Volkswagen Polowers

Volkswagen Polowers

Volkswagen Polo is one of the most desired cars amongst the youth of Spain. To make a big entry DDB Spain created a Tweet based race that would make VW Polo the most trending topic on Twitter for that day.

A special hashtag #Polowers was created in order to give a name to the VW Polo Followers. Then to generate conversation amongst the Polowers a race was setup where each tweet took the follower to the first position. When the Polo stopped at one of the 5 designated stops, the follower in the first position at that time would win a prize – iPad, Denon Ceol music system, Leica D-Lux 5 camera, VW Bike and eventually the grand prize VW Polo itself.

In terms of results, the campaign generated more than 150,000 tweets in 8 hours after launching, at a rate of 5 tweets per second and reached more than 10% of Twitter’s total audience in Spain. It also became the leading Top 10 trending topic and generated a record breaking amount of traffic to Polo’s product section on Volkswagen.es.

Last year Mercedes-Benz had created a tweet based race that had real life cars fueled by tweets. 🙂 Check out that campaign here.

Bradesco Insurance – Fake Ad

Bradesco an insurance company created a cheeky ad in the iPad version of the Quatro Rodas, a Brazilian car magazine. When the readers of the digital magazine swiped the fake ad, the car actually went in the direction of the swipe and crashed into the side of the screen, unveiling the message “Unexpected events happen without warning. Make an insurance plan.”

The Generous Store

Generosity is one of the basic elements in human happiness. However, research shows that just 1 in 10 people experience generosity from others. So to help change that trend, Danish chocolate maker Anthon Berg opened “The Generous Store”.

For one day only the pop-up store became the world’s first chocolate shop where people couldn’t pay with cash or card! Instead the store provided iPads where people could login to Facebook and post their promise of a generous deed to a friend or loved one…

Now thats what I call an innovative way of spreading positive brand messaging through people’s Facebook network. 😎

Slide to Unlock

AlmapBBDO Brazil has developed a very unique and innovative iAd for the new Brazilian Audi magazine app. The ad seen in the video below appeared in various publications on the iPad and used a nice play on Apple’s “Slide to Unlock” feature to engage the users.

Users who saw the ad instantly recognized the swipe gesture used to unlock Apple devices. So after racing their finger around the track, they were rewarded with a free download of the first Audi Magazine copy from the app store.

Before I could publish this post I came across another “Slide to Unlock” iAd! It seems this iOS feature is becoming a popular creative feature for iAds. In the below example, Amnesty International has created an iAd in Sweden’s largest newspaper, DN, where readers were presented with an image of a prison cell and prisoner inside. “Slide to Unlock” was used to open the prison cell and reveal a strong call to action to join Amnesty International as an activist.

Augmented Reality – Hyperlinking the real world

Is the end near for the QR code? It has been put to good use in countless innovative projects, but recently I am starting to see a drift towards technology that can produce similar results without the codes.

French company Capturio, lets users turn their t-shirts into a business card! Now Blippar in UK is creating augmented reality effects from printed images without any activation from a QR code. All the users needs to do is:

  1. download a custom app…in this case its from Blippar
  2. scan a Blippar enabled printed image (identifiable by a small Blippar logo) with their iPhone, iPad or Android device
  3. and begin interaction with the augmented reality 3D overlay seen on the screen…

In India I have seen Telibrahma using the same technology to increase the experiential engagements of brands via traditional mediums i.e. newspapers, posters etc.

Disney Appmates “the next toy revolution”

Disney recently announced a new line of toys called Disney Appmates. These new toys and the iPad work in tandem to create a very new age play experience. Featuring the likenesses of characters from Cars 2, the Appmates are miniature figures with special sensors mounted on the bottom. The sensors work with the Cars 2 Appmates app to identify each figure when put against the iPad screen…

The Apple and Disney Stores will start selling Lightning McQueen, Tow Mater, Finn McMissile, and Holley Shiftwell in October. Francesco Bernoulli and Shu Todoroki will be launched in November and will made available exclusively through the Apple Store.

3D Video Mapping Interactivity Test

NuFormer after executing 3D video mapping projections onto objects and buildings worldwide, have now used interactivity in their latest addition to this technology.

During the interactive projection test the spectators became the controller and interacted realtime with the building by using gesture based tracking (Kinect). People could influence the content by using an iPad, iPhone or web based application made available for both mobile phone and computer use. For this test Facebook interactivity was used but any type of social media can also be incorporated into the projection.

This is an exciting development for projection mapping and we should be seeing this featured in some great campaigns to come.

Interactive iPad ad for VGT

VGT (an association combating animal factories) in collaboration with Austrian ad agency Demner Merlicek & Bergmann, created an iAd for the iPad version of DATUM magazine.

In the iAd you could see a young lady wearing a fur coat. When the iPad user would want to continue browsing by making the finger-wipe movement he would find that every finger-wipe would leave behind blood stains on the fur. The more he tried, the more blood would appear.