www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.

Much like last year (yes, it is a whole year since these little suckers last hit the shelves) the website cremeegg.co.uk is acting as a hub for all activity and content. Here you can find Goo on the Box – an archive of past TV ad favourites; Goo on the Web - a selection of egg-related user-generated content and Goo Games - including the Great Eggscape (playable online) and the mobile-based Eggs and Ladders.

www.cremeegg.co.uk

The most intriguing area of the site, however, is introduced with the rousing call to arms, ‘Your country needs goo’. Via a comic book-style animated storyboard, visitors are told how a batch of escaped Creme Eggs suffering from amnesia, are currently ‘wandering aimlessly across the internet’ and need rounding up. Users can do so by tracking them down across multiple portals including MSN, Yahoo and YouTube.

Each egg found will contain a special code which, when entered on the website, gives the user the chance to win a selection of prizes – including key rings, beach balls, Red Letter Day experiences and a trip for two to New York. The campaign extends to a quiz on the brand’s Facebook page where the eggs are currently posting cryptic clues and asking the 300,000+ fans to help identify their whereabouts.

The later stages of the campaign will see the launch of two seperate iPhone apps – one of which will utilise augmented reality technology along with an accompanying online application.

via Contagious Magazine

Facebook Inc. says it hasn’t been able to find out who came up with the idea.
Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, said the group was not behind the campaign but called it “a terrific tool for raising awareness.” She added, “We just hope people act on it — get educated, get a mammogram.”

So there you have it. It’s a viral campaign for Breast Cancer Awareness this day. Now the men will not have to wonder why most of their female friends have a color status as we told you readers how the Facebook Colors of the Bra Invasion started.

Filmed in one shot entirely on an iPhone, “Apples” was created, produced and finished by The Mill NY with award-winning, marketing communications agency Draftfcb New York. City Harvest asked Draftfcb for a commercial that conveyed a lot of food is wasted in a voluminous way. The iPhone captured a realistic feel people empathize with, and one that lends to a digital life as a viral film and a cinema vérité-styled commercial. The Apples were created entirely using CGI.

Yann Mabille, The Mill’s Joint Head of 3D, and co-director of “Apples”, explains that the iPhone was singled out by the team for its practical playback feature, and overwhelming popularity and near ubiquitous presence among cell phone users. The spot was filmed in one day, and took three weeks to finish, Mabille says. Although its resulting style is low-fi, finessing that look and feel took technical expertise and innovation behind the scenes.

Angus Kneale, The Mill’s Creative Director and co-director of “Apples”, explains an exact virtual camera move had to be created that matched the physical iPhone camera. “Due to the rolling shutter from the CMOS sensor, the raw footage was slightly distorted,” Kneale explains. “Regular tracking software could not work.”

Armed with this knowledge before the shoot, The Mill created an innovative tracking rig for the iPhone. “It would have been impossible to track the iPhone camera without the rig,” adds Vince Baertsoen, Lead 3D, The Mill. “We had to re-create a motion capture set up in the station. On set, we looked at places we could put cameras and determined how we could triangulate the rig. We used three Canon 5D Mark 2 static cameras to record everything in sync simultaneously.”

“The rig was designed to clearly show the iPhone’s exact position and orientation in 3D space,” Kneale elaborates. “The three Canon 5D Mark 2 cameras captured the iPhone’s movement from three varying perspectives. The rig had multiple LED lights attached to make the ‘tracking points’ clearly visible in the subdued light. The rigging simplified 80% of the work, but a lot of fine-tuning was done by hand, sometimes frame by frame.

“Full HDRI’s of the location were captured,” Kneale continues. “A Spheron Camera was used to capture multiple 360-degree scans that provided exact survey data and lighting conditions of the whole subway platform and train. This data was used to accurately construct the virtual environment and used for everything from modeling to texturing and lighting.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SALSn9E1fkc

“The CGI was composited into the original live action by our lead Flame artist Cole Schreiber. It was important to work at the native resolution of the iPhone and match the codec compression artifacts,” Kneale relates. “Cole carefully integrated the apples into the footage by emulating the dynamic range and white balance of the iPhone, ultimately color matching the apples. Subtle details were added such as green color spill, shadows and reflections. The dynamic auto exposure changes of the iPhone also had to be matched. The tracking was given one last tweak in Flame locking the CGI into the live action.

The resulting “Apples” commercial has a man-on-the-street sensibility. It is also a fine example of the influence of user-generated content in advertising thanks to the iPhone and the star quality of Apples. “Our goal with this year’s campaign is to visualize the numbers behind the hunger problem in New York—both the amount of food that goes to waste and the number of residents that go hungry,” explains Keith Loell, Executive Creative Director, Draftfcb. “We’re hoping that the sight of a few hundred thousand apples pouring out of a subway car will get the attention of potential donors.”

Final commercial

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V5fKX_U3qY

Via The Mill

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGwHQwgBzSI

But it’s definitely an initiative very good in generating word of mouth and curiosity in checking out the magazine. So the mechanism is simple: you get people interested in the publication, they buy it, they like the content (not just the AR part) and they will possibly be willing to buy the next issue as well if not to subscribe.

SONY has launched a campaign to get us all singing in our cars.

“Singing in your car” takes an activity that we all do (often to the annoyance of fellow passengers) and turns it into an interactive TV and online contest. You can send in your auditions (posted to YouTube) and some of the best (what is the criteria?!) get featured in the television commercial. Susan Boyle eat your heart out!

This is definitely a perfect example of interactive TV content created with consumers help.

If you visit the website probably you won’t understand much about the NA-VU technology (it’s a navigator with digital TV functionalities also playing music and videos), but you will surely have a lot of fun and feel positive energy. People really loved the initiative and got crazy to get one minute of fame: you will see mums with kids, families with kids playing the sax, friends, singles, singles with dogs, couples with cats and much more. In December the best audition will be awared with the value of ten years of holidays based on government estimate (about $9,500).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfK7d0ck0vo

Adidas sponsors the New Zealand national rugby team, also called the All Blacks. The All Blacks are notoriously famous for their haka (a Maori dance) before each international match.

Adithread

The first user generated campagn with the All Blacks was Adidas’s campaign called “Adi Thread” which was a collaborative effort with the University of Canterbury to create a unique experience for the All Blacks professional rugby team fans to contribute to a special addition jersey for their captain. This contributory experience is a great use of the emerging Nano technology capabilities.

Fans logged onto a microsite where they entered their name on a virtual thread which was then produced as the physical sticking for the jersey. This also has as elements of a collective experience, as all 100,000 fans who participated can feel like they are part of the team in a more personalize and up-close way as the watch the matches.

Adisynth

After this campagn, the All Blacks now have asked their fans to cooperate in creating a poster for the 10 year adidas All Blacks anniversary using Microsoft’s Photosynth.

Microsoft’s Livelabs introduced Photosynth to the world at TED. Now adidas has used this in a new campaign for the All Blacks.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVzsmwzxpO0

Of course, Photosynth was introduced a while ago and CNN did a similarly collective and highly publicized Photosynth of the Obama inauguration half a year ago. But we didn’t blog about that back then, and the technology is definitely worth noting.

Leicester rockers Kasabian have produced a promo vid for their latest single ‘Underdog’, which shows a group of sharp shooting freestyle footballers hitting notes on a giant guitar in an extravagant twist to the popular game Guitar Hero.

But this isnt’ a game you’ll be able to play at home… Football hero was created as a three-storey high game in a West London warehouse where instead of pressing buttons on a plastic replica guitar, footballers had to hit coloured buttons on a wall several yards away in time to a fret board display projected above…

“The freestyle footballers were headed up by Woody & Kleiny who starred in the documentary In The Hands Of The Gods and also appeared on Britain’s Got Talent,” explains Sony Music’s Phil Clandillon. “The game was powered by the open source Guitar Hero clone Frets On Fire -  and we used two enormous projectors to create a three story high image on the side of the warehouse wall.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XjwoVqM_qE

“The coloured buttons on the typical guitar controller were replaced by five huge pressure sensitive pads which were carefully positioned on the wall in order to line up with the game’s descending notes,” he continues. “Each of the pads contained a piezoelectric vibration sensor, and these were wired back to an Arduino, which in turn was connected to the MacBook Pro we used to run the software. The footballers had to try to hit the pads in time with the music in order to play the Kasabian track Underdog.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmjijvX50FQ

Via Creative Review

From Autopia’s “Most Annoying Promotion Ever” department comes this dispatch from Lancaster, California, where Honda’s marketing team joined forces with the city to turn a stretch of road on the edge of town into a giant LP that plays “The William Tell Overture,” which you might more readily recognize as the theme to The Lone Ranger.

One of the ways to define IOOH experiences is to create a layer of parallel experience on top of a real world physical activity that changes and enhances it with information, utility and entertainment. The Civic Project: Musical Road did that by allowing drivers to hear a song that was generated by the vibrations that car tires make when driving over payment groves. Super creative and difficult to get right. Take a listen.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFGacuxcSM

This clever idea is very low tech at the point of deployment but very high tech in its implementation. The use of professional musicians together with civil engineers is a interesting blend of skills. You can see from the below video and some of the other “Making of” videos posted by Honda on YouTube, the work and planning that went into make this idea come to life. Kudos to Honda for funding such a unorthodox form factor for a DOOH experience – asphalt.  Now all they need is a more traditional DOOH LED digital display on the side of the road to help connect the dots for the audience and extend the story. Don’t forget to check out the Volkswagen campaign as well.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgrWh_Wf5I

Honda officials apologized to all who complained, including some who lived as far as a half mile from Civic Musical Road and still heard it. Still,  imagine that Lancaster residents wouldn’t complain about Honda’s previous So Cal guerrilla marketing campaign, which had Honda employees pumping free gas and carrying groceries.

Maybe the problem was the tune Honda picked. One Lancaster resident suggested that old Beatles chestnut “Yesterday.” Perhaps “Drive My Car” would have been a better choice

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxRgf5czTiM