Euro RSCG 4D Digital

Microsoft’s on a bit of an advertising role recently it would seem. Check out their latest campaign for Internet Explorer 8 at YouTube. We’ve embedded our favourite above. One of the ads has actually already been banned for being overly offensive. Judge for yourself here.

Oh and one more thing, use Firefox.

We like Burger King’s advertising. We thought their Whopper Freakout was clever – take the Whopper (a product that practically personifies the brand) off the menu and use hidden cameras to record the outrage. We covered their launch of a meat-scented fragrance way back when and for those of you who have strong stomachs, Piers Morgan is the star of the UK version. Their Whopper Sacrifice campaign was an ingenious use of social media, blending product attributes with virtual rejection. They even crafted several advergames for the Xbox a couple of years back.

So all this has made us think. Could a fast food brand be producing the most intelligent, well-targeted advertising around? Or is it all a load of infantile nonsense? As for this ad, we'd still rather get our mouths around a 12 inch Italian (from Subway of course).

Us marketers love studying the effects of branding on consumer’s choices which is why Blind Search is so interesting. Input a search query (above we’ve tried our favourite drink Cristal) and the site will provide randomised, anonymous results from Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft’s Bing. You can then vote for the best results. The first time we tried it we ended up choosing Bing. Now originally there was a tally to help people keep track of what was leading the votes but naughty hackers were artificially inflating certain results. So what comes out on top for you?

We still can’t decide if it’s a gimmick or ingenious so we’ll let you work it out for yourselves. Remember those YouTube annotations we told you about? We wondered when the first brands would start using it. Well they may not be a brand but these guys certainly have.

We want this. Real real bad. The offline syncing is particularly rad, though we wonder if you’ll have to be a premium user (£9.99 a month) to make use of it. Did we mention we really want this right now?

While doing some research on a new project this week we came across the following astounding facts from recent surveys:

• One in three eight-year olds have a mobile phone
• 75% of all children aged seven to 15 own "at least" one mobile
• Children as young as seven offer to do chores in exchange for cash to buy ringtones

And perhaps our favourite (in a totally non evil way of course):

• Last year, two children aged 12 and 13 were admitted to a mental health clinic to receive treatment for mobile phone addiction

It is with these facts in mind then that we present to you the Samsung Tobi phone, aimed squarely at school-aged kids.

Now the argument in favour of a device such as this is that it helps parents keep track of their kiddies while they’re out and about or at school. And to that end the Tobi does deliver some very clever safety features:

• An SOS button on the side of the phone that when held for 5 seconds will call a preset emergency  contact
• Pressing the volume key 4 times in quick succession will send a preset emergency text to up to 4 emergency contacts
• A fake call button. Holding it down will make the phone start to ring as if someone is calling you. You can even pre-record a message for when you answer to make it sound more realistic

Nice huh? There’s even an IM app built into the phone that works over Bluetooth so the kids don’t have to pay data charges. We really hope the Tobi is successful, if only to prove to other manufacturers that simply repackaging existing tech with a new colour scheme isn’t enough to appeal to a vastly different target audience. As for marketing mobiles to kids in general though, we’re still not entirely convinced. Us marketers are very moral you know.

Watch this video and try to work out how they did it (click through from the video to watch in HD):

Once you’ve got your theories, watch the ‘reveal’ video here.

Great way to show off the HD capabilities of the phone and a very well choreographed trick. We particularly like the way they’ve incorporated some of the YouTube comments into the reveal.

Victory was declared for large-breasted ladies with too much time on their hands this morning when Marks & Spencer ran the above ad in all the major newspapers. We’re sure you’ve read the coverage all over the news this week but to summarise; M&S decided to charge £2 more for bras sized DD and above due to higher manufacturing costs, a woman representing a group called ‘Busts for Justice’ created a facebook group that attracted 14,000 members and the attention of the press, M&S initially refused to lower the prices. Well, now they have. And they’re reducing the cost of ALL their bras by 25% for a fortnight.

They responded swiftly and humorously and for that, we applaud them.

According to this boingboing article, the island of Tuvalu where .tv domains emanate is sinking. So domain registering sites like GoDaddy are recommending you don’t buy them. A bit of sleuthing reveals that the domain was actually bought by a private company about 8 years ago. Supposedly. And that the island isn’t sinking anyway, sea levels are just rising.

Wait, have we just talked ourselves out of our own story?

Here at Euro RSCG towers the use of the Comic Sans font is banned. Well, not banned exactly but were one of our art directors to drop it into a concept he would be mocked mercilessly until at least, let’s say, the end of the day. I imagine it would go something like this:

“Hey you remember that time you used Comic Sans, Ross? Tragic man, tragic”

And then we’d forget about it and go back to Rockwell and Helvetica (they’re cool, right?) and wonder why we were speaking like Americans. Some people however can’t seem to forget about it. Some people have set up a website, flickr pool, MySpace and Facebook pages and sticker campaign for the sole purpose of banning Comic Sans. In the past fortnight journalistic heavy-hitters have even weighed-in on the subject. Read The Wall Street Journal and Guardian’s opinions.

So what’s the big deal? It’s fun and friendly right? Kiddies love it, clowns love it, your parents probably think it’s cute. The WSJ article even describes someone using it to soften the blow in a break-up letter. Now that’s class. We’re not going to bash Comic Sans. Instead, we’ll finish with a quote from the inventor of the font himself, Vincent Connare, who we think sums it up rather nicely:

"If you love it, you don't know much about typography," he says. But, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."

We like posters like these. A lot.

Vouchers. They’re all the rage in these days of recession, especially when it comes to restaurants. And word has it that takeaway pizzas are one of the biggest growth sectors as people choose to save money and order in rather than head out to a jazzy restaurant.

Pizza chain Dominos was forced to give away 11,000 free pizzas earlier this week when a voucher code never intended for use was released onto the internets. Apparently, the code word ‘bailout’ was discovered by a punter who realised that it granted them a free medium pizza. Of course, within minutes the code had spread to the darkest depths of the internets and was only picked up by HQ the next morning – 11,000 pizzas too late. Dominos is now reimbursing all restaurants $3.88 per pizza. By our calculations that’s $42,680 worth of FAIL.

The UK army have been doing a lot of digital work for the last few years and they are investing more and more money into TV ads, internet and video games.
It is interesting to see what kind of approach they have chosen in order to persuade young people to join the army.

First they had that campaign where you could see a tv spot and it was stopping just before the end of the ad. You had to go online to discover what would happen.

Then they produce TV spots during movie breaks, one just after the break and another one just before the movie start again. The idea was simple, you just have to count how many soldier you could see in the TV Spot and then after the ads you could see how much you have spotted.

Now they have got their twitter, where you can keep track of what the British troops are doing in the world.
https://twitter.com/armyweb

and finally they have created a video game, where you are put into situations and have to make the right decision. It’s really well done using Flash, Papervision, and streaming videos.
http://www.armyjobs.mod.uk/startthinkingsoldier/Pages/Default.aspx

My only worry is I’m not quite sure that they should compare war to a game. That reminds me of the US government which released a couple of years ago a First Person Shooter game (a bit like Counter Strike) to check if you had what it take to become a soldier.

We went to the Japanese Restaurant called INAMO a few days ago and I have to say that the concept is great.
Your food and menu are interactive and retro projected on your table so you can move a mouse and choose / preview the drinks what you are going to order.
There is as well a real time bill for yourself and the table so you can keep an eye on how much you will have to pay at the end .
The concept and the interface are really user friendly but we figured out a couple of idea they haven’t thought of, like the possibility to give customers suggestions when they are drinking a cocktail or for example if they order a specific wine, what kind of food will go along with it and vice versa.

We’ve made a couple of lovely little games for Peugeot as part of their Drivesexy campaign. You can even embed them (as we’ve done above) into your own blog. There, enough patting ourselves on the back for one day.