To send New Year greetings for 2008, the communications team at the dinosaur museum in Brussels sent colleagues and main sponsors a highly original package. Inside was a block of plaster and a hammer & chisel with an invitation to amateur paleontologists to dig, not for the bones of a mighty T-Rex, but to find the museum’s greeting card.
Agency: McCann Erickson Belgium
Account Director: Talia Hendlisz
Creatives: Gregory Defay, Quentin Gascard
Thanks for the pointer, Tanguy
Time for environmental action! The “Coalition for a Cyanide Free Romania” is a civil society initiative that was formed to support a legislative proposal to ban cyanide in mining in Romania. Its concerns are based on social, economic and environmental grounds. Obviously that is a cause worth mentioning, and I’ve been asked to contribute to the general buzz, which of course I will. The campaign kicked off with a few x-mas cards that have been sent around, and it was also supported by spreading the stickers below.
Agency: Next, Romania
Campaign website
Hugs for Andrei Chirica, PR coordinator
Christmas cards are added after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »
The first time I saw this clip I thought it was a real video, like the one I’ve seen earlier of a holiday resort that had a beach right before the start of the runway of the airport. Then when I saw the plane turn I began to suspect something fishy, but I never really expected the clip to turn out the way it did!
Video: Have A Nice Trip
This is in fact a commercial for X-Travel, a Dutch site aimed for teens and youngster who are looking to plan a vacation. It’s a clip that promoted a campaign where teens could ’start their own airline company’ meaning that if they would check in 6 friends, they could win a free vacation for all. Tempting idea, and an appealing video for that specific target audience.
One of the leading car rental companies in Europe is Sixt. In Germany or Switzerland, and more recently at Schiphol airport in The Netherlands as well, I saw their brand gain traction and become more present. They always find cool ways to do offline marketing stunts, as I have previously covered a few times [hanging car, don't forget]. But also in the online market, they have found ways to be remarkable when they experimented with a new way to make their Google Adwords ads stand out from the crowd.
Pretty clever.
Thanks for the pointer, Paul.
Fuel Industries, an agency specializing in branded entertainment, was hired by QNX Software Systems to help out with the launch of a product directed to a very specific community (embedded software developers). So Fuel Industries came up with something a little different and developed a Flash game called The Pocket Geek to get the Foundry27 forum some more tracking.
Besides the fact the design looks really neat, I’m very fond of the ‘action-figure’ approach. It’s makes a geek-in-the-box look so adorable and cute, I think this could be a super cool direct marketing gadget to send out to agencies. Collect ‘em all, and rule the world!
The gameplay is nice, goes smooth but is a little more complicated than you might suspect at first glance. Keeping a geek productive, not hungry and happy at the same time requires tact. The IQ tests in between are funny :) The goal is to have your project finished by the end of the week. Challenging. Perfect for a Friday afternoon.
Extra stuff:
Thanks for the pointer, Nick Iannitti.
Mmm. This one made me think about the old days. Where is the time when kids didn’t need a PS3 with 60 games to entertain theirselves? Where is the time when audio cassettes still did the trick? Observe the various implementations of this deluxe device Tiger once released, and think back to the endless days of super-spy-fun you once had. Fun for hours, unlimited rewind/rewrite functions… OMG. I feel sooooo old when I see this stuff flash by again. I think the clip is from 1995, but it seems almost like it’s from the 80s. Waaaaay back in the days.
Video: Tiger Deluxe TalkBoy
Houtlust recently merged its content to Osocio.org, so you might want to adjust your bookmarks if you haven’t done so already. I was browsing the site and stumbled upon this pretty interesting ad. Sure, it’s not the first one to be depicted on the wall of a swimming pool under the water level, but I thought it was an interesting take on global warming. Even though I do not think things will take such a dramatic turn, there is still a need to alert people of the dangers if we keep up with our current wasteful lifestyle. This is a pretty cool way to communicate, and most of all I think it’s pretty wow. I’d take a few extra dives just to look at the ad better :-)
Caption: “Don’t let this be our future. Save our rainforest, stop global warming.”
Agency: Naga DDB, Malaysia
Paul Hennell pointed me to a very interesting piece of hilarious marketing. It’s a bit like selling the holes in the cheese, but in this case it’s free. What a very cunning plan to put this up. A Scottish rock radio station based in Glasgow decided to hand out free air guitars as a promotional stunt for their launch. In front of their building an empty guitar stand invited people to pick a free instrument. As Paul hinted, this might be a super cool idea for a guitar store when you’d add: ‘more colors available inside’. This is just brilliant!
Thanks for the pointer, Paul!