.

It’s the web’s ultimate home for creative expression, where emerging and established artists alike, across every category of art gather to share ideas and find inspiration from their peers.

“On any given day, more people will view art on the deviantART web site than will attend all the museums and galleries in the world.” – USA Today

The site has a huge Australian following, with over 45 million local monthly pageviews across a staggering array of art categories; from fine art to 3D modeling, street art to fashion photography, to film and animation.  DeviantART’s 160 million pieces of work easily makes it the largest collection of art on the web today.

“As the largest aggregator of creative talent on the Internet, deviantART enables us to help brands engage and interact in a meaningful way with a desirable and valuable audience,” says Remi Carette, Digital Media Director of Populace, and deviantART member since early 2001.

“We’re excited to partner with Populace, and eager to introduce our set of deeply integrated advertising products to the Australian market”, said Ernie Riemer, Vice President of Advertising Operations at deviantART.  “With the rapid growth we’re seeing in the Australian  ad market, we see this as the perfect time to show a new set of advertisers the dynamic impact our creative community has when interacting with products and brands on deviantART.”

DeviantART recently rolled out a hugely successful media partnership with Foot Locker Australia for the Foot Locker Art Prize colouring competition, a creative crowdsourcing campaign and contest worth $50,001. Deviants ruled the competition, with the winner along with 6 of the 24 finalists being Deviants. Through the integrated promotion encompassing interstitials, blog editorial, display banners and Facebook posts; deviantART engaged thousands of street artists, fine artists, and digital designers to contribute a slew of high caliber submissions, customising a pair of sneakers.

Other recent advertisers in Australia include Dell, Dunlop Volleys and Billy Blue College of Design. International examples of brand integrations with the likes of Sony, Smart Car, Mentos and Universal Pictures are showcased in deviantART’s Brand Book.

The Populace network now reaches 2 million monthly unique visitors and spans MUSIC sites Grooveshark.com, Tonedeaf.com.au and ResidentAdvisor.net, and FASHION sites LOOKBOOK.nu, Hypebeast.com and Sneakerfreaker.com.

“With an increasing number of brands looking to engage people online to create and participate, our audience of active and influential consumers across the cultural pursuits of Music, Fashion and Art is unmatched. Our audience simply love brands that give them a platform for self expression and creativity,” says Michael Slonim, Populace General Manager.

http://www.deviantART.com

Kalin Thompson, a 24-year old hailing from Brisbane, Australia has taken home the $50,001 first prize in the Foot Locker’s colouring competition. And guess what? He’s a deviant! That’s right, *KalinThompson is Foot Locker Australia’s sneaker-coloring king! Proving, once again, that deviantART is home to very best!

In May, Foot Locker Australia ran the world’s richest art colouring competition, inviting people to create sneaker art for their chance to win $50,001 in prize money.

deviantART’s media partnership drove over 10,000 people into the competition, but moreover contributed the winner and a further 6 of the 24 finalists. As the leading online network for creative people, deviantART’s passionate and talented community is unmatched.

Your favourite sneaker fiends have just shared their mid year pick of the litter, take a peak at this top 20 list.

Foot Locker is running the world’s richest art colouring competition, inviting people to create sneaker art for their chance to win $50,001 in prize money (cheekily $1 more than the Archibald prize).

As the world’s largest online art community, deviantART has partnered with Foot Locker to tap its enormous troves of talent to participate in the contest. Through an integrated promotion encompassing interstitials, blog editorial, display banners and Facebook posts, deviantART has engaged thousands of street artists, fine artists, digital designers and all sorts of budding art enthusiasts to apply their creativity to customise a pair of sneakers, contributing an extremely high caliber of submissions in the process. Here are some examples of submissions made by the deviantART community…

A high impact display campaign is also running through Populace sites Hypebeast.com and SneakerFreaker.com, including skins, feature banners, half pages, editorial, newsletters, forum and social media posts.

If you’re one of the increasing numbers of brands looking to engage young people to CREATE and PARTICIPATE, our audience of active and influential consumers across the cultural pursuits of Music, Fashion and Art is unmatched. They simply love promotions that give them a platform for self expression and creativity, just like this one.

Converse is hosting a block party in Prahran, Melbourne in May, bringing together music, art and street culture. We’re talking basketball 3 on 3, a skate comp, artist installations, skipping crews, breakdancing, a taco truck, flea markets and music from the likes of Phrase, Illy and the Fool’s Gold DJs flying in from the USA.

Basically it’s a massive mash up of youth culture, so no surprises that Converse has partnered with Populace to get the word out through our extensive and highly influential pop culture network.

Leading the activity is a skin on Grooveshark.com being targeted at Victorians across relevant music genres and tastes. In addition to providing huge reach into music fans, Grooveshark enables serious targeting by demo (age, gender, state) as well as listening habits, which has been put to perfect use here in conjunction with impactful creative.

The Converse Block Party event is also being pushed through an extensive display campaign across our key fashion sites – hypebeast.com, sneakerfreaker.com and LOOKBOOK.nu – along with indie music site Tonedeaf.com.au.

Check out more details if you’re not doing anything this Saturday May 14!

adidas has released its first ever global campaign that marries the Sports and Style sides of the brand. The campaign centres around an epic video directed by Romain Gavras, featuring a slew of adidas celebrities, from Katie Perry to David Beckham and Jeremy Scott, all set to a brand spanking new track from French electro gods Justice.

Populace sites Hypebeast, LOOKBOOK.nu, SneakerFreaker and Grooveshark are being tapped as key partners, each bringing to the campaign a unique audience and way to showcase the brand’s video assets.

Grooveshark, the latest addition to the Populace family, is a hugely popular global music streaming site, with 605,000 Australian UBs. Its unique video skin is an extremely impactful and creatively rich way to bring the 2 minute video straight to the target audience’s eyeballs, using demo and music taste targeting to hone in on its sweet spot of young music lovers.

Grooveshark Video Skin

On Hypebeast.com, the massive “obese boy” homepage banner unit is being used to showcase the video, whilst video banners, editorial and Facebook posts are being used by LOOKBOOK.nu and SneakerFreaker to engage their highly influential audiences.

Hypebeast "Obese Boy" Video Banner

Through Populace, adidas has been able to speak directly to an audience of close to 1 million young culturally engaged individuals, utilising a range of creative units to showcase its video assets.