S-W-H

Came across the site for an agency called S-W-H today and it was surprisingly cool. The home page is an interesting search engine where you start to type in work and get AJAX style results drawn from their portfolio. It is something I have never seen before in an agency site. The upside is that it makes you want to explore the content and see what results come back but the downside is that browsing content this way is hit and miss. The rest of the site is also filled with unique information design and I especially liked the designs of the people and awards.

Disney Customized Maps

There are times when you wish Disney would push the envelope in their films as much as they do in their parks and guest experience. I recently saw they have interactive customizable maps where you can pull up maps of all of their parks, pick the highlights you want to see then Disney will send you custom printed park maps based on your selections.

Visa Signature Living

I saw today that AKQA has put out a new site for Visa called Visa Signature Living to launch their new line of luxury rewards cards. The site is created around what is supposed to be the ultimate to-do list for your life. The list includes everything from "go heli-skiing" to "kiss the Blarney Stone". The site is well executed enough and provides just enough production value and video to keep you engaged but when you scratch below the surface you start to see the problem with the concept.

Visa is going after the aspiration traveler who likes to go on trips that are slightly beyond their normal means. It is a lucrative target that a lot of companies are trying to hit. The problem here is that this concept just doesn't deliver because there is nothing Visa can own that will make this card distinct in almost all of the content. When you go to "kiss the Blarney stone" all you get is a short history of the stone and that is it. A few of the entries to have travel packages associated with them but none of them seemed to provide anything I probably couldn't do on my own.

One thing this consumer target craves is insider access and the feeling of being special. Where is that access or feeling? Why couldn't I just book almost any of these things with any credit card? For online advertising to be a success it has to marry a resonant creative concept with a compelling and actionable hook. Sad to say there is just no good hook here

Bud.tv staggers out of the gate

It seems that the bud.tv which I wrote about earlier this month, has run into some problems. Attorneys generals of 21 states are attacking the site for being too easy for people below the legal drinking age to access the site. They sent a "strongly worded letter" to Budweiser detailing their problems with the fact that multiple users can use a single log-in and content can be downloaded and passed around. I find it funny since it was a pain in the ass for me access the site and other seems to agree. Last week Ad Age published an article called "Bud.tv's Walled Beer Garden" which came to the same conclusion. This puts Budweiser in a difficult position since one group in bashing them for making it too hard to get in and another one is bashing them for making it too easy.

Wrigley's goes Wii

We all saw where Burger King created games exclusively for the Xbox 360 this past holiday season, but the Wrigley candy company has made an interesting play for users of Nintendo's new Wii console. They have launched wii.candystand.com which links its adver-gaming site candystand.com to the game console through the Wii browser. The most interesting things as that they did it without any contact with Nintendo. I haven't had the chance to experience a Wii yet (Chris I am look at you here buddy) so I would love to hear from anyone who been able to experience this site through the Wii browser to see if it is a compelling experience.

MINI Turbovision

I didn't start writing tonight with any intention of this turning into a MINI love-a-thon but I got a link to MINI's new home page inset called TURBOVISION and I was too good not to share. It is a very well produced and very funny Flash inset that introduces the two new Mini Cooper models through the use of old school blue and red 3D glasses. Plus anything that makes fun of 20 sided dice and Star Trek is just greatness.

MINI Hammer & Coop

Looking like to took inspiration from it's parent company BMW and the characters in the Beasty Boys "Sabotage" music video, Mini USA has launched a multi-channel campaign that follows the adventures of a character named Hammer and his a Brit-speaking Mini sidekick named Coop.

The campaign first broke in a teaser movie trailer that appeared to be promoting the "Hammer & Coop" action film which was shown in 1,000 theaters earlier this month and will expand to 1,900 theaters through March. The centerpiece of the campaign is a series of short online films directed by Todd Phillips of "Old School" fame but is also using various nontraditional media like 15-second video-on-demand spots for mobile handsets, "Find Coop" contests in Second Life, a "Hammer & Coop" MySpace page, iPod video downloads and a red-carpet movie-premier-type event in here in New York at Union Square.

HammerAndCoop.com features the short films, and action name generator and a few standard extras like wallpapers and screensavers. Right now only two of the short films have been posted to the site but they are there are funny though clearly male centric. It will be interesting to see how the films progress and if it catches on with the broader public.

StephenGates.com 2 - Alpha 0.1

So I am going to do something I have never done before and let you become part of my process in designing and creating a StephenGates.com 2.0 This is a very, very early alpha that I have develop over the next few months. The site has been in development for about a year now but it has been slow going since I can only work on it in my free time and there isn't much of that. Something will look familiar but a lot of it is brand new. 75% of the time has been spent on the Actionscripting as everything has been written or re-written from the ground up in Actionscript 2. This coding has created a 150k core site that dynamically creates the portfolio section in three templates through data arrays and XML feeds. The other 25% of the time has been spent completely re-doing all the site content which is formidable since this new version has 178 case studies and I am trying to add as much video of the sites in action as possible. I will be adding the design layers and other sections on top of this new core over the next few months so feel free to give me any comments or feedback and check back now and then to see the progress.

Lincoln MyDream = Newsmap interface ripoff?

I was scanning through AdCritic.com today not seeing anything new or interesting until I saw a screenshot that got my full attention. Lincoln and their interactive agency Kirt Gunn & Associates with Y&R/New York and Wunderman/Detroit have create MyDream.tv, an online social network built around 25 documentary short films that depict real people bringing lifelong goals—like building a dream house, climbing a mountain or making an independent film—to life. It wasn't the concept that caught my attention but the interface design. I would say that the reasonable person would find a striking similarity between the interface designs of Lincoln's MyDream and Marumushi.com Newsmap which I wrote about earlier this year. While I understand using other sites as inspiration, this seems to be blurring that line a little too much.

JEEP teams up with Marvel for Patriot launch

So in their latest attempt to boost their brand, Jeep has teamed up with Marvel comics and Organic to create the online campaign that will support BBDO's launch campaign for the new Patriot SUV. The site has an interesting take on user generated content where users go to the site and they help shape the plot of a 20-page comic-in-progress (starring the car, of course) by submitting their comments and story ideas in the form of written text, digital photos or scanned artwork. The best ideas are then incorporated into the evolving story by Marvel artist Bing Cansino.

The site has an interesting interface where all 20 pages are laid out next to each other and you can page through the work so far. On comics pages see the artwork in pencil, ink and color layers. It is interesting that in terms of automotive advertising, the car does take the back seat to the comic content. It will be interesting to see if this take on user generated content works and can help create a successful launch across a wide demographic.

Fan Boys

I am a Star Wars fan and a friend of mine sent me this trailer for the movie Fan Boys on YouTube tonight. For the first time in a long time, a trailer made me laught out loud.

Did Google forget how to spell?

Everyone knows that Google will alter the look of their logo to celebrate different events and holidays but the one they ran today for Valentine's Day was just confusing. Does anyone else think it looks like Goooe?

AYou Fashion

I saw this site today for AYou fashion out of Asia. I have no idea what it says but the interactive hand painted interface is nice.

Sprint decides screwing up their brand isn't enough

I used to keep a large red poster in my office that simply read "Good advertising goes to heaven. Bad advertising goes everywhere.". I didn't keep it there so clients would think I was a brooding creative but so my art directors and I would not get numbed by the volume of bad design and advertising we see everyday. It is easy for the best of us to let all of the junk mail, billboards, spam, commercials ad units join into a white noise of bad ideas and advertising. When that happens it takes a truly horrible ad to snap you out of the haze.

I snapped out of that haze tonight when I saw the latest TV commercial from Sprint. I wanted very badly to be able to include it in this posting but wasn't able to find it anywhere so I will have to do my best to describe it to you.

The spot promotes the new project (red) RAZR and is narrated by Sprint's spokesman Ron Livingston of Office Space fame. For those of you who don't know, rock star Bono launched a new global brand, Product Red, with partners like Apple, AmEx, Converse, Armani and more with a share of profits from the sale of special items going to the fight against Aids in Africa. The first half of the spot has Ron holding the RAZR flanked by four photos of withered Afr can children explaining that the a portion of the RAZR price will help African children. This part of the spot is as uninspired and forgettable as the rest of their recent advertising but it is the second half that left me speechless. The four photos of the African children flip over to become four slick products shots of the RAZR. Lights start flashing and music starts playing. Ron looks directly into the camera and says "and if that isn't enough you get a really cool red phone."

I am sure that the delivery leaves a lot to be desired here but to boil it down, Sprint has decided that their customers are so shallow and self-centered there is a good chance they would rather care that the phone is red rather than helping children with AIDS.

Did I miss a memo? Did I have a stroke and no one told me? When the advertising industry decide that insulting their customers is a good idea? Maybe it is that I saw this ad so shortly after the kissing mechanics Superbowl Snickers ad that showed two auto mechanics accidentally kissing while eating the same candy bar and then ripping out some chest hair to do something “manly.”. How can Snickers watch that ad and not think that Joe small-brain male American would not be turned off by the sight of two men kissing? And then how did they think that gay Americans wouldn't be pissed off at having that act be portrayed in such a negative light? They managed to piss off all of their customers - so who are they trying to sell to?

I love the advertising that been created for project(red) and all of the products produced by all of their other commercial partners. This commercial is an insult to product (red) and any consumer with a pulse.

What the hell went wrong with Saturn?

I saw the headlines in the advertising trades this week announcing that Saturn had moved their account to Deutsch Los Angeles from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. I used to oversee all the interactive work for Subaru so I watched all the automotive advertising with special interest. Saturn has been able to turn a brand that had the best advertising in the industry into one that has become painfully forgettable. Their TV spot with everyone in the neighborhood driving cardboard boxes is still one of the best automotive spots I can remember. I think AdAge said it best when they accused Saturn of losing it's soul a few months back. I even have to agree with Bob Garfield when he said "there hardly seems to be another explanation, other than maybe absolute surrender to the client's worst instincts, to shed light on why an agency of this caliber would have produced a generic TV commercial."

We can all guess what went horribly wrong but I think Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has consistently does some of the best work in the business so I am glad to see Saturn leave so they doesn't drag this agency down. For me it all goes back to one core truth of advertising - great work is only possible with great clients.

Flash Embedding Cage Match

I have to hand it to the guys at A List Apart because it is the only site that has been able to remain as one my my favorite sites for years. They have another fantastic article this month from Bobby van der Sluis called 'Flash Embedding Cage Match'. The article takes an in-depth look at the complexities and subtleties of embedding Flash content and examines the most popular embedding methods to see how good they really are. I would recommend it as a must read for any beginner to sub-guru level Flash developers out there. In addition to the article van der Sluis has also create a Flash embed test suite that is a sprawling documentation of all the different operating systems, browsers and embed methods.

STAGR

I came across STAGR today and thought it was worth passing on. The site let's create your own t-shirts which isn't anything new but it does it better than any other site I have seen. Unlike their compeition, STAGR uses a Flash interface that really lets you customize almost every aspect of the artwork you are putting on your clothes. You start by uploading your own art, using some of theirs or browse their themed galleries for inspiration. From there you can scale layer, rotate, flip, color and customize to your hearts content. For me as a designer this is the kind of control I have been looking for. Now if I can just convince them to add 4XL tall to take care of the 6'4" guys like me - short people have all the fun.

Yahoo! Pipes

Today Yahoo! launches a new service called Pipes. It is a interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual editor. The name pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers chain simple utilities together on the command line. The goal is to let the user create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together. Each Pipe consists of two or more modules, each of which performs a single, specific task. For example, the Fetch module will retrieve a feed URL, while the Sort module will re-order a feed based on criteria you provide. Once you have built your pipe you can save it and share it the world.

Bud.tv

Earlier this week Budweiser quietly launched their new video site call Bud.tv. Even though this site was launched without a huge amount of fanfare it could turn out to be one of the biggest this year because Anheuser-Busch has said it will spend over $30 million this year on this online video network.

The site features short films, commercials, trailers, original content and commercials for network content. It is an impressive range and depth for a site launch and it does look like Bud is serious about making this a legitimate video channel. The catch is that in keeping with the advertising many of the videos seem to target the Jackass style 25 year old male sense of humor.

AXE Dirty Rolling

Firstborn Multimedia is at it again. They have launched a microsite to support the new AXE TV campaign featuring a couple rolling around the city picking up random stuff. The site lets you control the couple rolling around the city and more stuff you roll over the higher your score.

Mini interactive billboards

I was on my way through New York City today and something caught my eye. Mini has launched new interactive billboards to support their new "Motorby" campaign. They have put a billboard in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami.

As with so much of the Mini advertising, they are really in touch with their target market. The billboards are user-triggered by a personalized key fob that contacts the billboard database, which then transmits a personal message to the driver, as in "Hi Jim, great day to be a lawyer." Drivers signed up for the program this month by answering a questions like telling your pet name for their Mini or their profession.

Dofus - Flash MMORPG

I saw this for the first time a little over a year ago at MAX but I throught I would post it in case you hadn't experience it yet. Dofus is a Adobe Flash based massively multiplayer online roll playing game (MMORPG) and was created by Akama Studios in France. You download the game and run it through your browser so the bulk of the assets run locally and it connects to the server to create the community. The art and amount of work is impressive and worth checking out.

New-age sweatshops

Lately everyone has been focused on Second Life and how this virtual world can create results here in the real world. I read an interesting article today that takes the virtual and real world interaction to a new level.

A new breed of sweatshop has recently emerged in Asia. Workers play online games like World of Warcraft for hours on end to gather virtual in-game content and create high level characters that can be sold for real world cash on sites like eBay. The buyers are affluent online gamers who lack the time or patience to work their way up to the higher levels are willing to pay to have other people play the early rounds for them. This is a growing trend because these gamers pay big money as characters easily run into the thousands of dollars for high level characters. Gaming companies have now started to outlaw these behaviors and Blizzard, the company who create World of Warcraft, recently banned over 300 accounts which were purchased online.

For me it is fascinating that an entire industry has been created because American teenagers and gamers have decided that even having to work at anything, even if it is something fun like a video game is too much to ask.

Become an M&M

I love M&M's. I love their advertising. Two two favorite TV spots are the one with red, yellow and Darth Vader to launch M&M's dark and the one with a guy pounding on the vending machine at a motel which cuts to red hanging on for dear life in the machine. Their genius is that they are simple, funny, resonant and memorable.

Their newest commercial features hundreds of unique M&M's and pas off with the URL www.becomeanMM.com. The site lets you create you own custom M&M which you can then download or save to use in games, postcards, screensver and more. It has a surprising amounts of options and is as deep as any character creator you would find in your favorite video game. All the options leads to a lot of time exploring all the options. Now if I could only order a figure of my creation.

Etsy

One of my co-workers turned me on to a site called Etsy today. At first glance it doesn't look like anything special since it is a marketplace for handmade products with a clean but un-remarkable home page. But once you dig into the site you find there are multiple ways to navigate through the content and there are a lot of really interesting interfaces. My favorite are:

Treasury - This section uses the concept of community browsing which I have been dying to do for a client for years. You can see the cursors of the other members as they browse through the section of items that have been picked by members.

Colors - You can explore products by choosing colors you like and it will return products to match.

Geolocator - This isn't anything new but it is very well done. You can explore the map, find an area of interest and click to see merchants in that area.

Time Machine - An interesting spiral interface that lets you move through products that have ben recently listed.

Connections - A visual representation of a relational database of vendors and the people they like best.