In the last weeks I came across two campaigns that revolved around Mobile Orchestra. So I decided to bundle them together...

The Philharmoniker Hamburg Acousticons App

Draft FCB was given the task to bring the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra and its classical music back to life by addressing a younger audience. So an "Acousticons App" was created that allowed people to chat just like in any other messenger app, but with a wide range of musical emoticons that let one feel the emotional power of classical music through the text messages. The App also contained the current season's programme and a direct link to order tickets.

The Czech National Symphony Orchestra for Hello Bank!

To promote a new "all-digital" bank in Europe called Hello Bank!, BNP Paribas and ad agency B-Roll wired up 60 musicians with smartphones and tablets for a rousing rendition of "Carmen."

During the 2012 European Championship, Nike worked with their agency DoubleYou to conduct a real-time social media monitoring campaign that caputured the conversations relating to Spanish football players sponsored by Nike. The data collected was then tabulated in the backend and the players were assigned points. These points were then displayed to the fans via a custom Facebook app. At the end the leading player was set to bear Nike's message of "My Time Is Now".

And the player was...

Last year Hellmann’s in Brazil came up with a novel way to encourage consumers to use their mayonnaise for more than just sandwiches. The brand teamed up with supermarket chain St Marche to install special software in 100 of its cash registers. The software then recognized when consumers bought Hellmann’s and tracked other items they were buying. At the time of payment it printed recipes that combined several of the ingredients on the receipt. In the first month alone of the three month experiment, sales increased by 44%.

Now for their new campaign, shopping carts at Pão de Açúcar shopping center in São Paulo were mounted with special NFC enabled touchscreen devices. So when consumers walked through the various aisles, the touchscreen automatically detected what was on the nearby shelf and suggested an appropriate recipe.

This way the customers constantly discovered new receipies that used Hellmann's mayonnaise. If the recipe was liked, the customer could further interact with the display to find the location of the necessary ingredients in the store, or share the recipe with friends via email.

As a result 45,000 customers were involved in the campaign and sales rose by almost 70 percent.

Coca-Cola's iconic logo has been around for over a century. Then recently someone discovered that the Danish flag was hidden in the Coca-Cola logo. Since several global surveys show Denmark to be the happiest country in the world, Coca-Cola decided to take this discovery to Denmark's biggest airport where it's a tradition to welcome people with flags.

Since everyone who comes to the airport does not always bring a flag, the welcome isn't as big and happy as it could be. So McCann Copenhagen created a special poster where people could take flags straight from the Coca-Cola logo. Thus giving everyone the chance to create a happy welcome to the world's happiest country.

In the last week or so I came across two campaigns that used video to innovatively deliver their message...

Volkswagen Hidden Frame

The Volkswagen Side Assist feature helps drivers avoid accidents by showing other vehicles when they are in the side mirror's blind spot. So to drive home the message AlmapBBDO developed a film that used YouTube's play bar to show the difference the VW Side Assist made in people's lives.

No Means No

Amnesty Norway in an attempt to change the Norwegian law on sexual assault and rape, developed a film that used a custom video player to pop up the key message. The campaign was a success and the law is about to change, as a direct consequence of the campaign.

The full version of the video can be experienced here.

Consumption of alcoholic drinks skyrockets during the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. During this period there is also an increase in traffic accidents. 50% of these accidents are caused by drunk drivers.

Antarctica Beer being the official sponsor of the carnival decided to make the event safe by ensuring everyone used public transport to get home safely. So with AlmapBBDO they created a beer turnstile that was installed at a subway station where all the carnival groups gathered. On successfully scanning an empty Antarctica beer can at the turnstile, people were allowed to travel for free.

As a result the turnstile was used by 1000 people per hour, thats 86% higher than the conventional turnstiles on the same day. The number of drunk drivers caught on that day also dropped by 43%.

'Ring ring....' would you be tempted to answer a ringing pink telephone? Benefit Cosmetics placed a pink phone booth bang in the middle of London for a day. Then the people who dared to answer the pink phone were made to sing the Whitney Houston classic "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" in front of a packed house while being accompanied by a live band at London's most iconic venues, Café de Paris.

Where will the temptation telephone ring next and will you be brave enough to answer?

Right now, most second screen experiences push content to the user but do very little by way of two-way interactivity. That however is slowly changing and can already be seen in the TV based second screen experiences from Heineken and Chevy.

Now in one of the first examples of second screen experiences that I have seen with radio, Swedish ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors has attemtpted to make the whole radio experience more visual, interactive, and shareable.

With a new radio player called "Swedish Radio Plus" they allowed people on computers and mobile devices to listen in on the radio programs and simultaneously add videos, pictures, comments, maps and polls to the radio timeline. All post made on this custom timeline were also shared on the users Facebook profile, with a link to that exact part of the program.

To give it a try yourself visit the demo page here.

Here are the latest innovations in adshels currently doing rounds on the internet...

Ikea LEDshel

Ikea swapped all the regular neon tubes found in adshels around Vienna with their new range of LED lights. This way they made the product the medium and demonstrated that Ikea can turn ordinary things into something extra-ordinary.

Only for children

In an effort to provide abused children with a safe way to reach out for help, a Spanish organization called ANAR, created an ad that displayed a different message for adults and children at the same time.

The ad used a lenticular top layer to show different images at varying angles. So when an adult looked at it they could only see the image of a sad child and the message: "sometimes, child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it." But when a child looked at the ad, they saw bruises on the boy's face with a different message: "if somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you" alongside the foundation's phone number.

Now there is an app that lets parachutists "check in" on Facebook as they free fall through the sky.

Parachuting specialists Sky Company, wanted to promote their Facebook fan page. So with ageisobar Brazil they developed the Air Check-in app [iTunes Link] that allowed users to take pictures during their jump while recording their height. Then based on their 3G reception at the altitude post the details on the users Facebook timeline or store the check-in for later.

The check-in posts made by the app had a link to Sky Company's Facebook fan page. So this not only helped boost their fan count on Facebook, but also helped increase the number of jumps with their team by 26%.

The above app also brought back memories of another parachuting campaign that was done by hotels.com in September 2011. This time the campaign was centered around the company's high-speed mobile booking application, which allowed users to book rooms at its network of almost 140,000 hotels worldwide.

To promote their smart phone app they teamed up with extreme athlete and stuntman, JT Holmes, for a wild and exciting digital demonstration to prove just how easy it was to book a room while "on the fly".