Burning rubber. Gasoline. Roaring engines. A fast and too furious clip that’s like a trip right to the center of your brain, touching the spot that makes you go ‘hmmmmm’. This interactive mini-site is awesome. If there’s one way to make men dream of fast cars and a load of horsepower under your behind that takes you up one level, this is it. Impressive. Tasty. Fuckin’ brilliant. I wish I was loaded enough to buy this.
It might seem as something euthanasic, but it has nothing to do with this blog. Shoot My Blog is an arty viral concept by Renaud Deha (Reno) and it’s purely non-profit. The idea is that people take an original photo of the shootmyblog blog with their digital camera or mobile phone. Then they send it to shootmyblog@hotmail.com. In the picture (somewhere, big or small) there has to be an imprint of the shootmyblog homepage. Participants are encouraged to be very creative and the reward is that the original picture gets published on the totally bizarre photoblog. The only thing I’m sad about is that the links to the photographer’s site is in fact plain text and not a link. Not only do I have to copy-paste the text in the address bar to check out that site, there’s also no linklove coming from the photoblog to the contributers. My opinion is: if you tap the consumer market, you also have to give something back. The words aren’t enough. A real link adds linkjuice to the contributors of the blog. A Flickr set makes it even more viral. It’s a good concept, but it still need some adjustments. I’ll send in a picture of my blog featuring his blog in a blogpost to contribute to the project. There’s already some cool art works on the index because the project first saw screenlight on July 29th.
Visit ShootMyBlog | Thanks, Reno.
A little friendly warning though, Reno… if you’re planning to go viral, you better not encourage people to click your AdSense ads, especially not on a blogspot.com domain. It’s against the ToS agreement you have to follow. People got banned for less. I’d remove the request from your sidebar if I were you.
Update [09-29-06, 11 AM]: Reno says the links are ON the pictures themselves, I must’ve tried some images of authors who didn’t have a website to link to. My bad!
Belgian agency Snow by LG&F just launched the mailman exam, a Dutch site with a very nifty Flash experience. The project has been ordered by ‘De Post’, the Belgian official postal services. MTFR made it happen and created a very attractive design. The site has a humoristic approach to the theoretical knowledge and daily best practices of becoming a good mailman. To goal of the campaign is to create awareness and have as much people as possible sign up for the e-letter. You can win a GPS system if you participate and fill in your data. If you don’t speak Dutch or French, it might not be very obvious to check this out, but if you do, the least you’ll have left after playing is a huge smile on your face and some perky thoughts about the profession ‘mailman’.
Client: De Post
Project site: postbode examen | examen du bon facteur
Agency: Snow by LG&F
Execution: MTFR
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:
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]
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)
Resulting process in action:
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!
From the fresh brain of Max Lenderman comes a pointer to this really cool outdoor initiative by Mike Milardo and his partner Bart Batchelor (no, these aren’t screen names, although it would’ve been great for a dating show). [Actually, the post has been in my 'to blog' folder for a while but I never got to blogging it.] – What we have here is a national stunt/promotion for Solo’s Walkie Talkie phones. At bus stops in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary, they’ve put up interactive billboards and connected them with each other by using actual walkie talkies phones. People would then just push the button and are being connected live to another bus stop. Imagine standing alone at a bus stop and receiving an incoming call from a total stranger who’s at a bus stop across town, or maybe even in another city. Quite engaging. As Max says, if these two blokes are smart, they’d connect a recording device to the individual phones. Makes a great start for the follow-up campaign.
Copy:
“Push here to try the walkie talkie phone”
“Your direct line to awkward conversation”
Client: Solo
Agency: Rethink, Vancouver
Looking for a pretty eye-catching way to impress your customers? Then try viZoo’s approach to experiental marketing. Introducing : ‘Free Format’ (R), the hologram-on-demand-service. I’ve been checking out the portfolio and I must say I’m stunned. This is mighty impressive. It goes back to 2003 already when viZoo could offer to show Gandalf “live” in some shop windows. Something never seen before! Passers-by just had to stop – they couldn’t believe their eyes, as they stood in front of shop windows at IC Company (fashion) in Copenhagen or 3 Mobile Video Company in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Isn’t this what all advertisers are dreaming of?
The nifty EMH, or Dr. Twain,
has nothing to do with viZoo.
It’s just my bench mark for a hologram.
Check out the viZoo profile throught the [PromoSamples] or visit [viZoo].
I was charmed by this experiment. Must be my soft side popping up every once in a while. Countless times I’ve seen this in films. Even dropped some messages in bottles myself, hoping that someday they’d wash ashore in a country far far away, that I’d get a letter in reply. Ah… Childhood memories. Well, now you can have them digitalized. With Oceangram (launched in May of 2006) you can send bottles online, and wait for bottles to arrive. At this time 100,019 messages are drifting the binary ocean. Write something nice to someone somewhere. Wish something. And if you’ve got some time to spare, wait for a bottle to come your way. Once you’ve opened a bottle, you can add a note to the message you’ve just received, that way other people know where the bottle has been. Very cute.
