IKEA Everday Heros

Came across the latest online offering from IKEA today and it is very cool. The interface lets you choose for 7 different IKEA boxes and once one is selected you use a slider to open the box. An entire room and scene unfolds from the box like an amazing Xmas card. Pull one more slider and the scene comes to life. It is a very unique visual and make you want to open all of the boxes to see the effect and find out what is inside.

Mobil Flash finally goes mainstream

Verizon wireless has announced that four of its upcoming cell phones will support Adobe's mobil version of Flash - "Flash Light". Flash Light opens the doors for custom development and natural mobil extensions for existing content services while removing the burdens and limited functionality of traditional mobile platforms. Verizon is the first U.S. carrier to endorse Flash content on their cell phones in the hopes that this move will encourage richer, more interactive content development. The concern is that it will only create a flood of repurposed pre-existing Flash and Shockwave games.

Walmart goes rich (media)

Shopping mega-giant Walmart has re-designed their website in the hopes of boosting their e-commerce sales. The new site sports better browsing with redesign navigation and menus and a new visual design with larger images, ideas, and learn more peel aways. I look at the site and can't help but think they re-designed the site trying to get as close to target.com without getting sued but in the end the new site isn't nearly as clean or well designed. Many site elements like the main search module land awkwardly on the page and disrupt your eye line. The muted pastel colors feel off brand and almost like it should be for a baby site. I am admittedly not a Walmart shopper so maybe this site shouldn't appeal to me but I would expected more from a company with such deep pockets.

GMC Arabia commands respect

ARC Worldwide Dubai has launched a site for GMC Arabia promoting the new Yukon. The site supports an computer animated TV commercial where robots are in awe of the Yukon. The lets you go inside of the robots and see the new Yukon through their eyes. The site is interesting but it feels like they could have had a lot more fun and been more imaginative this the content.

Audi - designed to thrill

Saw these new print ads for Audi today for their "designed to thrill" campaign and thought they were well done.

Bentley tells it like it is

I have no idea if this ad is real or not but I saw this ad for Bentley today and loved it. Kind of says it all with no words at all. If anyone knows more about it, if it is real or who did please post in the comments and let us all know.

Making HP's "Hands"

I'm a huge fan of HP's "The Computer is Personal Again" campaign which features celebrities speaking about their computers using only hand gestures. I think the brilliance as each commercial is a visual autobiography that slowly reveals their identity through the items on their computer without ever showing their face or going the usual route of cashing in this celebrity. The spots were conceived by Goodby, Silverstein and Partners and created by Motion Theory who has now posted some very interesting making of details and video.

The future of search engines?

Saw this new search engine yesterday called Ms. Dewey and thought it was worth mentioning. It is nothing new but is a sassy ad fun take on a very boring category. No idea who did it so if anyone has info please post it in the comments.

Paint the town followup

Back in the beginning of August I wrote out the new SONY Bravia commercial which looked amazing. They have now completed the commercial and it is every bit as amazing I thought it would be. It is posted here so check it out.

'Beer Cannon' misses the mark

For years I have been talking about the fact that viral sensation Subservient Chicken was a failure because it generated a lot of clicks but no sales for Burger King. It would seem that we are doomed to repeat the sins of the past as I recently saw where Milwaukee's Best recently launched a YouTube video that got 3 million hits and 197 blog mentions and no lift in sales. The piece called "Beer Cannon" shows cans of Milwaukee's Best Light being fired out of a cannon to destroy china dishes, house plants and fruit. The video was launched early this summer on Miller's website but sat largely unnoticed until August when they began buying ads on YouTube. Sales of Milwaukee's Best fell 11% in supermarkets for the 52 weeks ended Sept. 9, according to Information Resources Inc., and sales of Best Light dropped 7.5%.

VISIONARY DESIGNERS - d'strict

I praised the work done on the unique Samsung SGH site and finally learned who created it. A design company out of Seoul Korea called d'strict. You look through the work that d'strict has created and you are struck with their clean designs and unique approach to interface design. Even their own site is one of the most original user experiences I have seen in a long time. I think we all could learn a lot from this kind of original thinking.

DiddyTV skips a beat

Burger King and Sean "Diddy" Combs to launch DiddyTV. It is a YouTube brand channel and for far it has fallen flat. The first video was posted last Saturday and showed Diddy in a Burger King ordering a Whopper, announcing that had been named "the king of music and fashion." He explained the "two kings" teamed up to launch DiddyTV. The welcome video was widely put down in the comments section with a lot of people making fun of him for "selling out" to Burger King. It has even spawned parody videos including one by popular YouTube contributor LisaNova where she hooks up with her fruit stand to launch LisaNovaTV. The Diddy video has received 700,000 view and the spoof by LisaNovaTV has 534,000.

I look at this and see the constant fact that content without a concept that resonates with consumers will not take you very far.

Cell phone simulcasting

Several companies have gambling that the next generation of broadcast networks will be seen on mobil phones and not TV's. They have developed a system to simulcast TV to cellphones. Verizon Wireless is expected to roll out Qualcomm's MediaFlo as soon as the first quarter of next year and some experts estimates it will have 4 million subscribers by the end of 2007. To try and give it eh best position for mass adoption, monthly fees are expected to be $10 to $15.

I think they have a big problem to overcome as I recently read that 63% of consumers would rather watch video on TV than on a mobile device. I would point to the recent failure of the UMD movie format on the Playstaion Portable to the fact that people do not always want to pay more for the same content on a smaller screen. Only time will tell who is right.

Army strong. Verbs dead.

McCann Worldgroup is going to replace the U.S. Army's tagline of 'Army of One' with "Army Strong" in a new series of ads that are going to break on November 9th. This tagline is the first work 10 months after McCann replaced Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnett. Eric Keshin, McCann Worldgroup's worldwide chief operating officer and regional director North America, denied reports the campaign was long in coming due to disagreement over strategy between the agency and the Army. He said McCann formally took over the account in the spring, and research and creative development took some time. Does anyone believe that? Does anyone else think that after 10 months they would have come up with a tagline that used a verb or something more impactful?

Sony re-launches PLAYB3YOND.com

Today Sony relaunched PLAYB3YOND.com to tease the upcoming release of the PS3. You arrive at the main page of the site to find a strange looking pattern that looks like pieces of the four symbols found on a Playstation controller. You soon realize that the pieces form a keyboard and only clicking them in the right order will trigger content to be displayed. Within hours of the site launch hordes of PS3 fans had tried millions of combinations and had figured out that each symbol corresponds to a letter and had lists of the codes needed to see the content.


Use this picture and then click on the symbols to spell any of these words and you will find video or info:
factorfive - all new 2 min Lair trailer
fire - Lair footage (shows Tauros? New monster)
fangs - Lair combat montage
king - Heavenly Sword wallpaper
nariko - Heavenly Sword wallpaper
andyserkis - Heavenly Sword TGS trailer
mayday - Warhawk wallpaper
dogfight - Warhawk video
machone - Warhawk music
tedprice - Resistance behind the scenes - MUSIC
chimera - Resistance wallpaper
nathanhale - Resistance behind the scenes - TECHNOLOGY
music - Genji soundtrack
heishi - Genji 2 wallpaper
evolutionstudios - video
dust - Motorstorm wallpaper
monumentvalley - Wallpaper

It is a testiment to the fact that if you have a product people wantthey will go to amazing lengths to get unqiue content and have an insider experience.

Yahoo! Time capsule

Yahoo has launched what it is calling the world's largest time capsule in history. Yahoo! is encouraging people to contribute personal photos, stories, thoughts, ideas, poems, prayers, home movies, music and art to an online anthropology project designed to celebrate and understand life and global culture in 2006. Anyone will be able to view and explore all submissions between October 10, when the time capsule opens, and November 8, when the time capsule closes. In addition to browsing the time capsule content, people can sort and compare the contributions by country, region, race, age, gender, etc. Once it is sealed the time capsule will return to Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. to be sealed and opened on the company's 25th anniversary in the year 2020. In addition, copies of the Yahoo! Time Capsule will be donated to the Smithsonian Institution's Folkways Recordings archives as well as to The National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico to be preserved, studied and shared with future generations.

Brawny Academy

Brawny papertowels and their agency Fallon are trying an interesting concept by shooting their own eight episode reality series which will play exclusively on their BrawnyAcademy.com. Unfortunately the show can be describes as a bad Survivor rip off as eight men, sent by their wives, will undergo training to become more thoughtful, more helpful and more romantic. Small parts of the show are funny and usually are thanks to the Brawny Man's over the top manly lines like "when i was clearing cougars from the camp this morning". Even though real drama does emerge in the end, I find it frustrating that they feel the best way they can appeal to their female target is to play the slovenly couch potatoe husband card.

The site has a very nice production value and does a good job to create an engaging wrapper for the content. I was intruiged by the "watch video fullscreen" option up until I clicked on it only to find that it was nothing more than a scaled up version of the regular video which did nothing but highlight the bad video compression. So see for yourself and let me know what you think.

Why is Discover Card running with scissors?

A friend of mine sent me a link today to the new Discover Card campaign that launched recently and asked for my opinion on the work. I took some time and watched the TV spots and spent some time with microsite. I have to admit that for me it is hard to be objective since I have friends that work at The Martin Agency who created the campaign and I came very close to working there a few months ago. But I had to be honest and say that I wasn't impressed.

The campaign which features possessed scissors waiting to cut up credit cards leaves consumers wondering what the point is. The payoff that Discover doesn't have the hassles of ordinary cards is a letdown that does nothing to seprerate them out of their fifth place position. It also seems to m that the scissors actually portray a negative message about the credit card category.

The microsite works to try and extend the campaign but it isn't nearly as imaginative as I would have expected given the material they are working from. The heart of the site is a little to reminiscent of the IKEA matrix style microsite of about a year ago. You can spin around to four different positions and learn about a cardmember at each stop. The whole experience is very passive and you find yourself reading and watching rather than interacting with the site elements. The only redeeming content is under the "Have some fun" section where you can see "outakes" from the commercials.

300 - The movie

I don't usually put much faith in movie previews anymore but the new trailer for 300 caught my interest as it look to be a visual feast of cinematograhy and effects. I can only hope does not become another version of "The Cell" or "Sin City" where they spent so much time of those two areas that they forgot to write a story anyone cared about.

300 is based on the epic graphic novel by Frank Miller and is a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas and 300 Spartans fought to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army. Facing insurmountable odds, their valor and sacrifice inspire all of Greece to unite against their Persian enemy, drawing a line in the sand for democracy. The entire process of creating this visual treat is documented in their blog where you can get all the details your heart desires.

Please go to New Orleans

I had the chance two weeks ago to visit New Orleans for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. I have seen the footage on CNN and there is no video that can begin to give you an idea of the massive extent of the devastation. I drove through the lower 9th ward and you drive for miles with nothing but destruction.

But in the midst of it all you see the locals trying to bring the city back and rebuild. I applaud the senior management at Starwood who decided who hold our conference there and help the local economy. I would beg everyone who is planning an offsite conference get together or and business outing to have it in New Orleans. Please help this city and the wonderful people who are there day after day trying facing down this unbelievable task.

Carlos Polo

Came across this site today for Spanish designer Carlos Polo. The site design is different and interesting as it lets you literally walk through his body of work and experience. The experience works for me even though I don't read Spanish and have no idea about the site says.

Will trade web site for PS3

That isn't a typo. You read it right. I want to see what his blog can do and have decided to skip the all night sleep out line in front of Best Buy and put my talents to work.

You
- deliver me 1 U.S. premium Playstation 3 console (the one with HDMI) before midnight on December 31, 2006

I will
- have my lawyer draft a contract making this a legal agreement. The agreement will outline the scope of work and all other aspects of the site development process. The document will be signed and witnessed by both parties.
- create original information architecture, visual design and production of web site consisting of 25 HTML or 20 Flash pages
- create appropriate metadata to get your list listed on search engines
- this package does not include any web hosting or set-up, domain name registration, email configuration or anything else but the design and production of your web site.

The price tag of the PS3 may be high, a project like this would normally cost my clients between $10,000 and $15,000 and you can get it for just $600. I am only going to offer this to one person or company and it is first come first served. I will keep all names in the order they are submitted so if the someone does not keep up their end of the deal I will make the offer to the next person on the list. Any questions about any of this post them in the comments and if you want to take me up on the deal email me now.

Apple integrated advertising

I saw Apple's new ad units tonight that support their new iPod Nano TV campaign. They are a fantastic example of great integrated advertising that lets the consumer interact with the advertising. The ad units play a short clip of the commercial followed by allowing you to choose you color iPod and recreate the commercial by making your own light art. The ad unit has a black background like the commercials and your cursor control the Nano which you can move around leaving a trail of colored light. The only thing I would have loved to have added was the music from the commercials. I found them on c|net if you want to check them out for yourself.