2009 Cannes CyberLions awarded (Mark will be posting a wrap-up for that in the next few days), now we are all waiting to know which entries will win Film category and the Grand Prix for Titanium and Integrated, which is rumoured that will be given to Obama's presidential campaign.
In the meantime, we already know for sure that one of the highlights of the Festival was the "Best job in the world" campaign developed by Cummins Nitro for the Tourism Queensland, winning three Grand Prix this year: PR, Direct and Cyber. That is the payoff of a great idea with a flawless execution.
However, it looked a bit weird to me that another campaign, released a few months before the "Best Job" one, and under the same concept/idea, has gone almost unknown.
A while ago i posted about Vodafone in Spain doing some crazy stuff for their 3G solutions for small businesses. Time after that, they've created a follow-up of that campaign, consisting on a Vodafone employee (that spends some time blogging) and his family going through Spain in a "bus-house" and without a landline number to get connected to the Internet, just a mobile phone and a USB modem. Also residents of each city will be allowed to get into the bus, as it will be staying for two days in each place.
All of this is being blogged at La Casa Movil and although it's in spanish, it's worth a read, you can use some online translation tools to get it translated into English or the language of your choice.
I recently received the link to the video recap of an integrated campaign run a few months ago in Belgium by Amnesty International. 60 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, human rights are still flouted. And Amnesty International has decided to take a very interactive approach to raise awareness among Belgians.
In Spain, even though it's not as hard as advertising tobacco brands, when advertising alcohol there's always a limit that you can't push; for instance, on TV commercials you can show the product but no one can be seen drinking it. That is why many of these brands do branded entertainment instead of focusing on creating ideas about their products' USP. One of the most notable examples of this kind of advertising is Mahou, a beer brand that has been doing interesting things online for several years, first with Herraiz y Soto doing their interactive and now working with DoubleYou.
This year's campaign is called "La Wikipeli" ("The Wikimovie"), in which Jose Corbacho and Juan Cruz (two famous comedians in Spain) are preparing a new short-film whose plot, characters, scenes, and so on, are chosen by users taking polls, sending videos or commenting the whole process and deciding things on-the-fly.
It seemed kind of funny that instead of being given a website to check out for more info, i was given a term to be Googled, and finally, a few days after i found some things about that:
Yesterday, my friend and co-worker Arturo and myself found out a couple of brilliant cases of integrated advertising, done respectively by German agencies Lukas Lindemann Rosinski and Jung Von Matt.
I think that both the image for the first case and the video for the second one are absolutely self-explanatory...
The geniuses from Waskman came up with a very original idea to advertise the new Vodafone "Oficina Movil" ("Mobile Office") service, which main value is to avoid freelancers and small businesses being wire-dependant on mobile phones, office phones and data services through 3G technology. So after a while of thinking who the target was they realized they could be the perfect target, so they proposed Vodafone moving their offices to the middle of Madrid and Bilbao for three weeks, writing about the whole process in a few sites.
When talking about advertising in South America you're sometimes exposed to hear about certain (and false) cliches: for instance, "Brazil is really good at graphic work, and only at graphic work" or "Argentina is really good doing TV work, and only doing TV work". I wasn't even interested in advertising when I saw on TV this commercial done for the new (then) Renault Clio. Years later I knew about their creators, Agulla&Baccetti, and some of their legendary (and multiawarded) campaigns, being also a seeder of new talents (with the likes of extremely succesful people in later years such as Juan Cabral or Leandro Raposo, among many many many many others) Did i say "many" enough?
Being one of the things I like the most about all of that works was the way in which emotions were expressed through images, it is often said that creativity in Argentina was dramatically fed because of the infamous Corralito situation in 2001, which almost completely froze bank accounts and forbade withdrawals from U.S. dollar-denominated accounts. The tone of TV spots, introspective until then, became more of cheerful, trying to help people to overcome the sadness they were living. As part of this anomalous situation you can even find three minutes length tv ads done by Madre for Banco Hipotecario, being the length of the ad part of the strategy as to try people believing in banking again.
After stunning cases such as "Big shadow" or "Rec You", japanese agency GT Tokyo can be considered as having one of the most original approaches on digital ways of communication.
I think this campaign called Love Distance that they created last November for Sagami Original is fantastic too. Sagami produces the thinnest condom in the world (0.02mm thin) and to promote this they created a story about two lovers living in Fukuoka and Tokyo respectively, separated 1000 kilometers from each other. To prove their love, they run to meet on Christmas Eve.
If you enjoyed Barack Obama winning US elections or simply you enjoyed George W. Bush leaving being the President of the United States then you'll maybe like this site created by the people at Shackleton called "Bush ByeBye Party".
Simple and funny, it consists on what to do to celebrate this special farewell: an earth map to add your party, downloadable goodies for the parties (some of them hilarious, as for instance, Obama masks), a safe kit for the day after and some other stuff. It has been set 67 farewell parties so far, if you think you want to do it too don't miss this site, it's worth a while :)
I don't know how i didn't heard of this campaign before but thanks to my good friends Jesus and Ferran I've seen the light because I think it's fantastic. ZUJI is an online travel company who wanted to be positioned as a company that helps holidays happen. And they did this to make it possible:
What I love about working in digital marketing is the fact that digital tools can be become even more powerful, cool and engaging if and when they are integrated with the "offline" world. You can apply them to marketing action as well as to art, as this brilliant project made in Pennsylvania demonstrates.
What happened is that a group of people decided to bring to life on Google Street View Sampsonia Way, located in the North of Pittsburgh. As Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, the minds behind the project, explain on the a Street with a view website, Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more. Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform.
