RSS
 

Archive for September, 2006

The Summer Of Boony

25 Sep 2006

Australian agency Accure together with the ad agency George Patterson Y&R were heavily involved with a promotion for Foster’s Australia called VB Boonanza. This promotion was all about a little interactive talking figurine, the Boony Doll, using technology from Veil Interactive to react to pings from the TV network telecasting the cricket games. The Boony Doll would come to life every time the cricket was on and talk to the consumers at home in his typical Aussie Bloke demeanour.

Each Talking Boony contained a 60 sec sound chip that contained over 35 unique phrases and individual code words.

There were two elements to the technology:

  1. Audio triggers – the figurines would respond to audio triggers transmitted by Nine during the cricket and embedded in TVC’s. Depending on which trigger the figurine heard, it would respond with a particular style of phrase, allowing it interact with what was happening during the cricket. The phrases were grouped; “good shot”, “good ball”, “appeal” and “random silence”. The random silence phrases include comments like “Anyone seen me thongs?” and “I feel like playing totem tennis”.
  2. Pre-programmed phrases – the figurines were timed to power up and down to conserve battery life. They were also designed to come to life at certain times and say a particular phrase such as “Hey get me a VB, the cricket’s about to start” before each innings. They also announced a daily code word during the telecast that consumers could SMS for the chance to win exclusive merchandise.

The idea of a Talking Boony figurine brought the VB Boonanza campaign to life and allowed the idea to flow through to all the other touch points. The campaign was quite successful and took out a promo lion at Cannes as well as various awards in Australia and USA. [see awards here]

Read the rest of this entry »

 

Flirt Vodka

25 Sep 2006

This campaign for Flirt ran in Bulgaria somewhere last year. I don’t know the agency that came up with it, but I find the visuals pretty good. I had 2 images in my archive but recently discovered AdsOfTheWorld had the full campaign in its database, so I figured I’d nick those images and have the full campaign featured here, just so I could have it in my personal knowledge archive myself for future reference. Thanks for digging it up, Ivan. Anyone got credits for this campaign?

Flirt 1

Copy: “FLIRT – Keeps the memories”

Flirt 2

Copy: (top line) “She says she was making a cake”
Copy: (bottom line) “FLIRT – Keeps the memories”

Flirt 3

Copy: “FLIRT VODKA – Are you ready for tonight?”

Flirt 4

Copy: (top line) “He said there was an earthquake”
Copy: (bottom line) “FLIRT – Keeps the memories”

Flirt 5

Copy: “FLIRT VODKA – Are you ready for tonight?”

 

Ending Conversations

24 Sep 2006

Good impressions, that’s what people must have of you once you’ve stopped the conversation you were having. At work I have a few colleagues who’re quite good at it. A closing line, totally off-topic and so far out it’s actually a damn shame nobody was there to record it. So that’s why I’ve been searching a little for a tool that suits fine to play along in the game. Every time I send out an email to one of these colleagues next week, I’ll include a cunning phrase to entice their thinking and make them philosophically ease back in their chair to stroke their imaginary beards. Examples might be:

“As my uncle Will always used to say: Nothing is quite as distracting as the memory of pressing an ice-cold cola bottle to their jugular right in the middle of a United Nations reception.”

“Someone has put it this way: Thanks to you, at this precise moment someone is feeling the sensation of a staggering religious epiphany right in the middle of soothing the escaped tiger.”

Or: “Remember: There’s nothing that can wake someone up like the feeling of having their nipples removed and cleaned right in the middle of freeclimbing the face of El Capitan.”

Yeah. It’s always good to end conversations with an impressive literate line.

Free Ride In A Police Car If You Shoplift

Want to have more? Check out the Instant Sensual Karma Generator, and you too can increase the amount of pleasure in the universe by granting a moment of bliss to some bewildered soul. (Careful, some links on that site are NSFW)

 
No Comments

Posted in 2.0 +, Geek, Humor

 

Graph Your Site

24 Sep 2006

I’m probably nearly the last one in the world to see this, but since I’m adding the image to the Flickr group, I thought I might as well blog it too so it’s ‘out there’. Sala programmed an HTML Graph Applet that renders your site into a graphical structure. Sala is an artist who’s active on many platforms. His alter ego art-project, onethousandpaintings.com, has also travelled the globe very fast. From the 1000 paintings he had on sale, as many as 583 are already sold. Amazing.

Marketing Thoughts Graph

See my graph being made | Create yours
On Flickr, 2023 photos have already been tagged with the websitesasgraphs keyword. Feel free to add yours.

 

Maconomy Viral Game

24 Sep 2006

Here’s a game which one of bosses is going to be very fond of :) He always has to urge people to fill in the time sheets, because the brilliant minds in our company are constantly working at full force and well… brilliant minds and time sheets, we all know how well that goes together. It’s a known fact, in every company. I’m surprized there isn’t a contract update yet that announces ‘torture’ as a legitimate means of pressure to remind people to fill in those [censored] timesheets. Well anyway, the guys over at t-viral came up with a very funny game for Maconomy, which offers business solutions and services for professional service companies and marketing communications organizations. The game illustrates the essence of this issue:

“Catch Time – on Time” is an addictive little game where you have to make sure that your people remember to fill in their time sheets on time or you won’t reach your break-even target and that means you’re going out of business. You can choose to play it in either advertising agency or consultancy mode.

And believe you me, the advertising agency mode is very funny! Now you can see what it’s like to be ad agency CEO. Feel his pain! See how far you can take it, I stranded at level 4. Good luck.

Random quotes of the workers:

“Did Picasso ever register time?”
“Can’t the secretary do it next time?”
“I’m off to the award ceremony!”
“Let’s go to the hottest place in town!”

and the all time favorite:
“Stop micro-managing me!”

T-Viral's Catch Time on Time

Check out this viral game | Thanks, Nicolai

Other work from t-viral on Marketing Thoughts:

 

Mushroom Life Simulator

24 Sep 2006

This is a very cool piece of Code-Art to check out: there’s a 20 by 20 squared field set up. You have to make contours (figures) in the squares by clicking on them. Doing so, you ’seed’ mushrooms. Make sure you seed plenty so it looks like the first screenshot I took. Then press the ‘generation’ button to start. You’ll see the formula start to work and ‘calculate’ generations, showing the results instantly (as illustrated in the second image below)

Mushroom Seeding Field

Resulting process in action:

Mushroom Process Results

When it’s all finished, or if you can’t wait that long: earlier, you can start clicking randomly in the field (click fast in circular movements) to activate new generations of mushrooms.

Mushrooms follow these rules:
For each generation,
a mushroom with 1 or 0 neighbor dies (loneliness),
a mushroom with 4 or more neighbors dies (overcrowding),
a mushroom with 2 or 3 neighbors survives (stability),
an empty space with 3 neighbors sprouts a new mushroom (birth).

Check out:
Art Project: Mushroom Life
by Kaiyijo
A Mushroom perspective on John Conway’s Game of Life

Also check out Kaiyijo’s site, by the way. It’s a Flash beauty!

 

Exit Urban Shoes

24 Sep 2006

This is a very weird campaign from Belgian agency Ogilvy. It’s very arty-farty and I think it stresses the bizarre identity of the product pretty well. Exit Urban Shoes isn’t just ‘your ordinary shoe’. Exit is ‘the shoe with personality’, extravagant, remarkable and with a very high degree of ‘look at what I’m wearing. The campaign below might look edgy, but I think it has every intention to be so, since it’s a perfect extension of the brand image. Enjoy!

Copy: “They find a way out”

Site: exit & c°
Agency: Ogilvy (be)
Account Team: Axelle de Terwangne
Creative Director: Phil van Duynen
Creation: Phil van Duynen
Photographer: Christophe Gilbert
Retouching: Yannick Lecoq
Media: Magazines

 

Top 100 Belgian Blogs

24 Sep 2006

B.V.L.G made a top 100 of Belgian blogs, based on the tool provided by the Business Opportunity Weblog. Although one might question the accuracy of a tool like this, I’m quite happy with my 7th place. I’ll line up the first ten blogs, you can see the rest at the bvlg blog.

  1. www.photoblog.be : $875,601.54
  2. www.brusselsjournal.com : $810,679.44
  3. www.mess.be : $623,816.70
  4. veerle.duoh.com : $597,847.86
  5. www.el73.be/drunkey-love : $362,434.68
  6. www.tenderfeelings.be : $186,862.74
  7. blog.coolz0r.com : $160,329.36
  8. www.dopplerradio.net : $154,119.42
  9. www.zattevrienden.be : $139,441.38
  10. fantomaster.com/fantomNews : $132,102.36

For the record: I’m not selling yet, but it’s ok if you want to invest :)

 
No Comments

Posted in Blogs, Tools