Ad agency Mother, London has just launched its first large campaign for UK’s Match.com. The ad is part of a new £7m through the line campaign, and features a couple finding love in a music shop. The stunning lady in the clip is called Amber Anderson and is set to star later in the year in a new film called “Your Highness” alongside Natalie Portman. I wish her all the best, she had me at “I laugh in my Sleep”.

They have also launched twitter profiles for the characters named ‘jackmatch’ and ‘jillmatch’, 5 people out of the first 100 followers will win a years free membership to Match.com. If facebook is your thing you can also check out the Facebook page, and if you like the song they were even kind enough to make a full length version (click here to listen to “That’s Just Me”)

P.S: If any girls are wondering, the chap is called James Connelly

The above campaign was one of the most successful online virals from last year for Radiotjänst (Sweden’s TV licensing body). Personally I was sent it about 25 times from various friends from around the globe. The campaign attracted over 14 million unique visits within 8 weeks. The above clip shows a nice brief of what, and how they pulled it off. The basic idea was to encourage more people to pay their TV licence fee in Sweden. To do this they created a video clip where you the viewer could be a world hero and star of the clip. They did this by embedding a photo of you and your name in the film at different scenes. At the end of the clip you could register to pay your licence, and personalise your own clip to send to a friend. The dedicated website was marketed on TV, cinemas and print. To try out the campaign for yourself go to http://en.tackfilm.se/ Great work and congrats to Draft FCB, Stockholm for coming up with the campaign.

Last week a post I did on Kulula’s new aircraft livery caused a traffic jam on my site after being linked to by BoingBoing (one of the world most popular blogs). Luckily I happen to know Kulula’s fantastic advertising & PR agency (King James & Atmosphere of Cape Town), I quickly contacted them and they kindly made up a fun banner to place next to the post in the sidebar of this site. So far the post has been viewed well over 150,000 times on my site alone and counting, and although all my analytics tools failed when the main traffic hit I can see that Kulula had thousands of click throughs to their site, not bad free global exposure.

Today I received the official press release and it looks like more fun paint jobs are being done for their new Boeing 737-800’s, read below to find out more and click on the pictures to enlarge;

“kulula’s latest plane design has been a worldwide hit after being seen by plane-spotters en-route to South Africa. Photos of the new livery dubbed “Flying 101” have since been viewed by millions having appeared on some of the world’s leading blogs, spurring a frenzy of online comments. All this before it even touched down in South Africa.

The design covers the planes exterior in a tongue-in-cheek guide to the various parts of the planes interior, such as the “Mile-high initiation chamber”. The plane is just one of a fleet expansion of eight state-of-the-art Boeing 737-800s (each with a unique livery). As these planes will be replacing the 737-400’s currently used in kulula’s fleet, South Africans can look forward to spotting the new 800’s during this year.

“The “Flying 101” was conceptualised and designed by kulula’s in-house design department. This branding idea is a result of our 2010 strategy to demystify air travel for our fans,” comments Nadine Damen, kulula Marketing Manager.

“Initially spotted by plane-spotters across the globe, our “Flying 101” plane has become famous on the world wide web before touching South African soil,” continues Damen. “We’ve been amazed by the number of blogs that have posted “Flying 101” images as well as the large number of people talking about the new branding on Twitter.”

The first Boeing, branded with the “Flying 101,” landed in Johannesburg on Monday, 8th February 2010 and will start operating from 13th February 2010.  The second Boeing is currently undergoing its transformation and will appear to kulula fans much like an oversized container box, with the words “this way up” printed on its side, is scheduled to start operating on the 8th February 2010.”

Thought I would share two great must reads with you today. The first is a study commissioned by the Wall Street Journal on the 2010 global ad spend. The basics are that there will be a small rise in spending but magazines and radio spends will see a small drop. The winners are; digital spends (+11.6%), TV (+2%), and Outdoor (+2.1%). Lucky I do digital work then.

The second must read is the latest Contagious report of 2009. The report lists the most talked-about trends and technologies to have influenced global marketing over the past 12 months, its a pretty essential read if you want to know what works and what doesn’t.

To download it either click the image above or Click here.

Google recently released this presentation showing 87 digital campaigns and creative ideas that they think have stood out for 2009. Most of the examples make use of the YouTube or Google Maps API but all are pretty good examples of how to WIN.

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.

The Brandz Top 100 report has been done yearly since 2006 by Millward Brown Optimor, part of the WPP group. The report shows the worlds top 100 most popular brands with their relevant value, and is based on over 1million consumer interviews in more than 30 countries, as well as using financial analysis from Bloomberg and Data monitor. (click the picture above to zoom in) The brand values published are based on the intrinsic value of the brand, derived from its ability to generate demand. This past year has seen 15 new brands enter the report and the total value of the Top 100 brands has increased by 2 percent to just under $2 trillion dollars. General trends seem to suggest that due to the current economic turmoil brand categories that have done well tend to have been the smaller luxury item brands like Nintendo and Johnnie Walker as well as brands that can offer great value such as Amazon. One other popular trend has been the increase of slightly more heath conscious brands like Colgate, Subway and Bud light. Tech brands have continued to do well with 7 out of the top 10 coming from that category, also worth pointing out is that the biggest-growing category has been from mobile operator brands. The great losers this year have been brands to do with cars, financial institutions, and insurance. This has been mostly to do with consumers tending to be more wise with their spending and using less credit.   Brand category #WIN since last year

• +28% Mobile Operators
• +24% Soft Drinks
• +18% Coffee
• +16% Fast Food
• +15% Beer
• +10% Luxury

  Brand category #FAIL since last year

• -48% Insurance
• -22% Cars
• -11% Financial Institutions
• -9% Apparel
• -5% Motor Fuel

To view the full report click here for the BrandZ of 2009 report or if you really want to be cool you can download the Brandz top 100 iPhone app.

   Its not often I get to write about great local below the line case studies, but luckily King James have been doing a grand job with South Africa’s own favourite milkshake brand; Steri Stumpie. To start with they managed to find and engage existing fans, rewarding them, and helping them to grow the user generated online presence the brand already had. They also started a dedicated blog (that they update at least a few times a week),a fun twitter account, and have created entertaining and engaging messages for the brand (See the “Hoot if you’re a fan” branded truck picture above) All the online components are linked together very nicely and used in sync to spread some key actions. Below are some of the main parts I picked up.

• Aggregate user generated content and positive brands mentions, like articles, pictures, videos, tweets etc
• Reward fans and influencers (even popular DJ’s as above) with Steri goodie bags. They are doing a great job of this and have produced fun branded T-Shirts, Stickers (even an “iSter” Sticker, see pic below), collectors post cards, funny “Steri Pride” bumper stickers, embroidered badges and lots of tasty product.
• Through the blog they allow people to nominate friends as official unofficial Steri brand ambassadors. If successful they get featured on the site and get serenaded by a Steri marching band !! (See pic below and click here for a video of them in action)
• Create very fun billboard posters and even branded the delivery trucks with an engaging message (see pic above)
• Start Steri Stumpie hunts, where through twitter they give away goodie bags each week in some of the main South African cities. People are given a time, location, date and person to find, the first person there wins the prize (nice simple viral msg)
• Working with local creative designers they are even creating innovative T-Shirt designs for the different Steri Stumpie flavours and documenting the creative process along the way.

To see what they are up to and find out more go to any of the following links; Steri Blog, Steri twitter, Steri facebook page (they have over 21,000 fans!) or go check out the King James agency blog. Great work and nice to see it being spearheaded by the fantastic Alex Van Tonder.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of helping to organise the first of what I hope will become many Audi Centre Cape Town MVP days. The basic idea was to see if we could use some fun non-traditional media methods to help advertise and get some nice PR for Audi Centre Cape Town. I chatted to Audi Cape Town and put forward the idea and thanks to the incredible Wernich Stipp we got the go ahead for a fun morning out. Audi Cape Town then kindly agreed to lend us 4 new cars for the day namely the Q5, A4, A5, TT (and an R8 for a surprise drive). For a PDF copy of the days activities I came up with and gave to all the MVP’s click here. I arranged for our half way drive stopping point to be at local rugby legend Bob Skinstad’s place in Noordhoek, namely the incredible Toad in the Village (A must visit for anyone staying in Cape Town). Bob even kindly was there to say hi before he left to cover the Tri-Nations (See pic above). At the Toad we then pulled a name out of a hat for a drive in the Audi R8 and Gabrielle Rosario took the honours, getting to drive it back to town. Finally we ended the day up at Theo’s restaurant in Mouille point, where Audi kindly bought us all a late lunch and even gave us gift bags for coming !! Audi Centre Cape Town are legends, I have been blown away. For all the pictures from the day click on the Album link below. The group consisted of Joe Botha, Cath Lückhoff, Matt Buckland, Marilu Matthee, Scott Hayes, Elodie Kleynhans, Gabrielle Rosario and myself. Big Thanks to everyone for coming along and helping out and am looking forward to seeing how this evolves ! ****Update: Joe Botha added more pictures on Facebook, Click here***** View Full Album

  Today marks the 40th anniversary of man first walking on the moon so what better way to celebrate than by reliving the mission in real time online. A dedicated website called We Choose The Moon has been set up and went live at 9:32 a.m. on July 16th, 2009 – exactly 40 years to the minute after the historic launch. The site recreates Apollo 11’s lunar mission, minute by minute, with an interactive experience that lets visitors experience the mission as it happened, using archival audio, video, photos and “real time” transmissions. You can even follow the mission on twitter from the perspective of Houston Ground Control, The Apollo11 spacecraft and the Apollo11 Eagle moon Lander. This fantastic project was thought up by the Martin Agency and is being done in partnership with AOL and the JFK Presidential Library.You will be able to experience the content at your own pace only after Apollo 11 will have completed its mission. For now (20th July) if you visit the site its running in live time only. Great Project and extremely well executed, I love the real time audio stream replayed on the site as it was 40 years ago, ended up listening for about an hour. Fascinating stuff and congrats to all involved. Go Check it out by visiting http://wechoosethemoon.com/.

Inspiring work by Publicis, Frankfurt. In order to promote a local fish restaurant called Fisch Franke they created a fortified poster frame and filled it with 600 Litres of water and several real Trout. The living poster was on display for a limited time and managed to attract a ton of attention as well as increasing traffic in the restaurant itself. Click on the video below to watch the making of the living poster frame. No fish were harmed during the making of this billboard.