Thursday, June 14, 2012

Nike Football - My Time Is Now

Apologies that this blog has been radio silent for the past month due to a ridiculous amount of traveling around for work (and pleasure).  By now, most of you have have probably already seen this campaign, but if you haven't please set aside the next 30 minutes to play around with the Nike Football Youtube experience.  It's without a doubt one of my favorite all-time Youtube executions.  Kudos to W+K London & Stink Digital for an amazing piece of work. First a bit of background from the W+K London blog (they can certainly explain it better than I can):

Our innovative new Nike 'My Time Is Now' campaign celebrates this next wave of footballers, whether it's the participants in The Chance, Nike's worldwide hunt for football talent (with previous winners featured in the spot), or elite athletes looking to make an impact on the world stage. 


But more than simply reflecting the defining qualities of hunger and impatience, this new global campaign provokes and rewards these behaviours in the participating audience too.


To achieve this, the campaign flips the traditional AV model: rather than creating a film for TV and running it online, we created a film for the internet, a version of which runs on TV. Launched online first, with the TV edit following up in Saturday's Champions League Final, the film is driven by a variety of different types of content, interactions and experiences, as well as seamless extensions to the overall narrative flow of the campaign.

It all kicks off with another epic 3-minute, star laden spot below.  That's followed by a call to action to 'Follow The Tunnels' which are areas of content/interactive experiences throughout the film similar to easter eggs.  These include Ronaldo's training program, a Sonic video game, Football IQ test, etc.


I love the fact that Nike continues to put digital first and foremost and are committed to creating truly immersive experiences.  Far too many of these ambitious campaigns start with TV and treat digital as an adjunct or bolt on at the end.

Additional Articles: W+K London | Contagious

VW - The Original Click

Really clever use of Youtube advertising formats in this campaign for official Volkswagen auto parts (developed by AlmapBBDO).  The idea is simple, people shouldn't accept imitations auto parts.  Similarly, they discovered that on Youtube many of the most-popular videos have poor quality knock offs/imitation videos, some of which have millions of views.  So VW bought in-stream ads against these imitation videos with the message 'Don’t accept Imitations. Prefer Original Parts.'  Clicking on the ads redirected users from the imitation video to the original version.  Check out the brief case study/explanation video below.  According to this AdFreak article the campaign generated '125,000 views and 500 clicks for every $100 spent.'



via Sibylle Tretera

Additional Articles: Adverblog | Digital Buzz Blog

Paper Crows - Build

Here's another clever use of Youtube videos from the musicians, Paper Crows for their new album 'build.'  The site shows four separate YouTube videos which are then synchronized into one coherent visual track using the Youtube API.  Each of the videos is actually a different music track, so users can change the audio track by rolling over one of the videos.  Simple, but very clever.  Check it out here, or see the screen capture below.
via Bobby Nolla

Getty Images - From Love To Bingo

Another great piece of work from AlmapBBDO for Getty Images.  The challenge was to show that Getty Images has such an extensive archive that any story can be told through their photo collection.  The creative team spent more than 6 months culling through 5000 photographs to create this minute long film which contains 873 photos from the Getty Images archive and tells a wonderful story throughout.  Just beautiful.

Doubleclick Rich Media - Media Bridging Desktop & Mobile

As you may have noticed from previous posts, I'm a bit obsessed with the media bridging opportunities where mobile is the glue that connects all other forms of media.  There's still a long way to go until it's seamless and elegant, but there's been some really nice progress, especially over the past six months.

One of my favorite examples (logrolling alert) was developed by my talented colleagues at Doubleclick (Scott Harmes - creative, Roberto Stocco - dev) in conjunction with Toaster Ltd.  The tech is called 'Channel Connect' and basically creates a communications channel between a desktop advertisement (such as a Youtube masthead) and an HTML5 mobile site.  It's not just limited to one user, so you can actually create an ad experience with multiple users competing/collaborating on the experience at the same time.  I think it has a ton of potential and look forward to seeing how agencies push these executions going forward.

Have a play with the demo here or for more details read below (full post on Doubleclick Rich Media Gallery blog):


Dubbed ‘Channel Connect’, this new Rich Media feature enables you to create more ways for users to connect with your brand.

What is it?
Channel Connect is a new DoubleClick package of Flash components and JavaScript libraries used to establish a communication channel between a desktop advertisement and an HTML5 mobile site.  The opened channel can be used to send any kind of information in either direction between a user’s mobile device and their desktop.



How can I use it?
Channel Connect turns a smartphone or tablet into a new input device, allowing users to interact with brand content more tactilely than a simple mouse.  Any Rich Media ad can be enhanced by switching mouse-interactions to gestures: turn a user’s mobile into a game controller or graphics tablet for maximum active engagement.





On a separate note you'll notice that it uses a QR code to initiate the mobile part of the experience.  That's definitely where most of the media bridging stuff falls down, so it's interesting to see Layar's announcement a few days ago that they're creating an easy way for publishers to turn standard print content into a simple augmented reality experience.  Really interesting stuff...

Tide Responds To Fake Onion Article

This is great.  The satirical newspaper The Onion (which everyone should read religiously if you don't already) recently ran a spoof column from a fictional Tide digital director entitled 'Hey, Everybody! This Cool New Tide Detergent Video Is Blowing Up All Over The Internet!'  In the column, the fictional Tide guy writes:

Hey, everybody, have you seen this awesome new web video from Tide detergent?
...it's got these cute, funny talking animals, a cool indie-rock song, and it's just so hilariously random. And it's got this amazing cameo by Bret Michaels, which is so funny because Bret Michaels is hilarious and from the '80s.
  But hey, I don't want to ruin it for you. Just take a minute to check it out for yourself at the Tide website or Facebook.com/Tide, or check out Tide's totally awesome YouTube channel, which is like a treasure trove of cool, popular videos that everyone loves. And honestly, do yourself a favor and just go to Tide's website and hang there for a while. It's a totally awesome place to go and play online games and meet other cool fans of Tide products.
...The other cool thing is, after watching this awesome vid, I honestly just want to go out and buy a lot of Tide. Obviously, I've always bought Tide anyway because it's the best detergent around, but this awesome new clip just makes me want to buy it more. But hey, I guess it should come as no surprise that a brand that makes such a quality detergent would also make a quality video. I mean, it's Tide.   They're the best. They always come up with great stuff like this. It's a hip, modern company that is totally in tune with today's Internet culture, so it makes sense they'd have such a cool online presence.


Read the whole fictional column here.  As always the Onion is spot on, but the best part is that Tide has responded to the fake column by creating a real video that mirrors all of the elements described in the column.  Very meta.

We constantly hear about brands being responsive and listening to their audience (or the Internets in general in this case).  It's great to see a brand doing more than just paying lip service to the idea.  Check out the response video from Tide below.  My favorite line is 'making viral videos with reputable brand partners...':
Additional Articles: Brand Channel

[GALAXY Note] Beckham plays Beethoven's Ode To Joy

OK, so it doesn't have much to do with the product, but I still felt compelled to share this version of Beethoven's Ode To Joy as played by David Beckham to promote the Samsung Galaxy Note.

Granted it's not as spontaneously delightful as the Elephant playing the Galaxy Note, but much better than the over the top fake of the previous Beckham Pepsi viral.  See below for some pure 'viral' enjoyment.