Interactive review posters for Avatar in the UK

These have been created by the Hyperspace division of our sister agency Posterscope:



"For the release of Avatar on Blu-ray and DVD we have created 5 audio enabled posters around the UK. By plugging in your headphones at any of the sites for the next few weeks you will be able to hear public reviews of the film and clips from the soundtrack. To record your review & get a little bit of fame simply call 07867 890841 (standard rates apply) and your recording will be sent out to each of our enabled poster sites."

There's a map here giving the five sites - my nearest one is in Tottenham Court Road.

Via Hyperspace's Electric Avenue blog

Jimmy Choo's Foursquare treasure hunt

This is a really fun way of using Foursquare.

Jimmy Choo have set up a Foursquare account, Twitter account and Facebook page for 'CatchaChoo'

They regularly move around London, checking in to Foursquare, and placing a pair of trainers nearby and posting pictures on twitter.


If anyone can find the trainers and the representative while they're still there, and confront them with the phrase "I've been following you", they get to win a pair of trainers.

I really like this because it's very straightforward, very low tech, and doesn't really need much planning or coordination. & it's fun!

Update - As Rog points out in the comments, this is similar to something done by Host for Levi's in Australia last year - only Levi's coordinated through twitter, and the Levi's reps had to hand over the jeans that they were wearing!



Another thought - does the Jimmy Choo rep get paid to visit certain places? Or at least free food and drinks? With nearly 900 followers on twitter it could drive a lot of people to the venues!

Update - 13th May - CatchAChoo was caught yesterday. Full story here. Jimmy Choo have announced that they will be repeating the game in other countries.

A stealthy fake ad for Toy Story 3

This is very clever. Pixar have created a fake ad for the Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, one of the new characters to appear in ToyStory 3.



The ad's very convincingly made, with a fake grainy VHS stripe along the bottom, and uploaded to an account called MrCrazycommercials, created about 3 weeks ago and also containing uploads of real ads.

(In fact the real product Purr-tenders is genius; plush cats, with disguises to make them look like other animals, like rabbits, dogs or mice. See the ad here)

They don't even give it away in the search tags for the Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear - lots of relevant mentions, but no mentions of Pixar or Disney:

retro old school 60's 70's 80's lotsohuggin lots huggin lotso hugging bear of commercial 1983 teddy toy 80s nostalgia plush

Mashable has more on the story, plus this fake Japanese ad for the Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear. Very clever, and reminiscent of the online treasure hunt that got people excited over Cloverfield.

Full disclosure - the company I work for works for Disney, but I have nothing to do with this campaign. (However I know people who's seen Toy Story 3, and they say it's great!)

Instapaper is going to change my life

Instapaper is a service that converts online book marks into documents for portable readers.

Bookmark a story or article, in the way that you would with Delicious, and it will save it to your account. (The bookmark is stunningly easy to use - just register, and then drag it to your browser bar)

When you connect your reader (iPhone, Kindle, iPad etc), it transfers the content to the app, and is ready to you to read on the go.

There are even a couple of sites - Longform and GiveMeSomethingToRead to give you recommended articles.

Or you could use the new service Newspaper Club (when it launches) to make a small run of newspapers of your favourite articles to read on the go or give to friends. Imagine your own personal version of The Week.

But seriously, Instapaper is going to change my life.

Facebook's 'Like' button on the Levi's site

Another good example, showing how an eCommerce site can become a social site.



See the LoveFilm example here

Re-sizable banner ads for Ikea

A very good use of the technology - drag the banner to create different sized rooms - furniture appears to make the room complete.

This ad format was also used for BMW

Iron Man mashups

I've no idea if these are official. But they're very well done:

Iron Man + AC/DC + iconic movie clips = awesome.





5 in total so far here

The greatest ad campaign ever

This agency certainly ticked all the boxes for the Swedish launch fo the new Zebra car.

Watch it to the end - very satirical!

Facebook's 'Like' button

Yesterday Facebook announced a new initiative at their F8 conference, which will allow other sites to put a Facebook 'Like' button onto their pages. You can 'Like' something, and you can see which ones of your Facebook friends also 'Like' it.

Here's an example on the Love Film site (see the bottom right hand corner):


This is clearly going to be massive. I also think that it's good that they don't have a 'Hate' button - this way you can only register positive approval.

Tweet For a Track

Tweet For a Track isa new DIY service for musicians and bands.

Artist upload a song, and tweet the download link.

When fans click on the download link they need to make a tweet to get the download code.

More people see the tweet and do the same.

It seems like a pretty good way to pass music around. You can see if in action by searching for the hashtag #TFAT

Guaranteed viral success

This looks like a sure thing:

Remake one 1990s novelty record, add two 70s TV stars, and an actress from Buffy, and you have...



I Like Big Butterfingers, featuring Erik Estrada, Lou Ferrigno, and Charisma Carpenter, in aid of Nestle's Butterfinger bar.

There's also a whole 'Butterfingers Defense League' thing going on...

Has twitter stopped urban myths?

Has twitter stopped urban myths?

The current travel chaos in Europe, caused by the potential danger of volcanic ash to aircraft jet engines, is creating a huge demand for news, and, you'd have thought, urban myths.

Urban myths are created in times of great worry and concern, often as cautionary tales, filling vacuums in the availability or hard facts. For example, after the 7/7 bombings in London there was a persistant myth (totally untrue) that a suicide bomber had been shot in Canary Wharf.

This week I have heard no myths about the travel chaos, I suspect because of the new structure of the 'live' web, and because people are doing their own reporting through Facebook and twitter.

These days there's no real place for the 'one of my neighbours told me...' stories, because so many people have a voice themselves. In the case of the Canary Wharf story, there would now be several twitter users in Canary Wharf debunking the story, and questioning the person who originally put it around.

Today any stories that might have been invented, or misreported would be contradicted and disproved very quickly.

Say someone started a perfectly plausible story on the lines of 'Ferries in France are demanding €300 in cash to let people on'. It wouldn't have legs these days unless it were true. (Which it isn't - I made it up).

7/7 was nearly 5 years ago. I used to think that twitter & Facebook would have stoked up the fear and hysteria; in fact it seems that they would have dissipated it.