Nissan - Damn Ponies

This campaign for Nissan comes out of Brazil and has racked up an impressive number of views in the past couple weeks.  It's a great example of taking a traditional TV spot and modifying it for the Youtube audience.  In the spot, a driver get stuck in the mud, opens the hood and to discover animated prancing ponies singing a jingle about how they won't move and don't like mud or sludge.  He curses the fact that he has ponies rather than horses, hence the 'Damn Ponies' title.  After the spot ends, the animated ponies tell you to keep the window open before turning into evil ponies and demanding that you share the video with 10 friends.  If you fail to share the video you'll be struck with the Curse Of The Damn Pony and spend the rest of your life with the annoying pony jingle stuck in your head.  Definitely a new take on how to encourage sharing and spreadability, just threaten the audience with a lifetime of annoying music.  I love it.

Here's the original video and an English subtitled version.  This campaign was developed by Lew'Lara\TBWA in São Paulo.


Supporting Articles: Portogente | AdWeek | Inspiration Room

Volkswagen BlueMotion Roulette

As part of their campaign to promote the amazing fuel economy of the new Volkswagen Golf BlueMotion, Norwegian agencies Try and Apt turned a long stretch of highway into a virtual roulette table.  Using Google Maps & Streetview the E6 highway was turned into one big roulette table with 80,000 individual slots.  So what's the hook?  Users were invited to place a 'bet' (using Facebook connect) on how far the VW could go on a single tank of fuel.  The user with the correct bet won the car.  Each user could only bet once, thereby encouraging users to learn as much as possible about the car, the features and the fuel economy.  When the registration period ended, the Golf took to the road where users could monitor the progress of the car in real-time via an implementation of Google Maps and livestreaming video on the BlueMotion website.

Over 50,000 people followed its progress in real time to find out if they’d be the lucky winners of a new VW Golf and the car eventually ran out of gas 1,570 kilometres later, the equivalent of an Oslo-Paris road trip.

Supporting Articles: Creativity | Ads Of The World

Frijj - You LOL, You Lose

Here's a great example of a campaign that should be residing on Youtube in a custom gadget.  Frijj, the UK milkshare brand has launched three new flavours of milkshake.  Iris and Universal McCann London have created a great interactive challenge that uses facial recognition technology as a key part of the gameplay.


'You LOL You Lose' website pits players against the finest, funniest and FAILworthiest videos YouTube has to offer. As the name suggests - laugh out loud and it's game over (thanks to face recognition via webcam).
The site delivers three kinds of video - LOL, OMG and Cute - one for each of the three new 'incredible' Frijj flavours: honeycomb choc swirl, jam doughnut and sticky toffee pudding. Err, yum.
The game aims to help players build up their tolerance to the unexpected, so these brand new flavours don't just knock them flat. There's some smart tech in the mix too, re--calibrating the game for each player's skin tone and the ambient light. Bet you can't last a whole minute.


Again, it's there's no reason why this couldn't have been done using Youtube as the primary platform rather than a microsite as we've seen advertisers utilize webcam and head-tracking functionality in the past (most recently the HUGO Just Different campaign).


Supporting Articles: Creativity Online | Adverblog | Marketing Magazine

Strange Talk Music & Cheer Detergent

With a completely digital budget and the tagline 'We Dig Color' the detergent brand Cheer (part of the P&G family) is doing it's best to appeal to the digital audience.  Cheer has partnered with the band Strange Talk Music on their latest music video, Climbing Walls.   The the premise behind the latest campaign can be summed up as click the video, get free colorful stuff.  The video has hidden clickable annotations on colorful objects such as socks, t-shirts, dresses and hoodies.  Finding and clicking on the hidden objects drive the user to the Cheer Facebook page.  Once users have liked the brand they see if they've won an item of clothing from the video or register an item they 'dug'.  Each annotation links off to a different item of clothing and they're giving away limited numbers.  Users who've found the annotations enter their name and address and the item of clothing they've won show up at their doorstep a few days later.  It's a nice way to a) get users to watch the entire music video from a band they may not be familiar with b) drive users to to a Facebook fan page from Youtube, c) get users to like the Cheer brand on Facebook and d) get winners/engaged users into the Cheer CRM database.

As for the actual music…ehhh.

Supporting Articles: Creativity | Mashable

Orbitz Bleeping Clean Videos

Orbit has created a series of filthy videos for users to clean up.  Each of the filthy videos on Youtube contains an external annotation that drives users to the Orbit gum Facebook page where users can clean them up with their own words.  It's like a video version of Mad Libs:

The Facebook application allows users to create their own customized videos based on three scenes — “Hot Tub,” “Party Crasher,” and “Cousin” — theoretically cleaning up language by bleeping out words. Orbit Bleeping Clean Videos uses a humorous computer text-to-speech feature, and users can choose from a large database of words, allowing for several story combinations and themes.

You can see a few examples of the cleaned up videos on the Orbitz Youtube Channel

Supporting Articles: MediaBistro

NAB - The Honesty Experiments

Hot on the heels of the recent Honest Cities Experiment from Honest Tea (courtesy of Nicola Young, worth checking out more here), comes a set of Honesty Experiments from Australian bank NAB:

Australian bank NAB recently launched conducted a series of 'honesty experiments', and published the results on YouTube. NAB explain the rationale for the experiments on its website: 'At NAB, we believe that Australians are an honest lot and that they deserve honest credit cards to match. So just how honest are Australians?'. A series of outdoor experiments were secretly filmed, then uploaded to YouTube.


The first experiment tested whether Australians would do the right thing if given too much change. NAB set up a coffee stand in Melbourne, and the barista deliberately gave them $5 too much change in each transaction. Everyone gave the money back. When the barista was deliberately rude to customers, 91% still returned the extra change.


For the second, the bank left wallets filled with cash on the streets of Sydney. Incredibly, 88% were returned. For the final experiment, NAB asked someone to deliberately drop $20 on a busy Melbourne street - 95% of people went out of the way to return the money.


The campaign was created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, who previously launched a hugely successful public Break Up campaign for NAB, which won the PR Grand Prix award at the Cannes Lions festival.

I love how this campaign took it one step further by introducing more barriers to entry/reasons not to be honest such as the obnoxious barista, the guy with headphones, more money in the wallet, etc.  There's also a nice use of external annotations to then drive people to the NAB site to find out more.


Supporting Articles: Contagious Magazine | Adverblog

The blink-182 Film Festival You Didn't Know You Entered

The blink-182 Film Festival You Didn't Know You Entered
After almost 8 years on hiatus, Blink182 has launched a new single (I was pretty happy with 8 Blink182-free years, but that's just me).  The video for the new single 'Up All Night' took a cool approach to crowd-sourcing.  From the band:


AT&T and blink-182 went through thousands of your videos and watched them, reviewed them, and entered them into The blink-182 Film Festival You Didn't Know You Entered.  
...
To launch our first single in eight years, AT&T helped us search YouTube for every instance of fans using our music without our permission. And then we rewarded them for it. This film is made out of clips from all those videos. Thanks for being a fan.

So essentially Blink 182 is pirating the fans that originally pirated them, making them the stars of the new music video.  The music may suck, but it's a cool idea.  Additionally the video contains annotations throughout that allow users to view the original videos.  This is all part of a partnership with AT&T around the launch of the new HTC phones with one-button Facebook sharing/connectivity.

Supporting Articles:  Campaign | CBS News | AdWeek

Old Spice - Mano a Mano In El Bano

Old Spice - Mano A Mano In El Bano

Note: This post has been copied from the Youtube Trends Blog which did a good piece on the stats behind the latest campaign.  See here

Old Spice launched a new viral, comedic campaign last week starring their most popular viral spokesperson, Isaiah Mustafa. The premise was that Mustafa -- aka Old Spice Guy -- was getting challenged for his title by famed model Fabio in something called "Mano a Mano En El Baño."

The series kicked off with this video from Fabio and response from Old Spice guy:




The Fabio challenge video, which has over 3 million views, was the most-watched of the series and was one of the week's most-viewed.


Over the course of the story, Old Spice posted over 100 videos from the two combatants channels: OldSpice and newoldspiceguyfabio. These videos, many of which were responses to tweets and other posts, were seen a total of roughly 22 million times.


At its peak, the Old Spice battle drew 5 million views combined on Wednesday.  Here is the final video of the series:

Last July, when the original "Questions" campaign ran, Old Spice drew around 82 million views.


There's also an interesting article in AdAge on the sales impact of the campaign (courtesy of Daniel Andrade)

Nokia Gulp - The World's Largest Stop Motion Animation

Ever since the launch of the Nokia N8, the product messaging has been focused around the amazing imaging system of the Nokia N8.  Rather than focus on tech specs (12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics) they've been constantly eating their own dogfood by finding creative ways to showcase the power of the N8.   First they shot a 8 minute short film (The Commuter) starring Hollywood actors using only the Nokia N8.  They followed that up with the world's shortest stop motion animation film, Dot.  Hot on the heels of those successes, they've now shot the world's largest stop motion animation, entitled Gulp.  Gulp is a short film created by Sumo Science at Aardman (in conjunction with W+K), depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch. Shot on location at Pendine Beach in South Wales, every frame of this stop-motion animation was shot using a Nokia N8.  The film has broken a world record for the 'largest stop-motion animation set', with the largest scene stretching over 11,000 square feet.

Another cool thing about the video, the Facebook and Twitter sharing are carved into the sand and embedded into the animation using external annotations.  They've also updated their Youtube channel with a new custom gadget to prominently feature the film as well as a behind the scenes/making of video.

Supporting Articles: Adverblog | Fast Company | AgencySpy

OK Go - All Is Not Lost Chrome Experiment

OK Go is back with a new interactive HTML5 video/Chrome Experiment developed in conjunction with Google and dance troupe/choreographers Pilobolus.  The band best known for their amazingly creative (and inevitably viral) music videos such as This Too Shall Pass, White Knuckles & Here It Goes Again recently released All Is Not Lost.  The experience is in the same vein as the award winning Arcade Fire Chrome Experiment, The Wilderness Downtown.  Users can personalize the experience in which different shots are rendered in different browser windows that move, re-size and re-align throughout the piece. With HTML5’s canvas technology, these videos are drawn in perfect timing with the music.  The band and Pilobolus dancers are filmed through a clear floor, making increasingly complex shapes and eventually words—and messages you can write yourself.

You can see a nice behind-the-scenes video here.

Supporting Articles: Google Blog | The Creators Project | Metro