Saw this license plate on the way to the agency this morning. It ranks right up there with other vanity gems like JETSETA, HIOFCER and I8A4RE.
More often than not, friends’ tweets can be lackluster to say the least. Reading about being stuck at work or how much traffic there was this morning clogs up Twitter feeds around the world, leaving readers comatose with boredom.
Now it’s time to take action and convert all this cyber-trash to cyber-treasure by recycling their lame and uninteresting tweets. GetTRASHED.org has partnered up with social media firm McKinney to rid cyberspace of pathetic tweets. Recycle a tweet and McKinney will donate a penny to the campaign. This is how it works:
First, @reply to someone who posted a lame tweet. Copy and paste their lame tweet, and add #recyclethis to the end. Click reply.
Recyledtweets.com will recycle it and send them a new, transformed tweet using some of the characters from the original. Not only will you have generated the donation of another penny, but you’ll get people to seem a lot more interesting than they actually are.
What are you waiting for? Start recycling.
Ever lost a hotel key card? Perhaps we know where it is.
Holiday Inn commissioned Bryan Berg, a world record-holding ‘card stacker,’ to construct a 400 square-foot hotel in New York City made entirely of 200,000 plastic key cards. The stunt is Holiday Inn’s way of promoting the brand’s re-launch featuring 1,200 new hotels in 2009.
The two-ton construction was Berg’s largest card-stacking challenge to date and the only card creation he has ever made to full human scale. The hotel itself includes a guest bedroom, bathroom and lobby, all fully equipped with functioning life-sized furniture. So, next time you’re in New York, check in and check it out.
Note: This author is not a professional card stacker, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn.
Throw out the chisel, toss the pick and hang up the paintbrush. Korean artist Gwon Osang has reinvented sculpture.
From a distance his pieces look like they’re ceramic, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that they’re made entirely out of original photographs. Curiously titled “Deodorant Type,” the collection features 14 freestanding sculptures of everything from people to luggage.
Osang, one of the most recognized contemporary artists in Korea, began creating 3D photographic works because he was physically too frail to pursue the demands of traditional sculpture. He hoped this appropriately modern new material would free him from the weight of traditional materials as well as the strenuous process of production.
In the end, Osang married photography and sculpture to come up with this creative and innovative twist on traditional art – carving a name for himself in the art world.
If your parental instincts aren’t on point, and you don’t know why your baby is crying incessantly, don’t worry - there’s an app that’s going to make it all better.
The Cry Translator works by analyzing the pitch, volume, tone and inflection of a baby’s cry, and provides you with an answer in only ten seconds. You’ll know whether your baby is hungry, sleepy, stressed, annoyed or bored. This doesn’t mean, however, that your role as parents has become obsolete; it just means your iPhone understands your baby better than you do.
The application is aimed not only at easing new parents’ anxieties, but teaching them the meaning of particular types of crying; well worth the $9.99 investment. And it promises to work not only infants, but crybabies of all ages. Hmm. Wonder if it works on interns?
It’s taken a while, but Australia has started to catch on.
In previous years, online advertising was just another way to execute a print or TV campaign and usually generated in the form of micro-sites.
Yet now, in Australia, the digital solution is becoming the backbone of advertising campaigns and the creative inspiration for other media channels.
“Ispylevis,” a Levi’s Jeans Twitter campaign, is being used in conjunction with guerilla marketing techniques to create non-traditional brand buzz.
For example, Levi’s has a current campaign where they have placed hundreds of anonymous people wearing Levi’s in hot spots around Australia and New Zealand. If approached and asked, “Are you wearing Levis?” these planted people are to immediately drop their pants and give the lucky guesser a new pair of Levi’s jeans.
Consumers can follow on Twitter to see where the Levi’s actors are hanging out.
Because of its measurable success in the US, Twitter is now being used by Australian marketers, companies and media groups. The general public, however, has been quite slow to embrace the social networking site, although Facebook also took a while to gain popularity in Australia and is now extremely widespread.
With Twitter, only time will tell.
What we do know now is that it’s a great tool for social connection and real time information, as well as the fact that the growing acceptance of Twitter in Australia should provide an even greater push to creative online advertising solutions. So keep an eye out for more of these social media campaigns – and an Aussie wearing Levi’s.
No, it’s not what you’re thinking; GetHighNow.com is a mind-warping new site with a large compilation of both optical and audio illusions.
Recently named one of this year’s 50 best new websites by Time magazine, GetHighNow.com is sure to make your lunch break memorable. Put on headphones while browsing through the site and listen to auditory hallucinations induced by pulsing different frequencies in each ear. You can actually feel another track’s sound circling around your head, instead of bouncing from ear to ear.
The optical illusions are just as interesting, and include stationary pictures that appear to move, warp, and blink. If you’re feeling scientific, GetHighNow.com also has humorous yet accurate explanations for each illusion. One word of caution: GetHighNow.com is considered a gateway site to other highly addictive websites. You’ve been warned.
Getting people to engage with a brand in a fresh and exciting way has helped make this the year of the free burger.
Back in January, Burger King created a Facebook App called The Whopper Sacrifice. The app rewarded consumers with a free Whopper if they “sacrificed” ten of their friends, testing the love of friendship versus the love of the flame-broiled burger. It was quite a success; so much in fact that Facebook decided to eliminate it after about 230,000 people were deleted.
Recently jumping on the free burger bandwagon, another opt-in branding experience was created by TGI Fridays. The restaurant chain asked people to become a fan of Woody, a 31 year-old Friday’s-loving PR character. Those who become a fan would only receive a free burger if TGI Friday’s hit their goal of 500,000 fans by September 15. With the help of TV ads, Facebook, and word of mouth, they were able to meet this goal without any problem at all.
Due to the success of the campaign, and to reward the thousands who came after the original end date, another round shooting for 1,000,000 fans by October 1st was created. Coming in just shy of the million mark, TGI Friday’s decided to give out free burgers to everyone who joined anyway.
Smart campaigns like these not only engage the consumer, but also entertain and reward them. These types of ideas that use social media to its fullest potential are the ones that will prove to be successful in the future.
So remember, it’s not about how many friends you add or delete; it’s about how many free burgers you can get along the way.
News can travel fast in the digital age – perhaps a little too fast. Especially when a cathartic blog or tweet ends up in the hands of your boss. That’s exactly what happened to the members of the Texas Tech Football Team, and it didn’t go over well.
After losing their second game and falling to 2-2 for the season, several Texas Tech players took out their frustrations via Twitter. Marlon Williams posted, “WTF I can’t believe what happened. Man my senior season isn’t goin anything like what I busted my azz for …. New week now F$&@.” Another player, offensive lineman Brandon Carter, used Twitter to break the news that he had been suspended for the next week’s game before it was officially announced. So, when Texas Tech head coach, Mike Leach, got wind of the tweets, he implemented a complete ban of the social networking site.
Is this censorship, or just a way of protecting a brand’s integrity? Perhaps it’s not for us to say - especially if our HR department is reading this.
We are clearly in the age of new media today, and new media means new advertisers ready to capitalize on it.
Most non-traditional methods have harnessed pre-existing structures for their message, such as a mirror in an airport restroom, parking lot stripes outside your local mall or even a grocery store conveyor belt. Determined to do something different, Aap! Global in San Francisco created their own new type of media altogether: underground screens.
Located inside a subway tunnel, a series of screens displays pictures that run together like a giant version of a flipbook as the train flies by them. Each frame is installed side-by-side and triggered to light up at the exact time they are aligned with each subway window. They call it MetroVISTA, and it just might be the next big thing in new media.
Adidas is currently using this innovative media strategically and with great success in Santiago, Chile. They created a seven-second ad featuring a man who appears to be running as fast as the train is traveling. The ad is quick, engaging, and gets the idea of speed across perfectly. This simple ad could not be transferred to any of the traditional or other new media outlets and still pack the same punch it does here. Taking advantage of this space is a great way to capture the attention of consumers while they aren’t being bombarded by other messages.
All media is destined to become a member of the “traditional” group as time passes. (Remember when banner ads were cutting-edge advertising?) It is the job of both advertisers and agencies to look for opportunities to engage the consumer in exciting and intelligent ways. Intriguing new media like this is exactly what is carrying us into the new age of advertising. So now is the time to question yourself, how new is your new media?
images from aapglobal.com
