Yesterday we launched a new iPhone app for Nutricia. In a new approach to support moms even more we’ve created with Nutricia this new app that helps to get dads more involved in addition of moms tracking their pregnancy.
Another pregnancy iPhone app you say? That’s what we though as well and therefore we’ve taken the new approach to involve dads because ‘Baby Connection’ works best when you use it as a couple. There’s a mum version and a dad version – and everything each parent adds is automatically synced with their partners’ phones. The app can also transform the two iPhones into one big screen. More about that in the video below:
To launch Baby Connection, we came up with an idea to make men pregnant… well kinda. You can see what we did below:
Did you know that 1 in 3 invoices in Belgium are paid late? That brought us to the idea for this campaign we created for ikki, a new service of USG People developed to support freelancers. From now on invoices will never go unnoticed again: the crying invoice.
Hats off to my colleagues at Duval Guillaume who developed the idea.
In February of this year I wrote a post about Kevin Slavin’s talk on Augmented Reality at PICNIC NY Salon. In that video he talked about something that made total sense to me… which to be honest is true for most of what Kevin says anyway :)
“His thoughts around augmented cities and why maybe ‘augmented’ should be about taking things away instead of just adding them to the world as we are already drowning in data as it is.”
So when I got this video today from a colleague about a research project on ‘Dimished Reality’ by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll of the Ilmenau University of Technology, it was like a proof of the concept Kevin talked about a year ago now. I don’t like the name ‘Dimished Reality’ because it still is doing more on top of what is really there. But in this case less really is more, check it out:
The YTTM offers an interesting way to watch videos from a specific year in between 1860 and 2010. Pick a year and choose one or more categories (video games, television, commercials, …) and you get a video that fits the selection.
For real. So the site is still up and running (don’t worry about that!) but it is clearly becoming a trend to bring some of the key Facebook characteristics to the real world. The examples below are perfect proof of that.
During summer Coca-Cola in Israel introduced “The Real Life Like”. Together with Publicis E-dologic they figured out a way to embed user data in IDF bracelets, and thus allow people to “Like” real world objects, places and events spreading the word about it on their facebook accounts.
“The implemented these facebook-bracelets at the Coca Cola Village, a watersport, sunbathing, gameplaying amusement park activity-thing for teenagers. When the guests arrive, they are given a bracelet ID which transmits an RFID signal, which they program with their facebook login. They can then “like” activities and places in the real village, and their actions show up on facebook. Teenagers are driven by vanity like everyone else, so there was a photographer present as well, if you wanted to tag yourself in any given image all you had to do was wave your ID bracelet to the photographer.”
Probably sometime during the same period, Diesel introduced Facepark aka The Analog Version of Facebook as part of the Be Stupid campaign. Go outside, speak with actual humans ;) Definitely my favorite of all these examples btw, just watch the clip if you haven’t seen it before:
As part of that they also invented the Facebook Ass Status, no sign of that being used within my network yet though :)
“At a busy downtown square in Budapest, they painted a Facebook wall(it was not an LCD screen). when users update messages on the online, they will manually place the messages with caricatures on this street wall.”
Not the most brilliant example if you ask me. Anyway, if you’ve seen other examples that would fit this trend, let me know in the comments.
Check out this presentation from Simon Sinek at TEDxPugetSound, asking if you know the ‘know why’ you do business as it is the biggest reason why people will get inspired by your brand. Many of us know what we do, or how we do it… but do do we know why?
It’s an important question we ask our clients at the agency as well, a question of which Guillaume Van der Stighelen talks about a lot in his book ‘Hero Brand’ (unfortunately only available in Dutch). Here’s his take on the video:
“Companies love their know how. They are very proud of it. So proud that it often is the focus in their advertising. “Look how well I’m good at doing this. Much better than my competitor.” But in communications, consumers aren’t that much seduced by those kind of arguments. They are much more interested in your intentions.
In the book “Hero Brand”, I have explained the parallels between becoming a public hero and becoming a brand. One of the things we learn from heroes is that they rarely talk about how good they are. You never heard Superman say: “look at my biceps! I am so strong! I can lift a building!”. Nobody ever heard Einstein say: “I am much better at inventing theories about the universe than anybody else!”. Real heroes talk about something else. They talk about why. Why the things they do are important for a better world.”
“PAC-MAN was played by real human-beings sitting in a cinema: it’s the 5th video performance of the GAME OVER Project from the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond. This stop-motion video was shot and played for the new ProHelvetia’s programme GameCulture at the Trafo cinema (Baden, Switzerland) on August 28th 2010. This giant game was played by 111 human pixels that has moved from seat to seat during more than 4 hours…”
Here’s the trailer of the HD movie Life Cycles. Beautiful! Makes me want to go out there right now – luckily for me the mountainbike season is about to start.
Talking about the new mountainbike season. If there are other mountainbike enthusiasts out there that work in marketing/advertising then you should consider joining the Mud Men aka Mad Men ridin’ the mud.
Also makes me want a new bike btw. Nobody doing blog seeding for mountainbikes? :)
An iPad, why would you be needing that for? Today you hold a little square in front of your webcam, not anymore tomorrow. Sure you are ready for the future? ;)
April 5, 2011
