Julie-Laure Coassin | Blog | A Digital World

With the new iAd from Guinness, it has gotten a little easier to discover the best night-life in your city with word of mouth type recommendations. Use the app to locate a favorite local bar, comedy routine, or some new music that you may not have heard about.  The app is a product of London-based digital communications agency TMW and comes with the tagline of helping you find more life in the dark. From the press release:

Diageo Great Britain (GB) is launching its first iAd for its Guinness® brand, inviting viewers to discover ‘more life in the dark’. The campaign, aims to equip consumers with the necessary tools and inspiration to help them enjoy a great night out.

Part of a larger multi-platform digital campaign ‘There’s More Life in the Dark’, the iAd opens with the narrator promising to show you where the best nights out are happening. The ad is then split into the four sections ‘pubs, gigs, comedy and sports’, each inspiring viewers to find great nearby events and venues using the iPhone’s location based functionality.

For example, the gigs section starts with a fun way of helping users get served without having to shout above the noise at a gig. An interactive dial allows the user to choose how many friends they want to buy a Guinness for, 1,2,3 or 4. They can then save the image ‘x pints of Guinness please! to their iPhone and show it at the bar to place an order. The ad then goes on to employ the iPhone’s location functionality to find gigs that are taking place over the coming days in the viewer’s area.

As well as finding gigs, users can select the various tabs to find quality pubs, comedy nights and venues for Sky 3d sports matches. The final tab allows consumers to sign up to Guinness communications, where they can keep up to date with brand promotions.

via @PSFK

Vying to engage their audiences, countless organizations and companies of all stripes have turned to Facebook as the ideal platform. The site allows companies to reach and hear from consumers, fans, users, and friends in a space that these parties naturally frequent. And as institutions and organizations streamline their presences in the social network, hosting contests on the site has become a no-brainer. Authors, museums, and stores offer giveaways for followers who like a specific post; musicians open up their walls for fans to post entries rethinking their logos or graphic identities. These measures have proven particularly integral for cultural institutions and individuals whose success depends on audience engagement despite a lack of marketing budget.

GalleyCat reported that Facebook is throwing a wrench in this tried and true marketing scheme. The social network recently rolled out a slew of restrictions on contests hosted on its site that all but bar  companies from staging contests:

Along with that change, Facebook has placed a long list of restrictions on how contests are staged on the social network…here is the most dramatic change: “You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.”

via PSFK

The next phase in the Pulse of the City project, Range Rover’s promotional vehicle for its flashy city-dwelling Evoque model, is a fully interactive choice-based film created byBrooklyn Brothers London with award winning director Nick Gordon. 

Staring Leo Fitzpatric from The Wire and comprising of nine different story lines and 32 unique endings, the Hollywood-inspired film was shot in Los Angeles and follows the well-worn choose your own adventure path trodden by many brands over the years. The plot centres around the character of Henry, who starts off in his apartment simply deciding which cereal to choose, but later descending into an increasingly wild plot with rats being shot and his Gran being kidnapped and tortured by a harpoon gun. Users can, of course, make various decisions during the journey that lead to different realities.

The purpose of this personalised plot is to communicate the huge variety of options available on the car - through subtle colour, situational and emotional references the film takes the choices that the users input on Henry’s behalf and output them in the form of an Evoque that suits.

Nick Gordon explains: ‘I am really inspired by projects that push digital boundaries, and in creating interactive work that is designed to emotionally and creatively engage rather than be purely driven by technology. Range Rover’s commitment to one of the most adventurous collaborations I have ever been part of has been incredible, Being Henry and has been a real learning curve for me on how creative interactivity is the future of really engaging with and respecting consumers.’

Via Contagious

New website Brand Toys uses market research data to visualise attitudes towards brands around the world: this little fella, for example, represents how Coca-Cola is seen in India.

The site was created by JWT London and is the brainchild of worldwide planning director Guy Murphy and creative director Graham Wood. It works by taking data from Millward Brown’s BrandZ study, using its findings to attribute various characteristics to the final toy relating to attitudes towards the brand’s trustworthiness, familiarity and so on. Added to this is data from social media search engine Social Mention relating to how much online chatter there is surrounding the brand – if general sentiment around a brand is positive, for example, the toy will appear with a bright sun behind it. Negative sentiment results in dark clouds appearing. 

 The toys have a different body shape according to their scores for familiarity and potential - the most familiar being represented by a big gorilla. Then the toy’s features are determined by further data, eg if there is a lot of chatter about it online, it will have big ears. Other qualities see the toy wearing various accessories: if it is ‘adventurous’ for example it will sport a trilby, if ‘straightforward’ it will have a collar and tie (play around in the ‘Build a Toy’ section to get a full list). 

All the toys are created using the same principles so that users can compare how brands are perceived in different territories or compare competitor brands

Here’s Apple compared to Microsoft

Users can create their own toy and have it 3D printed as a real life figure usingSculpteo.

JWT are at pains to stress that the toys, though cute, are created using serious data and research so the site has its serious side. 

For anyone used to doing competitor research it’s got to be a lot more fun than staring at graphs and spreadsheets. Have a go here

via Creative Review

Check out these great examples of Flash work which have been produced so far this year… You might then think that “Flash is dead” reports are exaggerated… See the 20 sites here