QR Code on a pint of Guinness

This is very clever.  The QR code is printed on the glass, and only works when Guinness (or another black liquid) is placed inside.

The QR code then allows the phone owner to tweet about the pint, update Facebook, and more.

More here

Update - this is a similar idea - a QR code as a shadow, in South Korea.

Stardoll celebrity tutorials

This is (possibly) the new Lauren Luke:  A Stardoll user posting videos on YouTube showing how to make Stardoll characters that look like celebrities:



Lots more to see on her YouTube channel.  & here's a different user doing a Katie Perry one

Also, Stardoll were all over Hunger Games, which surprised me a bit, but I guess it's perfect for the older end of the target market.

Marvel Avengers Assemble - Live Outdoor Mural

This is a very nice bit of work done for one of our clients for the new Marvel film Avengers Assemble.

Watch live streaming video from assemblelive at livestream.com

A poster site in London was taken over, and two artists added characters from the film based on tweeted votes, with the whole thing streamed.  It's a shame it rained so much, but this is excellent - content created around a theme.

Budweiser Ice Cold Index

This is an app that my colleagues in Isobar created with Tribal - the app gave away mobile vouchers for Bud Ice Cold in Ireland; the hotter the day, the cheaper the Bud.



A very deserving winner at last week's Revolution Awards - Best Location-based Campaign.

Full case study on the Isobar Mobile site.

Things I Love - Sunday 22nd April

This new tumblr What Happens in Media Planning.  It's just a situation ('When money gets reallocated from my digital budget and is given to TV instead, it's like...') and then a silly animated gif.  It's so good.  Long may it continue!

This video on how to pack to travel light, from Mr Porter.  Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but some good tips!  I'd add:

- Get high quality, thin T-shirts, like Sunspel, which take up a lot less space; ditto for sweaters

- Get an internal packing system, like the inner bags by Eagle Creek, which keep all your clothes tidy and clean when they're in the case

This site from the National Trust on 50 things kids should have done by the time they're eleven and three quarters.  Things like camping in the wild, climbing a tree and building a den.  Well done!

French & Grace, a little restuarant in Brixton Village.  The specials are always great, and the deserts (ginger cake with salted caramel) deserve to be legendary!

"A hotel in a desert" - new phrases

A hotel in a desert was a good analogy used by someone I met this week.  The point is that if you build a hotel in a desert you've got to tell people about it, and make it as easy as possible for them to get there.  See also making a video and putting it on YouTube, making a new site, and so on...

Three other new phrases:

A two pizza team - a team of about 5-7 people.  "If you can't feed a development team with 2 large pizzas it's too big"

GAFA - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple - the new power elite.  I remember when we used to talk about GYM!

Showrooming - where people treat shops as showrooms, then buy online.  Apparently in the US 39% of people who bought a book on Amazon had looked at the same book in a physical store

Next Generation Media Quarterly - April 2012

This is the latest instalment of my regular catch-up presentations, essentially distilling bits from my examples and stats blogs over the last 3 months.

Have a look:

Next Generation Media Quarterly April 2012

View more presentations from Dan Calladine

Great Ikea Transactional Banner

Really clever stuff.  This has obviously been done before, but not for so many products.



Via Adverblog

The Worst Breath in the World

This is a lovely bit of work for Tic Tac.  It reminds me of the woman I saw on the tube this morning, who was eating slices of salami out of the packet.  Anyway, the title of this film means 'the worst breath in the world'!



& here's another outdoor stunt, for TNT TV channel in Belgium

 

Things I Love - Sunday 15th April

The whole Text From Hillary thing.  Well done to the people who saw potential in the original picture of 'Hilz' and well done to Hillary for enjoying the joke!

This great hijack ad from Newcastle Brown.  Perfect.

The story of Keep Calm and Carry On, from Barter Books



A Visit From The Goon Squad - another great modern novel, all about getting older.  It's notorious as 'the one with the powerpoint presentation' but that's only one chapter.  Highly recommended.  The cover for the paperback is pretty terrible though - the original cover was much better:

Another song I've heard through Chicago Mixtape - Julie Meckler's Manhattan.  Incredible voice.

The first ten million is always the hardest; Thoughts on Instagram

Last Monday saw the purchase of Instagram by Facebook for an extraordinary one billion dollars.  I was too busy to write much last week, but now that I have more time, and the news has sunk in a bit, here are some of my thoughts.

1 - The price.  It's a 'Damien Hirst' price, with no real logic behind it specifically.  Just as the shark is worth $12m because that is what someone was willing to pay for it, Instagram is worth $1bn because that's what Facebook were willing to pay.  It was valued at $500 by an investment round the week before, and the premium on that suggests to me that the founders didn't really want to sell, but Facebook really wanted it, so made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

2 - The audience.  Instagram has a very fast growing and young audience.  It's grown 10m in the last 10 days, as a result of becoming available for Android, and also the buzz around the deal.  The users are younger and funkier than Facebook's have become.  (In fact the petulance of some users cancelling their accounts showed that selling to Facebook is the new 'signing to EMI').  Oh - and One Direction fans are now using it, which can't hurt.

3 - The Growth.  With something well over 500m active smartphone users in the world (491m were shipped last year) there is little to stop a really good app growing at the rate of 1m a day or much faster.  Facebook know all about exponential growth - but for them it's slowed down.  As seen by figures from Angry Birds and Draw Something with mobile it's getting much faster.

4 - China.  As mobile grows in China and other non English speaking countries, especially countries with other character sets, pictures will become more and more powerful.  Music is also crucial for global communication, but music is more problematic; you need to buy rights to the professionally created stuff.  With pictures there's much less gap in quality between amateur user generated content and what professionals make.  Zynga got a very good deal when they bought Draw Something!

5 - The Talent.  I think that this is the most important consideration.  What Facebook bought is a team of people who are visionaries.  Two years ago they set up a company that allowed people to create on mobile, and share through other platforms, but had no website.  These are the people who understand how millions of other people will want to use mobile.  They (possibly) to mobile what Zuckerberg is to social networks, what Steve Jobs was to mobile hardware.  They are now needed to re-think how Facebook does mobile, because several other services (including Twitter) work much better on mobile.

Increasingly these people won't leave university looking for jobs, they'll set their own thing up.  & this is why the first 10m is the hardest - if you can create something now that can get to 10m users quickly, then you've cracked it.  I think we'll see a lot of acquisitions in mobile over the next few months.

Finally, I've always loved this quote from Albert Einstein:  “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

(With acknowledgement to Po Bronson for the title!)

The Asos Rucksack Challenge on Pinterest

This is a clever use of Pinterest by our client Asos.  Take a picture of the contents of your rucksack, and email them the picture.  They put all the pictures up on a Pinterest board, and will award a prize to the best one.

I liked this one:

"Extra points will be awarded for inventiveness of composition and bag contents"

A second campaign for Asos is called the 'mid season steal'.  Users have to create an Asos sale board, then re-pin their favourite products to it, together with a special picture, to be in with a chance of winning £200.  See the competition here

Stripping for 'Likes'

Stussy have a new campaign on Facebook - the more you like their page, the more clothes their model will take off.

She's clearly in a cold place, because she's wearing lots of layers, or rather she was when she started.  Not sure how long Facebook will allow this, and is this the first time a brand's done this on Facebook?

More background here

Tipp-Ex Experience 2 - The bear has a birthday

Tipp-Ex have updated their Tippex Experience video from 2010 (A Hunter Kisses A Bear etc) with a new set of videos, launched by this film:


You then get to a page where you can input a year, for example 1901 or 1967 and see how the bear celebrated.

It's lots of fun, but I think it lacks something - for example this time you don't need to guys verbs (kisses, chases, marries etc), instead you just type in different years.

Also, who knows what this is doing for Tipp-Ex...

Enough of my moaning - have a play here.

Update - OK, having played with it for a bit, I take it all back.  It's very creative.  Try 2000, 1969, 1979, 1982, 1945, 0, ...

& there seems to be a list of all the key years here

Update - a case study video


Case study - Tipp-Ex Hunter And Bear's 2012 Birthday Party from Bill Kalagan on Vimeo.

(They only talk about views and shares in the results though - no word on what it's doing for the brand)

A Day... for Photography

ADay.org is a project to get the world taking photos on 15th May, and upload them.  I'll be taking part - I think it'll be a very interesting project.  Photos are just so hot right now!

Get involved here

Keith Lemon for adidas

Keith Lemon helps launch the Olympic promotion for our client adidas



I think this will be quite popular...

See more

Nike - I Would Run To You

Great ad, with a story, humour, and lots more going for it.  Bound to be parodied, although it already seems to be a bit of a parody of an OK Go video or similar.

Magnum Pleasure Hunt - Back, Bigger & Better

Magnum scored a huge hit last year with the Pleasure Hunt.  They've done the sensible thing - brought it back for another summer, but made it bigger and better.  This year you run around the map, as well as through other brands' sites.

Watch the trailer...



...& then play here.  This year they've co-opted some Non-Unilever into the game, including jeweller Bulgari, surf gear brand Quicksilver, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Hotel Fasano in Rio, whon provided their intellectual property free in return for their exposure, according to AdAge

Instagram competition for Visit Sweden

Instagram, now out for Android users, has been chosen by the colleagues at glue Iosbar to play a vital part in a new promotion for Visit Sweden.

Classic Swedish pics have already been Instagrammed by their spokesperson Cissi; people now have to upload their own to win the chance of a week in Sweden for themselves.

Have a look here, and get involved with the hashtags #LiveStockhold, #LiveSkane or #LiveGothenburg

April Fools 2012

A quick run-down of some of the best.

Google - They always go big on this; among those this year were 8-Bit Maps, the whole of YouTube on DVD, and a self-driving Nascar.  Oh - and Google News got fooled by a story on Forbes





Sony Vaio - The world's smallest Ultrabook



Cadbury - Dairy Milk Bubbly filled with helium

Webex webinar service - Angry Birds option now available

Criterion Collection - Kindergarten Cop 3 Disc Director's Cut released

The Lynx Mobile App



More here.

& some technology-specific ones here

Any (good ones) I've missed?

Things I Love - Sunday 1st April

These amazing drawings from players of the game Draw Something - brilliantly creative

This man singing in the back of a Canadian police car.  The cops park up and let him finish before getting him out.



Jeremy Deller's exhibition Joy in People at the Hayward Gallery.  There are lots of interesting things to see, but probably my favourite, hidden away at the end, almost as an afterthought, was a family tree of Shaun Ryder.  It simply showed the names and the dates of ancestors, with their occupations, going back about 5 generations.  The point of the piece (I think) was to illustrate the decline of the industrial north.  For generations they'd been weavers or lace makers, or prescott, but then Shaun's dad became an aircraft fitter, and Shaun became a singer.  It's a great use of information in art.  Go to see it!

The prospect of being able to order Chelsea Buns from the Cambridge shop Fitzbillies online.  Why did no one tell me..?