Check out this fairly new digital campaign BMW just launched. The idea and presentation looked good, the game-play seemed kind of generic, they should have thought that through a little bit more, but the integration into Facebook was a great touch. I’d like to see more digital implementations like this in the states – it caught me off-guard to find out that this campaign launched in South Africa, who would have thought?!

Here is a little more about the program:

Advertising the new BMW 1 Series, iLogic allowed consumers to engage with the brand in a new, exciting way. Keeping in mind that unmatched innovation is always part of the BMW driving experience, iLogic developed Interactive Video Projections. Full activation on the ground took place over eight nights in major cities across South Africa. Locations were vibey, high-traffic main streets. Through a high powered, HD projector, iLogic projected an interactive racing game onto buildings and scaffoldings (Screen measuring 108m2). Consumers engaged in real time, while having serious fun with new technology and the brand!

Everyone is saying that QR Codes and this type of technology will disappear in the next few years due to usability experience – who wants to download a QR scanner just to shoot a magazine and be sent to a website? That’s not the case within this research.

Mobile action codes are getting harder to miss in magazines. That trend is documented by Nellymoser, a mobile marketing firm that supports brands and publishers’ QR campaigns. The firm has a new report out that says that in all of 2011, nearly 4,500 codes appeared in ad and editorial pages in the top 100 titles.Women’s magazines were the biggest users of QR codes in 2011. The biggest was InStyle at No. 1 with 141 codes. It was followed by ESPN The Magazine (136), People (136), Self (126) and Entertainment Weekly (123).

The occurrence of such quick-response codes (a broad term encompassing QR codes, Microsoft Tags, SnapTags and others) grew sharply over the year, mostly driven by ad pages. Put another way, 8 percent of magazine ad pages in December contained codes, up from 3.6 percent of magazine ad pages containing codes in January.

Among brands, nearly 40 percent of the codes came from the beauty, home and fashion industries, led by John Frieda (82), L’Oréal (79), Cuisinart (74), Garnier (72) and Revlon (67).

Earlier research into 2-D barcodes in magazines has shown this relatively new technology is starting to catch on with readers. Still, there’s room for improvement among its users. While readers increasingly understand what the funny interactive symbols are for, the codes get better results when they describe what benefit the user gets after scanning them, whether it be free content or a coupon, according to Roger Matus executive vp of Nellymoser. Still, one-third of those than ran in 2011 didn’t include that information.

Nellymoser has also found that the more codes an individual magazine issue contains, the higher the response rate. Yet, one-fifth of the magazines it studied accounted for nearly half the QR codes that ran in the fourth quarter, suggesting there might be an opportunity for others to step up their frequency.

“The more codes that are in a single publication, the higher the scan rate for the single publication,” Matus said. “We have found this again and again. People get trained once, and they have their phones out, and it becomes part of the process.”

For the survey, the firm looked at all print-to-mobile action codes that were printed in the pages of the top 100 magazines by circulation, excluding membership-based and regional titles.

In summary, the technology and strategies behind QR codes will evolve and as more and more digital media vendors begin to dive deeper within this technology and develop engaging experiences we might just be in the infancy stage of mobile domination where QRs may be a main player. Only time can tell.

References: Adweek

Reblogged from nancyrubin:

Hoottle provides people with the ability to share cool content, earn points, win free stuff, and help make the world a better place! The idea behind the hoottle points system was to create a universal gaming currency that would allow people to obtain merchandise, prizes, and various  items for free by being an active hootle participant,  while simultaneously contributing to the overall notion of giving back to those who are less fortunate. As each hoottle member enjoys their personal user experience, …

Seems to be like a Tumblr site with gamification opportunities. Anyone on this yet? What are your thoughts?

Super Bowl XLVI advertising teasers keep flowing in. Now we can add Kia and Bridgestone to the mix—and they’re bringing a pile of celebrities with them.

First up is the Kia spot, “Drive the Dream,” from David&Goliath (and Noam Murro, who also directed last year’s Kia Super Bowl spot). Kia goes to such great lengths to describe the 60-second ad in the press release that you wonder why they didn’t just put it on YouTube. We won’t spoil it by revealing the exact plot, but the ad does feature all of the following elements: a woman sprinkled with fairy dust, a man sprinkled with even more fairy dust, a Fabio-like hunk (who is apparently not actually Fabio), Mötley Crüe, Adriana Lima, UFC fighter Chuck Liddell, champion bull rider Judd Leffew, an “extreme dream sequence,” thousands of bikini-clad fans, bursts of flames and fireworks, a pair of lumberjacks sawing a massive sandwich, and a Snow White Pearl Optima Limited. The full ad will start airing in cinemas next Thursday, Feb. 2, with an extended version breaking the same day on YouTube. In the meantime, Kia will run the 15-second teaser ad below, starring Lima, on TV and in cinemas beginning Friday.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

Bridgestone’s spot, from The Richards Group, will humorously reveal how it plans to change the world of sports with a new football, basketball, bowling ball and puck made from the same materials and technology as Bridgestone tires. There’s all manner of teasers leading up to the spot, which will star Tim Duncan, Deion Sanders, Steve Nash and Troy Aikman, among other athletes. In a bit of inspired casting, it will also feature Jerry Lambert—aka, Kevin Butler from the PlayStation campaign, as a Bridgestone scientist. He’ll probably steal the show. See that teaser after the jump.

SOURCE:  Tim Nudd

Working with Prius is always fun, because you pretty much have to do a little out of the box thinking. Its not as sexy as the Camry or acquires the history and reputation as the Corolla, but it does have the Hybrid Technology and all the perks that come with that – fuel efficiency, financial benefits and definitely eco-friendly. The only hurdle was “how do you speak to the audience?” “What visuals can you use to help support and what kind of story can we put together that will tie that all up?” In this post I will show you what finally got approved and went live in the latter part of 2011.The concept that the client gravitated towards, had a real simple idea and message “New Way of Thinking” – this spoke to our target in a number of ways. First, our target market looks for style, power and reliability when choosing a new vehicle. They also want to ensure that whatever car they ultimately purchase – they receive the “ooooh…” factor from their friends and family – who doesn’t want that? Second, they want a car that has a proven reputation especially in the area of handling and performance. Lastly, when you look at a Prius it does not look roomy at all, and space was important, so instantly your mind shuts down not giving the Prius a second thought – not knowing that that the Prius does have a lot of, not only head room, but leg space as well.

One point that stood out though was that the target market were very interested in making the world greener, but not in the area of their automobile – with that it was a clear indication that we needed to create a campaign focused on telling our audience that they need a new way of thinking when it comes to automobiles.

We wanted to keep the banner clean as well as fresh (that is how the background color was chosen) and focus on the product as well as the messaging on-hand rather than gunking up the banner with unnecessary imagery. We used the image of a tall adult male to support the fact that the Prius has room, we then concepted the story of what happens when you change the your way of thinking because its only then when you open the doors for endless possibilities. The tree ties back to living green and the money represents the savings opportunities.

Its a simple message with a whole ‘lotta goals that we tried to convey in a 40kb, 15 sec banner ad. Mission Accomplished. Take a look at the screenshots:

There’s an app for that… Well, at least there is just about to be, with the impending launch of “Crash Corsage“, a new mobile app designed to help you find and crash weddings where ever you are, while adding a gamification layer so you can compete to be the world’s best wedding crasher.

The app crawls wedding directory sites from around the world, summarises key information on upcoming weddings, including intimate details about the couple to help with your cover story, and then aggregates them by location in the app. Once you’re in, you’ll have to check-in to claim points for crashing a wedding, then you can complete specific wedding challenges to earn more points, helping you compete on the global leader board… Very funny, let the crashing begin…

Posted by: Aden Hepburn

Graphic designers are, by and large selfish and spoiled. They stubbornly control and individually design things that are generally smaller than them, perfecting to a level appreciated only by people like them. They don’t share and play well with others
- Wayne Hunt

In search for a pair of everyday gloves for the cold season, I was looking at a few options – a couple REI gloves, Hard Wear and Seirus made the list. Then I tried on the North Face E-Tips. Though they weren’t as warm as the other gloves they definitely were more compact and flexible, works as a great liner as well under my snowboard gloves.

The E-Tips compared to the other gloves has the Xstatic fingercaps technology which fit perfectly over my fingers and made the use of my technological device a very close-to-real experience. The E-tip gloves also include silicone grip patterns on the palms which definitely gives additional gripping power. Though the price was $40 (the most I’ve ever paid for a pair of liner gloves) it was well worth it.

Japan Institute of Science and Technology was on something when coming up with this concept. If you guys remember the game Wipe-Out you will definitely love this video. Check it out. Here is a screenshot of the original game for reference.

Checking out my email this morning I found this cool new iPhone toy for all my iPhone lovers. There is definitely no shortage of iPhone apps out there to let you shoot retro-style movies, but the medium is the message — why not do it for real?

Lomography’s new Smartphone Holder will let you get 35mm LomoKino movies directly onto your phone with minimal fuss, attaching to the separate LomoKinoScope viewer so that you can quite literally film the film yourself. Transferring LomoKino movies to digital was previously a matter of painstakingly scanning frame-by-frame, but now the only thing you have to worry about is getting the film developed. The Smartphone Holder is available in the online and retail Lomography stores for $24.90 — you can see what the results look like below.