Check out the JellyBeats, which are like jellyfish you can alternately identify with and fantasize about eating. Each is themed with a genre of music (folk, easy listening, acid house -- wouldn't it be funny if that whistle was a pacifier?) and comes equipped with its own playlist.
The JellyBeats represent Aardman and Digital Outlook's attempts to cash in on the 14-18-year-old crowd. They launched on Bebo last week. Individual JellyBeats come with film shorts, downloads, special dances and lingo. And they're all embeddable on other social networks. ('Cause if you can't be everywhere at once, you FAIL.)
For interior design site mydeco, TAMBA put together a swanky Facebook app for all the users that are getting too old to cash in on their .edu cachet.
The My Dinner Party widget enables users to create a "dream dinner party" with famous and fictional characters, as well as actual friends. (Then again, everybody's equally actual and fictional when they can all appear on your Top 8. Which is also an app!)
And because no inet offering is worth anything unless it comes with opportunities for validation, friends can change seating arrangements, organize private fetes and rate the dinner parties they attended. How fancy. These days, any plebe can play blue-blood. Who'd've guessed that Wonderland would be so ... democratic?
Imagine The Warriors took place in present-day Manhattan. But replace the vicious gangs with refugees from Flashdance.
Before you virtually bitchslap us and go, "Why would we EVER do that?!", be forewarned: somebody already has.
Can -- you -- dig -- it?
The client: MTV.
Rehab, the cats behind Gap's Sound of Color effort, just produced a series of videos for Kenneth Cole's most current campaign "We All Walk in Different Shoes," put together by Kenneth Cole's in-house creative crew.
As always with Kenneth Cole, the campaign exploits the language of fashion to raise awareness for popular social issues. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) At left is the creative for Regan Hofmann's HIV video. See other shorts -- including stories about a Sikh businessman and a duo of Israeli and Palestinian film directors -- at KennethCole.com/Thinkers.
And here's the campaign blog, Awearness, which generated winces all around with the all-caps tagline, "To be aware is more important than what you wear."
We dig Rehab's audio/visual spin on an old Kenneth Cole agenda. But we can't say we're crazy about using tacky puns like "Awearness" to generate trendy cause mojo.
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While we're not sure what making a bed has to do with a hospital's ability to successfully perform a hip replacement or being ranked tops among all hospital responding to a heart attack, we do like this new commercial from Boston-based Winsper for Exeter Hospital. Oh wait, we get it. Attention to detail. After all, a well made bed is certainly as important as performing open heart surgery.
OK. We jest. We get the analogy. Besides, the spot is just very soothing and who doesn't want to be soothed when faced with a nerve-racking hospital stay? Not us. We've been there.
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Penny Denialer, the well-preserved materfamilias of Mackenzie Investments' "Denialers" campaign, began appearing in rich media ads on popular Canadian websites last week.
See her on Sweetspot.ca (you'll have to scroll way down). When engaged she'll say something decidedly wise like, "Whoever said money can't buy happiness was obviously shopping at the wrong website. Look at that." Then she'll stare with vacant Valley awe at the content of the page.
The ad invites traffic to burnrate.ca, where they can meet the Denialers, watch money burst into flames, and find out how to keep theirs from going up in smoke.
Put together by Lowe Roche, Toronto.
According to Collective Intellect, which tracked brand lift for advertisers before and after the Academy Awards, Dove outdid 10 other major advertisers, elevating its position 500 percent with pre-show buzz.
Consistency, and refining an old model, were probably key. Dove rehashed last year's campaign strategy: appealing to audience members to produce and rate ads for its Cream Oil product. The winner was a woman named Celeste Wouden, whose spot lacks the slapstick, paging-Cartoon-Network! feel we've come to expect from UGC efforts. In fact, it looks like a stock Dove commercial (and for WAY less money).
Watch the ad at DoveCreamOil.com. Runners-up can be seen in the gallery.
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Yarg. To promote The Ruins -- a movie that, from what we can tell, is all about evil parasitic vines -- Ralph & Co. is encouraging internet users to disseminate this genuinely icky video. It literally hurts to watch and reminds us of this one time we had an ingrown hair that kept growing under our skin until finally... well, forget it.
Killer vines. Okay. Guess that's scarier than improbable monsters. But is it scarier than toothy vaginas and randy chlamydia?!! Well, maybe.
Pot Noodle's latest spot (released just in time for St. Patrick's Day!) isn't super-appetizing, but it kept us watching. It's a spoof on Guinness' Tipping Point, where a domino effect travels from a luxe office to the seedy interior of a village overflowing with costumed extras from every movie set ever.
Alternatively, Pot Noodle's Tipping Pot starts out with farts, bars and cigarette cartons before traveling through somebody's working-class home and ending ... well, you can guess.
We're not eating that. But we did make a dry coughing sound that approached a laugh, so ... cheers. See AKQA's previous Pot Noodle viral effort.
To celebrate the birth of four distinct company arms (with four unique specializations), The CementWorks launched a baby shower campaign for quadruplets. Watch the intro on their website -- very cute. (Possibly painful.)
Dividing itself into four realms followed the logic of "growing big by growing small." Read more about The CementBloc, The IronWorks, The StoneWorks and The CementBond.
An agency with industrial chic. Ayn Rand would be so proud.
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