Why do hotels make you check out at 11am if the next guest is not arriving till 6pm? What if no one’s booked in for the next night? Why do you have to check out at all?
Introducing our latest campaign for Art Series Hotels, the Overstay Checkout. If no one checks in, you don’t have to check out.
San Francisco Lose Super Bowl but Win Pudding
Shortly after losing the Super Bowl, San Franciscans were notified of a mass pudding drop orchestrated by JELL-O in order to lift the town’s spirits. A humorous video explained the drop and directed people to a microsite where they could receive information on the drop zones and coupons. To further lift spirits, the site also offered the Baltimore blocker – a chrome app that automatically censors any page you’re viewing that mentions the Raven’s win.
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QR Codes Set In Stone
QR Codes Set In StoneThe city of Rio de Janeiro has laid the first of thirty QR codes in stone pavers along famous tourist destinations such as Ipanema Beach. Resembling mosaics, the codes provide historical information about their destinations when scanned and are perhaps the first QR codes to look aesthetically pleasing. Whether they suffer the same fate as most QR codes (little to no consumer use) is yet to be determined.
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New York Times Launches Start Up Program
The New York Times are the next to join the increasingly long list of companies to offer in-house start-up programs to bolster their own innovation. Called Timespace, the program (like others) swaps desk space, mentorship and investment opportunity, for access to the minds of early stage media entrepreneurs.
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Cadbury Allows You To Personalise Chocolate
Naked and Cadbury in the UK have given us a new reason to buy more chocolate – because it’s personalised. Called Joyville Made, the service allows users to personalise the famous purple wrapper by renaming it and adding messages and images before sending the bespoke chocolate to a friend.
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Bang With Friends, Professionals and More
Bang With Friends is the latest in a slew of controversial apps that seem to be launching this year. The service is simple. Connect your Facebook account to the web app, select the friends you’d be “down to bang” and if they’re using the app and have marked you in the same manner, then both parties are notified. A LinkedIn spin off, Bang With Professionals, has also popped up, as well as a more subtle Facebook version, Would Love 2, which replaces ‘bang’ with ‘date’.
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Super Bowl 1: Brands Newsjack the Blackout
During the third quarter of the Super Bowl there was a blackout at the stadium. A handful of quick thinking community managers were able to “newsjack” the drama on Twitter with witty remarks that earned their brands tens of thousands of retweets and PR coverage. Audi took a jab at Mercedes who had naming rights to the stadium and PBS suggested it was a good time to look at “alternative programming”.Oreo however gained the most attention with a custom ad proclaiming “you can still dunk in the dark.”
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Super Bowl 2: CBS Super Bowl Streaming
Despite the fact that all we could see in Australia was a Toyota ad on repeat, the CBS Super Bowl streaming site was impressive. Amongst a multitude of interesting content and features, the site allowed viewers to start, stop and replay sections of the game, view the game from multiple angles, and see live tweet streams, game stats and on-demand Super Bowl ads shortly after they aired.
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Super Bowl 3: What a $4M Super Bowl Spot Would Get You in Digital Ads.
The discrepancy between digital and traditional media spending is diminishing – except when it comes to the Super Bowl. To that end, the folk at Digiday have crunched the numbers to see just what a $4M Super Bowl spot would buy you in digital. Some of the more interesting numbers included, an 8 day YouTube homepage buy out at $500,000 per day and a Twitter promoted trending topic every day for a month. Full stats are here.
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Theatre Offers Free Seats for Live Tweets
Using your phone in theatres is becoming less taboo. In fact, one theatre in Rhode Island is not only encouraging it, but is giving away free tickets to those that do. . Called Tweet Seats, the theatre’s initiative waives ticket prices to those willing to ‘live tweet’ the performance and reserves the two back rows for them to broadcast from. The initiative aims to attract a younger crowd.
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See How Your Facebook Page is Performing Against Others
It’s always been difficult to get solid consensus on how your Facebook brand page is performing compared to industry benchmarks. Agora Pulse, a new web app, has now made it easy, and free. Simply connect your Facebook page up to the web app and the service will analyse your posts to enable you to compare your page stats, such as ‘posts reach’, ‘engagement rate’ and ‘viral reach’, against industry averages. The site uses the private data you hand over when checking your page to help form the benchmarks. Thus, with every use, the averages get more accurate. Very handy.
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Twitter Launches New Social Network
With this week’s launch of Vine, Twitter may have just created the holy grail of apps – a video version of Instagram. The app allows users to create and share six second videos that loop in a gif-like manner. The reviews have been positive (except for reports of porn) and if nothing else it’s well worth checking out the brilliant user experience. Time will tell if it takes off. Regardless, expect to see “the first campaign to use Vine” come out this week or next.
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Restaurant Prints News Headlines On Receipts
A Washington restaurant has begun printing news headlines on receipts that go out with a customer’s bill. Updating every two minutes, the headlines are localised to be relevant to diners. Whilst this may be a small PR win, it’s curious given the prevalence of smartphones why this would be useful to anyone. Especially when they are getting up to leave.
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Playbook Lets You Share Your Romantic Conquests
A controversial app that was created as a joke during the PennApps Hackathon seems to be gaining momentum(unfortunately). Called Playbook, the app allows a group of ‘bros’ to upload pictures of their latest romantic conquests, indicate on a baseball diamond which ‘base’ they got to, and then listen to their friends feedback by way of votes, comments and oddly, redeemable beers.
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Push to Add Drama – Again.
Following on from the hugely successful viral video “A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square”, TNT have done it again with the sequel, “A Dramatic Surprise on an Ice-Cold Day” for their Dutch launch. As with the last, a big red button with the invitation to “push to add drama” is placed in a public space. Once pressed, an incredibly well choreographed, action packed drama erupts around the unassuming individual. It’s unlikely that it will top the 45 million plays the last video achieved but so far it’s had a healthy 2.5 million plays in under a week.
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Facebook Ads Just Became More Accountable
With the public rollout of the Facebook conversion tracking tool last week, marketers now have the ability to track the amount of ads that resulted in sales, sign ups or any other action on their website. In short, we can now tell if Facebook ads work. In addition, the tool also allows marketers to retarget ads to those who have converted and works across multiple devices meaning that a purchase made on a desktop website can be tracked back to an ad seen on a mobile.
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Sometime in the not too distant past, as researchers around the world proved unanimously that highly creative content is much more likely to drive greater commercial success, the argument over whether advertising should strive first to be ‘creative’ or ‘effective’ was replaced with a simple ambition to be both.
Today it’s clients as much as creatives who aspire to do the most creative work that in turn leads to the most outstanding commercial results. And the Holy Grail for client and agency partnerships has increasingly become to win a gold Lion and a gold Effie with the same campaign.
Putting aside nerdy squabbles about which award shows are best, a Cannes Lion generally represents the global standard of creative excellence, and an Effie the same for effectiveness. Both are programmes that attract entries from every market and provide genuine rigour and objectivity in their judging processes.
As the case for creativity would suggest, ‘creative and effective’ campaigns are common. The larger Cannes Lion winning campaigns almost always show up at the Effies (alas, rarely do clients invest in the expensive measurement metrics required to compile an Effie paper in the case of their smaller campaigns, and often it’s these smaller campaigns that win creative awards, thus the illusion of a preponderance of creatively awarded yet ineffective campaigns).
However, going all the way and winning a gold award at either Cannes or the Effies is bloody difficult. Of the hundreds of thousands of campaigns produced around the world this year past, 141 were creative enough to win a Gold Lion and 300 were effective enough to win a Gold Effie. These winners represent the tiniest fraction of a percentage point of our industry’s work.
And winning both – taking home a Gold Lion and a Gold Effie for the same campaign – is a delicious rarity. A high watermark of human achievement in creative communications, and the kind of work we’d all love to be able to stake our names to.
Nine campaigns joined this exclusive club in 2012*, and the thing that stands out most is what a remarkably broad creative canvas these campaigns represent. Funny TV, clever promotions, brilliant social media, emotive social marketing, huge integrated ideas, and killer innovations. There is little in the way of consistency in style – if anything, it’s gratifying evidence that communications creativity in all its forms can be super-effective.
The one theme, of course, is that these are all cases for creativity. Persuasive appeals to drive outstanding commercial success by producing work that’s highly original, hugely engaging and brilliantly executed. To do things that consumers and the media find fascinating enough to talk about. And most of all, to quote Faris Yakob from his recent commentary in Millward Brown’s 2012 Effie Report, to “be awesome”. Because “in a world driven by sharing, if it doesn’t spread it’s dead, and awesomeness, the emotion of awe, is what drives the most spread.”
And so, having collected up and scoured the winners lists from both Cannes and the past year’s 40 Effie shows, here are the nine awesome gold Lion winning campaigns that went on to pick up a gold Effie in 2012:
- James Hurman
*At first glance, just nine gold Lion and gold Effie winning campaigns might sound like more of a case against creativity. Shouldn’t the crossover be larger? In fact, no. Only 1 in every 7000 campaigns is creative enough to win a creative award – meaning that of the 300 gold Effie winners there should by rights have been either zero or 1 creative award winner. The fact that there are 9 gold Lion winners (and dozens more creative award winners of other varieties) shows a gigantic over-index of creative campaigns, running well into the tens of thousands, for the statisticians out there. This is consistent with the accepted research showing that creatively awarded campaigns are much more likely to be effective than campaigns on average.
Real Life Mario Kart
An engineering marvel has been made: real life Mario Kart. Developed by a bunch of nerds in Texas for their YouTube channel, the feat is enabled by decking out real-life go-karts with on-board computers that control the kart’s acceleration, steering and brakes activated by RFID tags. Drive over a “power up” section on the course and the RFID chip might (for example) tell competitor karts to slow down and yours to speed up. If that wasn’t enough, they’re also fitted out with mushroom launching pneumatic cannons.
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Samsung Shoot Interrupted by Bear
An incredible video has surfaced that shows a wild grizzly bear interrupting the filming of a Samsung washing machine ad on location in B.C. Racking up 750,000 plays in under a week, many have called the video a hoax. Either way, it’s likely to do better than whatever they were shooting. Definitely a must watch.
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Agency Lands Client by Way of LinkedIn Bomb
A Kentucky agency has landed a new client by a novel, yet potentially suicidal practice they’ve dubbed a “LinkedIn Bomb”. Targeting two senior marketers of A & W restaurants, the agency had all staff press send on a personalised welcome message they had written to the marketers at the same time. Fortune favours the brave.
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App Tells You Who Gave You The Flu
We all like to lay blame on people who we think have given us the flu. Now, thanks to “Health Remedies”, there’s an app to help substantiate our allegations. Called “Help, I Have the Flu” the Facebook app scans your friends’ Facebook feeds in search of ‘run down’ keywords and suspicious high-risk behaviour such as late night posting and partying. It’ll then give you a list of the most likely culprits to either lay blame or avoid.
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McDonalds “TrackMyMaccas” App
In an effort to help convince the Australian public that their food is ‘real’, McDonalds Australia has launched TrackMyMaccas, an app that tells you exactly where the ingredients came from in the burger you’re eating. First the app uses image recognition technology to identify what burger you’re eating. Then, it matches your phone’s GPS coordinates and time stamp against their supply chain data to deliver real time information about the farms where the burger’s ingredients have come from. To top it off, they deliver the information in 3D animated, augmented reality right beside your burger.
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App Shames You Into Fitness
While apps like RunKeeper and GymPact use dollars to motivate you to stick to your fitness regime, a new app created at last week’s Foursquare hackathon uses shame. Called GymShamer, the app holds you to your pledge by monitoring the amount of times you check in to a gym on Foursquare per week. Miss your quota and the app lets your friends know by updating your Facebook or Twitter account with humiliating posts on your behalf.
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TV Tech That Projects Off Screen and Into The Living Room
What happens when everyone realises that 3D TV is a gimmick and screen sizes get so big that they can no longer fit in your living room? Microsoft Research have been busying themselves with this question and have developed the VERY impressive IllumiRoom – technology that projects images beyond your screen and out into your living room for an immersive gaming experience. Best understood by this video.
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Book a Night in a Homeless Person’s Room
Faktum Magazine (think Big Issue) have launched an innovative campaign that aims to raise awareness of the homeless in Sweden’s Gothenburg. Called Faktum Hotels, the microsite advertises ten spots where the city’s homeless sleep. People can book a night for themselves or a friend like a regular hotel and all of the proceeds go towards the Faktum Magazine.
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Auto News from CES 1: Ford Developer Program
At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Ford announced the launch of the Ford Developer Program, an initiative where anyone can have access to and produce apps for their SYNC in-car entertainment system. Within 48hrs, 1,000 developers had signed up. With this move we expect to see massive advances in car-smartphone compatibility across the industry in 2013.
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Auto News from CES 2: BMW In-Car 4G Wi-Fi Hotspot
Web browsing on my smartphone during car trips is painful. My 3G Vodaphone signal just isn’t up to the task. If I were in a new BMW however, I’d have the option to connect to its in-car 4G WiFi hotspot . Making use of the vehicles antenna and power supply, the router can service up to 8 mobile devices at a time. It’s also removable allowing passengers to continue their browsing in coffee shops.
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3D Printed Records and Music Piracy
With the help of 3D printing, digital music piracy has taken an analogue twist. Digital media tinkerer Amanda Ghassaei has developed a process that enables any MP3 to be printed on to plastic records and played on a turntable. Given it will only work with super high-res 3D printers and the audio is still horrible, it’s a long way off in-home use, but we suspect it won’t be long.
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BookRX Recommends Books By Scanning Your Twitter FeedA US PHD student from Northwestern University has created an innovative web app to help you discover new books. Called BookRX, the web app scans your twitter feed and bases its recommendations on your recurring tweet themes. It’s a surprise that none of the major online retailers have developed this previously. Try it here.
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Vid 1: Would You Help a Drunk Get Into Their Car?
A UK insurance comparison company has released an online video campaign that tests the public to see how many people would help an inebriated individual into his car. Alarmingly, only 8 people out of 50 refused him entry. Good thing he was acting.
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Vid 2: Subaru Collision Avoidance Demonstration
Subaru have created a clever video to demonstrate their “Eyesight” collision avoidance technology. Clocking up over 600K views in a little over a week, the video features a multitude of mini Subarus each fitted with the “Eyesight” technology and a musical tune that only activates when the car is moving. The video creates a symphony and showcases how the mini cars navigate each other once a single road block (holding them all back) is lifted.
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The Nokia Open Song Project
A few months back Beck released a new song only in sheet music form – a clever move that spawned hundreds of public interpretations before his own version was released. Nokia, Naked Communications Copenhagen and Danish electro group Spleen have just teamed up to release ‘Hybernation’ in a similar manner. Called the Open Song Project, Nokia and Spleen have given people the various sample components of the song and asked them to create music with it – all without actually hearing the song. Each component (kick drum, synth, bass, etc.) is accompanied with video shot on the new Lumia 920, so when each part is stitched together a video clip is automatically made.
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It was an interesting year for Naked according to the experts. Naked’s work received some very significant accolades, as well as some rather dubious ones.
All of these accolades were awarded on a global scale. i.e. We’ve done some of the best, innovative, freakiest and disgusting work the world has seen in 2012! Here’s what happened:
It’s also been a great year for the more conventional measure of campaign success. Below is the list of awards won:
ADMA
Grand Prix, 2 Gold. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’
Cannes
1 Gold Lion, and 5 shortlists. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’ and Sony ‘Crossing the Ice’
Effies
2 Gold, 2 Silver. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’
Spikes Asia
2 Gold, 2 Silver, and 1 Bronze. For Coke ‘Share a Coke’, and Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’
One Show / One Show Entertainment
1 Silver Pencil and 1 Bronze Pencil. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’ and Sony ‘Crossing the Ice’
Mumbrella
Best Advertising Campaign. For Coke ‘Share a Coke’
London International Awards
1 Silver. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’
New York Festival’s International Advertising Awards
World Gold Medal. For TAC ‘SpeedKills’
Media Federation Awards
3 Gold. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’
Australian Marketing Institute (AMI)
1 Gold. For Coke ‘Share a Coke’
Clio Awards
2 Silver, 1 Bronze. For Art Series Hotel ‘Steal Banksy’ and Coke ‘Share a Coke’
Fingers crossed for 2013.
Warney gives us the big ups on The Project for our TAC Homesafley campaign. Check it out at www.homesafely.com.au