Category: Social Service

Feel the View

Ford in Italy along with their agency GTB Rome have teamed up with Aedo, a local start-up that creates devices for people with visual impairments. Together they have designed a new innovative device, that when applied on a car window can decode a landscape seen from the car, allowing visually impaired people to experience it with the tip of their fingers.

The device can transform a flat surface of a car window into a tactile display. The prototype captures and transforms the photos taken by the integrated camera into haptic sensory stimuli, not visible, but perceptible through touch and hearing.

Black Bar Donation

Videos that are recorded vertically and then posted on YouTube, generally have black bars on either sides. Lots of viewers find this waste of space annoying. So JWT Brazil came up with the “Black Bar Donation” campaign that allowed people with vertical videos to donate their black bars to NGO’s who needed help promoting themselves.

On visiting the campaign microsite, people could select the video to upload, tag it with the NGO of choice and then have it directly published to their YouTube channel.

A Sirious safety message

By hijacking Siri, Toyota in Sweden has found a new way to get people to turn off their phones in the car and stop texting.

With the help of Saatchi & Saatchi they created a unique radio ad that interacted with the phone without human intervention. Of course relying on the fact that the iPhone was plugged in, charging and would wake up to the voice command “Hey Siri”. So, even if the driver wasn’t paying attention, their phone was. 😎

Two separate ads ran during rush hour – one for Apple’s Siri and the other for Google Android with “OK Google”.

Castrol Vuvu Lyza

The breathalyser test is the most commonly used method for alcohol testing. Since the test is extremely invasive, Castrol decided to merge the breathalyser that everybody hates, with the vuvuzela that everybody loves, and created the Castrol Vuvu Lyza.

For the first time ever South African drivers could use their vuvuzelas to enjoy the game and arrive home safely after it.

Living Memories

Each week in New Zealand, five families are told the devastating news that someone they love, is someone they will never see again. Their families don’t just lose a loved one. They lose everything that person could have become.

So as part of National Road Safety Week, Brake (a road safety charity) partnered with ad agency Y&R New Zealand to create a highly emotional and impactful campaign encouraging New Zealanders to think about the potential life-long cost of their decisions on the road.

Five families from around the country volunteered to be part of the project. Each family worked with a forensic age progression specialist and the digital artists at Weta Digital, to help create an individual portrait of what their child would look like today if he/she was still alive.

For more visit www.livingmemories.org.nz.

Shadow Wifi

Instead of simply informing people of the dangers of UV rays and spending too much time in the sun during the summer months, the Peruvian League Against Cancer and agency Happiness Brussel teamed up to create a “Shadow WiFi” network, that educated people on skin cancer prevention while providing them with free WiFi in the shade.

A large looming blue structure was setup at Playa Agua Dulce in Peru which provided people on the beach with free WiFi access in its shade. A directional antenna ensured that the WiFi was only delivered to the shadow area of the structure. A sensor tracked the movements of the sun throughout the day and changed the rotation of the WiFi antenna. So as the sun moved, so did the shadow along with the WiFi seekers.

St. Pauli pinkelt zurück

St. Pauli is one of Hamburg’s top entertainment destinations, attracting as many as 20 million visitors a year with its popular nightclubs and legal prostitution. However the steady stream of visitors has many residents and merchants angry as the visitors often relieve themselves against walls which leaves the whole place smelling like a latrine.

So to combat this, St. Pauli merchants association is fighting back by coating the most frequented walls with Ultra Ever Dry, a hyper-hydrophobic nano paint originally developed by Nissan. Now when urine hits this paint, it splashes back, soaking the offender’s pants and shoes with his own urine.

UPDATE: Pee-repellant walls commissioned by San Franciso Public Works

Homeless Fonts

When you walk by a homeless person on the sidewalk holding a cardboard sign, you see an anonymous face struggling to survive. So to help the homeless in Barcelona, Cyranos McCann teamed up with the Arrels Foundation to launch HomelessFonts.org. The website featured fonts created using the handwriting of local homeless people, ready for purchase by marketers aiming to personalize their brands.

The money raised from the website is to be spent on accommodation, food, social programs and health care of the homeless. For more information visit www.HomelessFonts.org.

The Donor Cable

Azerbaijan has the world’s highest number of children born with the blood disorder thalassemia, a hereditary disease primarily found among Mediterranean cultures. The illness requires extensive blood transfusions for babies, and hospitals often lack the needed amount of donated blood.

So Y&R Moscow partnered with Azerbaijan cellular network Nar Mobile to re-imagine blood donations for today’s digital world. Together they created a special wearable bracelet that let smartphone owners easily donate power to another.

The unique “donor cables” were an instant hit and the country saw an increase in blood donation by 335%.