Augmented reality has been kicking around for a while now but is starting to get used more and more. The campaign we’re currently running for Paramount to promote their social media assets has just thrown up We Are Autobots which (with the help of a quick plugin download) allows you to see some cool bits via your webcam. Pictures paint a 1000 words though- so look at these:

Posted by Kirk

Promoting the new BBC2 series, South Pacific, the clip is shot on a hi-def camera that was modded to sit in the surface of the water, allowing it to catch stunning shots above and below the surface- as the guy who filmed it says in the clip: ” I watched it back and I’ve still got shivers in my spine because it’s probably the best shot I’ve ever got in the water…without a doubt”

Posted by Kirk

This was all in aid of T-Mobile’s latest 7000 person “Hey Jude” singing flash mob in Trafalgar Square (with token popstar Pink plunked in the middle). Through press attention and popstar power alone it’s being talked about to buggery, yet you can’t beat the authenticity of the original which made us all smile and share somewhat.


Posted by Adam

Via Power Shift – Social Media Blog

Posted by Andy P

The purpose of the campaign is to start online conversations about the film, which hits cinemas across Europe on Friday 13th February — that’s today, folks!  The campaign’s focused on five major European territories: the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain (EFIGS to the ITKs).

We’ve been equipped with a provocative and interactive viral film to get people talking: http://www.travelwithus.tv. In the clip, you join a ‘live’ webchat with a slightly fearful lady backpacker before she is, ahem, *cut off*.  You can also customise the clip to send a delightful personalised message straight from Jason to your friends — or enemies.

The campaign follows the good work we did last year with the viral promotion for Paramount’s ‘Tropic Thunder’.  We’ve also been engaged to undertake a major online seeding campaign for the hugely anticipated ‘Watchmen’ which is released in cinemas next month.

Rory reckons: ‘Paramount are pioneering what can be done within digital social-media and viral channels. They have recognised that the film can start well before the viewer gets to cinema – it’s very exciting to be part of this when we can offer people genuinely engaging content.’

Posted by Ben W

Edit: it seems SlideShare’s embed code and our blog don’t get on so well. You can check out the case study on SlideShare while we try and resolve these minor technical difficulties.

Posted by Ben W

This year a fully integrated on & offline campaign incorporates a whole host of digital content, featuring videos narrated by, amongst others, a fatally wounded drug mule dog called Pablo and a talking bag of cocaine.

Our team’s been tasked with distributing this online content to drive high-levels of awareness across the net amongst FRANK’s target for this campaign of 15 to 18 year olds.

In total there are four pieces of content to seed: two specially commissioned online clips – a cryptic teaser and a viral – which complement the TV spot and another film highlighting the darker side of cocaine.

We’ve gone for a two stage strategy. We kicked the campaign off earlier this week with an exclusive pre-launch preview of the teaser and viral films to a discrete audience of culturally relevant bloggers (e.g. DJ / music blogs), and then yesterday, as the full campaign officially launched, we pushed the button on a blanket seeding strategy intended to generate high-levels of awareness quickly.

So far the strategy seems to be working with some good early advocacy for the campaign amongst the blogger community, and a good early surge in views of the campaign videos.

See the viral here: Baggie

and catch all the other pieces of content here: YouTube channel

Posted by Chris Q

It certainly seems to have captured the imagination of the sites budding musicians, with over a million views to the explanatory video. It gives you the chance to be part of a huge interactive orchestra: downloading the sheet music to practice, uploading your recital of it, and then being in with a chance of playing in an orchestra made from the best submitters live at the Carnegie Hall.

This project is a collaboration between YouTube, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, composer Tan Dun, and pianist Lang Lang, alongside many other classical music stars and leading institutions.

This is an interesting project as it shows people’s acceptance of new media channels for communicating in the classical music world. This is also a very involving method of promoting the individuals and institutions involved. Encouraging the musicians to practice the piece so they can be involved in the final performance, will mean that they will be thinking of the campaign even when not directly watching the video. Their practice will also affect those in their close proximity creating an awareness of the campaign on a secondary level also, to people who may not have had any contact with the video.

Posted by Ally

And don’t worry: it’s also a short story.

greatplaces2work is a charity that enables those looking for a career or change in career to match their strengths and skills within the hospitality, leisure and travel industries. They wanted to take a message of ‘careers you’ll thrive in’ to their target audience in a way that reflected their desire to help people ‘make the most of [their] skills and personality’.

Dudecorp is a darkly funny animated miniseries about office life (and death) that we made a couple of years ago because we had some scripts that made us laugh.

greatplaces2work saw in Dudecorp the opportunity to reach their audience and provide them with entertainment – all the while, articulating the thought that perhaps the corporate machine is, er, not the ideal working environment for everyone. We were not going to be the wall to this Pyramus and Thisbe and so were delighted to take on the work.

We’ve gently repurposed the existing Dudecorp site and assets to work with the greatplaces2work proposition (‘get yourself a career you’ll thrive — not die — in’) and have been able to develop some great new Dudecorp content as well.

We’re launching the campaign this week with a panoply of targeted seeding, clever embeddable content units, videos, games and, of course, the original Dudecorp microsite.

Now, we’re watching and waiting for the happily-ever-after of people finding a career they love because they were entertained by content that advertised a service that was useful to them.

Maybe it’ll set a whole new paradigm and put an end to the incessant, aggressive calls from recruitment consultants. Sorry, scratch that last bit, this isn’t a fairy story.

Posted by BenW

I love physics games anyway, possibly because I am terrible at engineering and enjoy the challenge but mostly because there’s no ‘lose’ criteria, only ‘try again’. However, the thing that really sets this apart for me is the really easy community aspect to it: once you complete a level, you can browse through anybody else’s saved and submitted solution to the same problem; you can also rank these solutions and, perhaps my favourite of all, each saved solution generates its own URL so you can point people directly to check out different contraptions (this one, for instance, is very cool: http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=26084). This already seems to have fuelled a lot of forum discussion.

The interface and game controls aren’t perfect but I love the way it’s done that thing of considering the campaign and not just the game, as well as the fact that it makes it stupidly easy for the user (URLs you can copy and paste into browser windows) rather than the Flash/SQL developer (none of this ‘simply take this generated widget code from within the Flash window which you have to select using the ‘select’ button and then input it into the location string field for the obscure Facebook application you have to install to run this sort of thing on your profile’).

What do you think? Check out Fantastic Contraption

I won’t go into the full detail of this here (there’s a good article at Searchengine Land that explains it very well) but the gist of it is this: Google monitors your activity and start customising search results based on your personal browsing preferences. That means that if you tend to go to Sky Sports (rather than, say, the BBC or the Guardian) for your sports news, you’ll see Sky Sports start to climb the rankings in your search results, even if the terms are more precisely matched by another site.

The effect may only be small at the moment, but to my mind this ties in with a discussion we’ve been having internally recently about a ‘marketplace of attention’. The phenomenon of Google and others’ advertising centred around search has been marked out as a ‘marketplace of intention‘ — that is to say, when you search for something, your exact intention is made clear and results, content (and, yes, adverts) can be served up to match that intention. Thus it was that the most successful search engine was the one which was the most accurate.

However, there have recently been signs of moves away from this focus on sheer accuracy, with other factors being brought on-stream (see, for instance, the talk about social ratings of search results). In the case of personalised search, the factor being added in to the equation is centred around sites that you like and frequent. We are tentatively calling this idea of compelling destinations a ‘marketplace of attention‘; it’s key to making successful virals because virals are something you discover or are sent, rather than search for (have you ever tried searching for something to make you laugh?) and it is, to get finally to the point, one of the reasons we’ve set up our Viral Ad Network.

Essentially, people are increasingly looking for things online to capture and hold their attention (like good virals), bringing interesting things to them rather than demanding they go out and find them (like good sites) — this is part of what I think Google is recognising with the shift set out in its personalised search. To be able to take advantage of this shift, advertisers need to push their good content out to trusted, well-read publishing destinations and publishers need to have ready access to new, interesting content to hold the attention of their readers and keep their destination compelling. By bringing the two together, the Viral Ad Network facilitates the brilliantly mutually beneficial supply and demand of attention.

Posted by Ben

Great statistics include:

• 90% of 12-21 year olds who own ‘entertainment-related electronic products’ own a gaming device.
• 75% of them play online and offline games on their PC.
• 80% of young consumers visit game-related web sites.
• 65% of young consumers tell other people about products they like.

** data from Forrester research.

Their conclusion? If you want to appeal to teen and young adult consumers, you can’t afford to overlook their massive usage of consumer electronics and entertainment devices, and for visiting web sites about gadgets and gaming. Talk to us if you want to know more….