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.