Sony Ericsson’s global Hopper Invasion campaign is well underway and thought it about time to give you an update on it (I first wrote about it here). The campaign promotes their new Entertainment Unlimited range of phones, namely the Satio, Aino and Yari. It all started a few months ago with a teaser site allowing people to create their own personalised online hoppers and a promo video showing 500 hoppers being let loose in Barcelona. They then did an online flash mob by taking over the yahoo.co.uk site for an afternoon using the personalised hoppers created by users online. (click here to see that) Next they created a fun interactive concept using twitter (with a unique hashtag), a warehouse full of deflated hoppers hooked up to pumps, and a dedicated website showing live video feeds from the warehouse. The general idea is that each time anyone on twitter types #pumpt the tweet is picked up at the warehouse and a hopper is given a burst of air in real time, all visible on the hopper website. The warehouse will stop pumping up hoppers on the 6th December and in the meantime Sony Ericsson are asking participants to tweet ideas for what to do with them. They will then pick the best one and make it happen. So far its becoming a great success, over 240,000 online hoppers have been created, and after just 7 days over 400 hoppers in the warehouse have been pumped up, and the #pumpt hash tag has been a trending topic on twitter. To follow the Hopper campaign on twitter click here, or to see the hopper live feed click here. (They also have nice Facebook and Picasa profiles set up)

Advertising agency Forsman and Bodenfors created a brilliant campaign for IKEA using Facebook picture tagging to help promote a new store in the Swedish town of Malmo. The store didn’t have a huge budget so the agency created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, and over a two-week period they uploaded images of IKEA showrooms to his Facebook photo album. They then put the word out that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it. Thousands of people started tagging themselves in the showroom pictures trying to win anything from beds to vases. The campaign spread like wild fire via users profile pages, news feed and links. The end result was huge organic awareness of IKEA and its store, as well as humanising the brand by having Gordon Gustavsson, the store manager updating content and replying to questions regularly.

Great spot from BBDO New York for Guinness, very smoothly done. This kind of thing happens to me every day, maybe I also need a raise.

Recently we have been seeing a ton of innovation in the print media to digital media conversion arena. This latest wonder is from The New York Times and comes in the form of a PC or Mac compatible reader. The Times reader 2.0 uses Adobe AIR and allows you to read a full digital edition of the NY Times just like a real newspaper but with the advantage of video content and more. The programme updates automatically and delivers the entire day’s Times in seconds, so you can carry it wherever you go. If you’re a subscriber the digital edition is free, or you can get just the digital version for $3.45 per week. There is currently a free scaled down edition available too, to try it out for yourself just click here.

Yahoo! advertising team has come up with this classic digital short showing the pain agency creatives have to go through. The short features “The Account Executive”, “The Creatives” and the fabulous  “Clients”. I especially admire the likes and dislikes captions for each of the groups. Classic. You can follow Yahoo! advertising on twitter here: http://twitter.com/yahooadbuzz or on their blog by clicking here.

UK agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine have created a fab little iPhone app called iLingual for Emirates. The app helps you speak in different languages (French, German and Arabic ). All you need to do is take a picture of your mouth, the app then uses the picture and animates it so that when you get the app to say the phrase needed you can hold your iPhone / iPod touch in front of your real face and let the phone do the talking for you.

Really like the positioning of this for Emirates and the fact they are simply using innovation to help make travel better.

To try it out for yourself for free click here

This is post is aimed at any expats out there that are keen to come home to South Africa for some Christmas fun in the sun. KuduClub (a website that allows you to watch all the SA local TV shows etc online) is giving 2 lucky people the chance to win a trip back to South Africa for Christmas for free.

Any safas keen to come home for free, all you need to do is click here and enter your details to win. If your in South Africa and would like to nominate to bring back a friend you can also SMS the word KERSFEES and your name to 34585 (R2 per SMS, entries close on the 25th November)

Pretty hilarious ad spot for a drink called Muscle Milk. Very reminiscing of an Andy Samberg Saturday Night Live skit but still fun none the less. Nice work from Pereira & O’Dell. They even set up a micro site for the campaign called www.sexypilgrim.com that allows you to watch the clip and download the song as an mp3.

  Loved this new site called www.learnsomethingeveryday.co.uk, every weekday they publish a new educational fun cartoon. Would love to have this as a widget app. (via Legend Steve Clayton)

UK creative magazine Distill have just made their latest edition available to buy on the iPhone app store. From the video above this has to be the best adaptation of a print mag to iPhone conversion I have ever seen (Grated there have not been many). The iPhone app work was done by a London digital agency called Ustwo. I bought the app to try it out and I must say  navigation is very simple, text easy to read, and pictures are easy to scroll and zoom around as you would expect from the iPhone / iPod touch.

Why more main stream publications haven’t figured out / done this yet boggles my mind. There is huge market for digital versions of their magazines, especially on products like the iPhone and even the new android phones. Screen sizes seems to be about right now and file sizes don’t need to be huge, the Distill mag is pretty extensive and is only 40mb (and costs £2.99).

Distill magazine is a UK creative magazine featuring the “The finest fashion and art photography in the world”, the content for the mag is selected by an Editorial Board consisting of the likes of John Galliano, Donatella Versace, Manolo Blahnik, Matthew Williamson, Giles Deacon and many more.

To download the Distill iPhone edition click here

It’s that time of year again and OfficeMax are at it again with the Elf Yourself campaign. This is the 4th year the campaign has been running, during the last three years the site has earned over 284 million visits. If you haven’t ever seen the site, the general point of it is that you get to add up to 5 faces (any pictures or your facebook profile pic) to elf figures, then choose from one of any of 5 sing and dance routines, then sit back and watch you and your friends dance around in elf costumes. Once you have finished you can embed the videos into your site, email, twitter, share to facebook, myspace or just download the clip to your computer. You can also buy officeMax products with your customised elf self on it such as mugs, calendars mouse mats etc etc. This year they launched the site in true 2009 fashion with a elf flash mob dance in Union Square, New York (click here to see that). To see me in elf singing action check out the video I made just for you below. Send your own ElfYourself eCards

This is literally out of this world. Toshiba’s agency in London, Grey, collaborated with The Mill to film the world’s highest commercial, shot 98,000 feet above Nevada’s Black Rock desert.

To make this possible they attached a high altitude helium balloon to a biodegradable chair, fitted the balloon with a rig complete with 8 Toshiba HD IK-HR1S camcorders and 4 GPS units to tack the position and altitude of the Chair, then in the middle of the desert they let it fly. The balsa wood chair and rig flew to 98,268 feet before the balloon burst and the chair tumbled back to earth at max speeds of a little over mach 1 !

The tag line is great; “Armchair viewing, redefined”, and the commercial also fits in well with Toshiba’s core slogan “Leading innovation”. The ad was made to help publicise the new Regza-LCD-TV range. Click here to see the making of the ad video.
Stats

• The chair is made of biodegradable balsa wood at a cost of about £2,500.
• The balloon was launched from the Black Rock desert in Nevada.
• The chair took 83 minutes to reach the lofty altitude and fell back to earth in just 24 minutes.
• The temperature dropped to minus 90 degrees at 52,037 feet.
• Four different GPS systems were attached to the rig to accurately record its height.
• The ad was shot by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, who also worked on Mamma Mia!