My new favourite ads for Panda Cheese, which feature a panda with a few anger-management issues. Never realised quite how vindictive the buggers could get.

via BoingBoing

This ‘can you head it in the net?’ challenge for AT&T is the first time I’ve seen an AR game hosted within a banner. And whilst it’s nicely executed, the copy is dreadful. It sounds like it was written by someone who has never played or seen football in their lives, and then translated it into English via Babelfish. Which is a bit of a shame really.

(By the way, the reason that there’s a picture of Robbie Fowler at the top is because he was my footballing idol when I was at school – a true goal machine with despicably greasy hair.)

Yet another annoyingly simple but brilliant idea. This time it’s for a Skoda ad airing in Poland, where apparently they have more than one TV station. With advertising and everything. Who’d have thunk it?

Anyway, the ad takes a product benefit – a remote controlled boot (yawn) – and brings it to life in a clever and (slightly) interactive way. I’m guessing the media placement was fairly pricey, but the end result is pretty impactful.

Probably the nicest and most heart-warming  Flash Mob I’ve ever seen:

On May 5th it’s Mukhtar’s, a bus-driver in Copenhagen, Birthday. In 2010 he had no idea that a large group of people had planned to celebrate him…

Must.

Not.

Cry…

Great (and ballsy) idea for Heineken, who persuaded loads of girlfriends, bosses and friends of football fans in Italy to play a little trick on them.

The set-up was that instead of watching the Champions League tie between Real Madrid and AC Milan, the poor unsuspecting bastards were dragged along to an event which mixed poetry with classical music. If they’d chucked in ballet as well it could’ve been a genuine contender for The Seventh Circle of Hell.

Over 1,000 unlucky souls were ensnared and this is what happened…

This stunt fits perfectly under the ‘made to entertain’ positioning, and the results were really impressive. Not sure if any of the girlfriends got dumped later in the evening though.

Via Digital Buzz Blog.

Before Micro Machines invaded every playground in the land, I was in a very happy monogamous marriage with Matchbox.  I had no need to look at the brasher, more American Hot Wheels cars, and the one time that I did do the dirty was with a French mistress called Majorette. So that was okay.

But now Hot Wheels are trying to lure me in with a series of interactive videos that make good use of YouTube annotations. It’s great to see this technology being used in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the fun, so for the time being, I’m shacking up with the Americans.

Via Digital Buzz.

The strange thing about this ad from 1977 is that I used to have a Casio Databank watch when I was about 10 and I’m pretty sure it claimed to have a memory of about 16k. And that was in about 1989.

I know a few people who still feel this way:

See some more here on Sad and Useless.

Saw this in my local Co-op supermarket last night. Apologies for the lack of clarity, but the the checkout girl was transmitting heavy-duty death stares in my direction.

Anyway, some poor buggers will have probably written and designed a promo to go in that specific slot (A4-sized apparently), only for the local store manager to ignore/forget to put in place. How very depressing.

Really cool digital idea from Lean Mean Fighting Machine, which used a silent disco to showcase the sound quality of the latest Samsung Beat DJ phone. Here’s how it worked:

On 7 July 2009, 100 individuals from across Europe competed in The Last Call, a 24-hour silent-disco contest, dancing to a non-stop playlist on their Beat DJ. If they received a call or a text, they were out. If they stayed in, they had the chance to win €10,000.

The contest was broadcast online for the full 24 hours. Visitors to the site could contribute to the competition playlist, upload video or images to be displayed live at the venue, and send in messages of support or distraction with Twitter.

And here’s what happened…

I love the fact that they’ve taken the key product message and turned it into a fun, interactive, completely on-brand event that probably didn’t even cost that much. I just wish that more clients would buy into this kind of thing…

Other people’s relationships are always good value for a bit of armchair voyeurism, especially when it gives you an insight into how the other half thinks. And that’s why I love this campaign for a the Japanese condom manufacturer Sagami (spotted by the ever-watchful Natalie).

The campaign was called Love Distance and there’s a video explaining it all here. But in short, the basic problem was that it’s hard to advertise condoms in Japan, which sounds slightly unbelievable given the extreme masochism involved in half of their gameshows. Anyway, Sagami produce the world’s thinnest condom (0.02mm in case you’re interested), and stuck an ad in a paper looking for genuine long-distance lovers.

They found a couple and then streamed 24/7 videos of them as they travelled the 1,000km between their homes. And this is where the clever bit kicks in. Using a beautifully new-media terminology called ‘blind branded entertainment‘, there was never any mention of who was behind the site or what it was supposed to be advertising.

When users logged on, they could only access either the male or the female site (depending on their gender). There were polls, webcams, blogs etc. all dedicated to and contributed to by one gender only. And it wasn’t until the couple actually met that all was revealed.

Running for about a month, it was quite a long campaign, but I think it was executed so beautifully that it doesn’t really matter. I have no idea about how successful it was in terms of stats, posts, dwell times, interactions, PR coverage etc. but I hope it did well.