Dec 31
Remember the milliondollarhomepage.com project created by English college student, Alex Tew? Well, now you too can get in on the action and build your own virtual advertising hub with GPix. GPix is a FREE yet powerful million pixel script, based on the marketing concept of milliondollarhomepage.com. The system is easy enough for any aspiring pixel peddler to set-up. It requires only a web server running PHP/MySQL, and the ability to chmod files and folders.
Guerilla Advertising by Gavin Lucas is a collection of some unconventional brand communication tactics and campaigns. With the advertising industry in a state of flux, the traditional channels of TV, print and OOH are no longer the most effective methods for a brand to reach its target audience. In this book, you’ll read case studies about how global brands are opting to implement ever more inventive and original schemes to get their projects talked about. There are over 70 international campaigns featured for brands ranging from Microsoft to Volkswagen to Adidas.
TXTual Healing is a hybrid mobile technology / interactive performance art project created by Paul Notzold. It’s a project that started as his MFA thesis at the Parsons Design & Technology program and has now shown across the globe in locations such as Beijing, Hamburg, and Amsterdam.
Paul leverages cell phones with SMS to allow an audience to interact with large speech bubbles projected onto a flat surface.  The speech bubbles are positioned near windows and doors to encourage an audience to create the conversations happening inside. Multiple bubbles may be used and the audience can direct their input to a specific bubble. The piece explores the use of mobile technology to trigger dialogue, action and create content for a staged public performance.
Dec 29
Here’s a great resource for all the online advertising wonks out there. It’s an archive of several thousand banner ads to draw inspiration from. Some of the ads are great, but some are terrible. Users of the site can easily search the archives by industry, by month, or by tags. There’s even a RSS feed for those that can’t stay away.
Dec 29
The Unseen Video is a weather controlled, dynamic music video for Mike Milosh’s – You Make Me Feel. The Unseen video is affected by the weather and local time from where the user is sitting. Every little change in the environment will alter the video, thus it is almost impossible for a viewer to see the same video twice. The characters in the video will also change based on the date.
Mobile peer-to-peer payment service, Obopay, is making more MVNO moves. After announcing a few months ago a deal with Amp’d Mobile, Obopay has sealed a deal with MVNO Helio to be their mobile payments service. Obopay will allow Helio subscribers to use its mobile peer-to-peer payment service, which is linked to an Obopay Prepaid MasterCard account, to check balances, view payment histories, add funds and make payments.
MTV is launching a new mobile subscription service called “Bananas” next month. Users that pay $5.99 per month can get two ringtones and a wallpaper download per month. Those that sign up for the premium $9.99 service can download up to four ringtones and two wallpapers a month. In addition to the downloads, content includes materials from MTV shows such as “Laguna Beach” and “The Real World”. Users will also be able to download music from major music labels like Universal Music Groupo and Warner Bros. Interest in the “Bananas” service will be generated during TV shows. Pop-up boxes will appear with a call to action for users to text “MTV” to a shortcode to buy a ringtone of the song being performed.
Dec 22
Nike just announced a 10% increase in sales for its second quarter to $3.8 billion and a 8% increase in net income to $325.6 million. Much of that increase is being fueled by Nike+. In a company conference call, one Nike executive mentioned that “Nike+ is turning out to be huge. In less than 6 months, Nike+ users have logged more than 3 million miles and there are over 3 million Plus-ready shoes in the global marketplace and Nike expects that number to double by year end.”
The consumer uptake to the concept of Nike+ has been extremely positive. Blogger, Cabel Maxfield Sasser, recently blogged about Nike+ as the “Multiplayer Game of the Year”. For those that are new to the Nike+ concept, you should read Cabel’s posting. It articulately deconstructs all of the key features of Nike+ and how the product is ultimately redefining consumer’s relationships with the sport of running.
Read How Nike’s iPod Connection paid off.
Read Cabel’s Blog.
Lisa Strausfeld and her team at Pentagram are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte from MIT Media Lab and the goal is to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. Production of the laptops is scheduld for mid-2007. The interface of the laptop uses an abstracted spatial navigation metaphor. It’s an extension of familiar Windows and Mac desktop metaphors however the OLPC leverages the laptop’s key feature, it’s networking capabilities. The interface consists of four levels or four types of typical interactions for a user – your home view, your friends view, your neighborhood view, and your activity view. Users can easily move between views and customize each view based on their preferences. Friends can meet in the friends view, users can locate other users in the neighborhood view, and gather around an activity in the activity view.
Thanks to Sascha from the Lace Sneakers magazine for sending over the update on their latest issue. For those that don’t know, Lace Sneakers is a bilingual (german/english) magazine for sneaker and design lovers. In the current issue is a interview with Nike design icon Tinker Hatfield, a special 20th anniversary for Etnies, a preview of the upcoming fall/winter 06-07 lines, and a one-on-one interview with Jeremy Fish who talks about dark matter and pink elephants.
BusinessWeek Online is running a feature on some of the coolest mobile phones in the world and guess what, they’re all Japanese handsets that are light years ahead of anything in the U.S. Check out the Softbank by Toshiba 811T phone that weighs in at a miniscule 111-grams, but packs a heavy punch with a 3.2 megapixel camera, mp3 player, and full-on GPS navigation system. Also featured is my favorite phone of the bunch, the DoCoMo D903iTV which is the a digital TV phone from NTT DoCoMo with a svelte figure of just 19.8mm wide. This thing can store up to 160 minutes of TV and is linked into DoCoMo’s Napster to Go service, a 1.5 million MP3 music catalog.
This advertising viral debacle was first uncovered by the folks at the penny-arcade. It’s Sony’s unsuccessful and insulting campaign in support of the Playstation Portable. Sony commissioned guerilla marketing gurus Zipatoni to create a viral marketing campaign, but instead they seemed to have wreaked irreparable damage to the Sony PSP brand. It’s unfortunate since Sony’s PSP line of games is an amazingly savvy portfolio of titles that speak to true ‘game-heads’. The story has been picked up by the Guardian in the UK and the Something Awful forums, but the most concerning for Sony is the recent announcment that the FTC is launching an investigation into this rather unethical form of viral advertising.
My only question now is, why is the FTC suddenly launching an investigation into this undercover viral advertising campaign when campaigns of this type have been cleaning house at advertising award shows like Cannes, The Clios, and The One Show for the past few years. Specifically, we can point to the Droga5 viral piece created for Marc Ecko’s Still Free. That piece just won at Cannes last year and it actually fits right into this guerilla viral stunt genre. Was the FTC more pissed that the PSP piece was just pure junk and lacked any originality or cleverness OR is the FTC really trying to put a halt to these guerilla viral stunts?
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