I very rarely mention our work on here but today we won a Cannes Bronze for the Best use of Outdoor - for the interactive talking poster we did for Virgin Trains up in Liverpool back in March. Check out the video here
Aah its nice to win something, good luck to everyone else.
I read an interesting article on e-consultancy blog about a couple of alternative options for search engines to Google and they highlighted a new type of engine called Hunch that although not strictly a search engine helps you find information about specific products. Calling itself a decision engine / decision tree it helps you narrow your choice.
It is not perfect yet as I'm sure it needs a bit of critical mass like all predictive collective recommendation engines but I like te personality questions it asks you in order to learn as you go through the process. It will be interesting to see if they launch a UK specific version as its a bit like Dubya Bush asking you questions in its folksy questions.
I met Josh from This is Open recently and he showed us this really innovative and interesting new ad format / concept he had created with his gang at This is Open
The unit essentially allows you to do several cool things.
1. Put almost the content of a microsite in to an ad format 2. Scrape content and bring in xml leads etc 3. Share / Embedd the unit in to your own site 4. Play video and a/v full screen from the ad 4. Data capture etc.
In essence its a really cool widget that can be tailored and served like an add with any content you wish to put it to it.
Here is one they have developed for MyDeco:
And a Vodafone F1 Sponsorship Unit all about McLaren and the F1 season.
Overall really nice and we are thinking of how to use it for clients like Virgin Holidays, Trains and Media even HMRC God forbid your Self assesment could be done in a banner.
Just saw this great piece of work has won one of the first awards - the world's first Ephemeral Museum.
Essentially a brilliant and simple idea - this time revolving around graffiti in Lisbon but here is how it works.
1. Make a map of cool graffiti - put it on line 2. Record information about the work - turn it in to a mp3 track 3. Put a small museum title board on the real pieces of graffiti 4. Stick the whole lot on a website 5. People download the map and the track on their ipod and then walk around the streets like a living museum
Great stuff for tourism, arts, attractions, the National Trust etc
A nice idea here from the guys at Dare. Vodafone are sponsoring the McLaren Team and it looks like they have created a game to celebrate the sponsorship.
The video below explains how it works far better than I ever will.
They have also done a promotional video featuring LH and HK the drivers for McLaren - which is quite sweet and has Barry from Eastenders fame in it too - bonus.
Overall very nice although it does have similarities to the seminal work of 'Monopoly Live' that Ben worked on at Tribal DDB and I'm sure the same person at Dare worked on both too ;-)
Half the office have been hanging out the 4th floor windows looking down on to Tottenham Court Road to see what the fuss was about. At about 3pm very load music began to literally shake the office and came blaring through the windows. I went down to investigate and was greeted by the following site - the britbus tour. Which appears to be a battle bus with various bands touring the country competintg to be signed. Anyway, despite the name I thought it was a promotion for Guitar Hero as they seem to have dominated the sponsorship and the BritBus logo was a bit hard to read.
Not much to say about htis other than a great real world mash up - Banksy has teamed up with Bristol Museum to add a little flair to the pieces they have on display.
Lots of brands do brilliant work online these days but I have to take my hat off to Ikea for consistency. It seems someone at Ikea or their agency just 'get it' and encourage great work.
The latest piece of work uses the time lapse camera technique they have been building on for a while and it basically follows two diner parties but the films are played in reverse. Simple yet captivating.
Here is an incomplete list of the great work I have seen, some of it is just an evolution of an idea over time but there are a few things they all have in common:
1. They are simple ideas 2. They are all beautifully executed 3. They all link back directly and seamlessley to the product - but in a very natural way
Wordnik looks like a great little site that has just been launched in Beta.
It is essentially a bit of a combination between a wiki and a dictionary. It aims to keep up with language as it evolves via crowd sourced references definitions and importantly contextual feeds. So if you type in a word it brings back a variety of definitions, references, pronounciations. It pulls in statistics both historical and real time, pulls examples off twitter and blogs etc and looks like a nice experiment.
I couldn't help but reference the infamous episode of Blackadder with Robbie Coltrane as Dr. Johnson.
This week lots of innovation occurring, the NATAL video I just mentioned, and then Google Wave.
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. It's hard to explain and this video is 1hr 20 long, someone should do a cut down video but it combines IM/ Email / and Google document sharing all in one with a really flexible interface that links in to blogs, apps and social media sites. It is clearly going to be something special and if you have 10 minutes skip through this video to the following time codes:
Microsoft have just released this technology called Natal, very much like the Wii but you do not need controllers. The video below despite being incredibly cheesey Americana pretty much speaks for itself.
I'm liking it but also because it brings back the physical element to gaming - I can see kids wanting to be able to do stuff therefore exercising more.
I'm interested in the power of interaction, digital media and technology. I've been lucky enough to work in the field for the last 12 years at some of London's best interactive agencies. The content here has mainly been gathered from other blogs and is just a convenient place for some of my colleagues to find out about new developments in the field.
I run a new digital agency called Spike www.spikeuk.com
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