G2 Amsterdam, together with Perfect Fools, created a website (this is an English demo, in Dutch the site is called ‘fragrances from nature’) for Ambi Pur that tickles almost all your senses – unfortunately not smell. The site, beautifully made with a combination of photography and animation, shows where Ambi Pur’s new ‘National Geographic’ fragrances ‘Japan Tatami’ and ‘Nevada Desert Flower’, come from. The joint promotion together with National Geograhpic (NG) feels a little stretched. Certainly NG is the specialist in showing remote and wonderful sceneries, but what has that got to do with smell? On the other hand, NG is a very strong brand that will certainly give credibility to the sceneries shown. Unconsciously the consumer might very well believe that Ambi Pur’s fragrances are therefore more exclusive, natural and special than those of the competition. Let’s see if both brands can think big and produce the first mass market scent DVD: ‘a fragrant journey into nature’ – or something along those lines.

We were invited to Digital Dinner at Rainarai, an Aglerian restaurant in Amsterdam. Though the food was wonderful, the portions were a bit meager. And since there was plenty of alcohol, we’re writing this piece a bit hungover. But the good news is that the evening was packed. Achtung!’s Dick Buschman did the introduction, explaining that Emerce initiated the event to connect with the Dutch creative industry. The organization (Achtung!, Bert Hagendoorn, and Pop The Campaign) then asked Creative Social to select some interesting speakers. Marc Chalmers (Perfect Fools), founder of Creative Social explained how members of Creative Social have to introduce theirselves; they have to show what they are working on and finish their presentation with the words “That’s me that is.” So we had the honor to witness the introduction of the 10 new Creative Social members.

Some of the new members showed a case film, which made things paradoxically a little less personal. That’s probably why the person we remember best didn’t need a voice over to introduce himself; James Cooper, Chief Innovation Officer at JWT New York, presented the first ‘bad ass’ ping pong clothing brand, called Thompson Punke. He loves ping pong, but hated the fact that there are no cool ping pong clothing brands. Not very digital, but very funny. Anders Gustafsson, from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, shared his Chevrolet Sonic campaign which was launched during the Super Bowl with the OK Go clip. In the next stage the Sonic is doing stunts, like bungee jumping, and the online community gets initiate the stunts by Liking them. Achtung! shared its Volkswagen Fanwagen case, a virtual VW Minivan turned into a real life ‘wagen’ – here’s the very smooth animated casefilm. Volkwagen’s briefing was; give us 30.000 Likes. Thanks to the Fanwagen VW is now the no.1 Dutch car brand on Facebook. Another new member, Cris Baylis from Tribal DDB, shared what seemed to us the most techy concept; ‘Obsessed by Sound’. A website for Philips that took Tribal a full year to build and allows you to single out any of the 51 members of the Metropole Orchestra. The other new Creative Social members are Sam de Volder, These Days; Tony Högqvist, Perfect Fools; Liz Sivell, Start JudgeGill; Alessandra Lariu, She Says; Rogier Vijverberg, SuperHeroes; Sam Ball, Lean Mean Fighting Machine. Thanks, Digital Dinner, for inviting us, an inspiring night it was!

For some brands gathering Likes on Facebook is simply a way to be able to spam your wall, we once said. For other brands it’s a smart way of creating customer intimacy. The latter actually try to have a conversation and – if they are smart – give something back every now and then. For example, last February we saw Heineken (physically) liking its customers back (in a bar). Dutch booming fashion brand Scotch & Soda is doing the same now, but digitally. That is, physically digitally; on a digital window display in its flagship store in Amsterdam the Facebook fans’ names will be animated (as from today) in a handwritten style across black and white Scotch & Soda images selected from the current season’s collections.  A sympathetic gesture of S&S – and its agency Perfect Fools. Though the image displayed here does make you wonder whether Willemijn Valk will be happy to be portrayed as a man. If we may shoot from the hip; why not ask Willemijn (and some other fans) to wear the new collection, do a photo shoot, and then display her in your store. We know, way more expensive, but then you will make her really happy and on top of that even create something that her friends will most definitely like on Facebook.

Fltr: Carl Johnson, Hazelle Klønhammer, Marika Zijp, Colin Lamberton, and Seyoan Vela.

New York and London based agency Anomaly – in 2010 ‘Agency of the Year’ according to Adweek – has just opened a third office in Amsterdam. Carl Johnson, who also spoke at the Tomorrow Awards last week, says the agency opens a second European office so close to London, because “London is not as instinctively continental as Amsterdam.” Hazelle Klønhammer will be managing the Amsterdam office. Before, Klønhammer was group account director at W+K Amsterdam and most recently MD at Grey. At Grey she worked with ECD’s Colin Lamberton and Seyoan Vela. Lamberton and Vela recently left to Team Volvo and JWT Dubai, respectively. They are followed up by Marika Zijp, who previously worked at MRM and McCann Amsterdam, among other agencies. Zijp will work at Grey along strategy director Paul Sijtsma, digital director Peter Hoekstra, and managing director Patrick Joore.

This Citroën DS5 Twitter Race is the first race ever (as far as we know) via Twitter. The concept is quite simple; you can navigate the DS5 towards yourself via Twitter and win it. We’ve seen a similar concept by Volkswagen and Achtung!, but using Twitter as the navigation tool is new. On the dedicated Facebook page Citroën constantly gives the Twitter crowd a choice (e.g. left or right) and the ‘wisdom’ of crowds decides where it should go. A count down clock decides when the race is over and (this feels as a bit of an anti-climax) when the time is up, the car pulls over and a sign is held up with a message. The first person to tweet this message wins the DS5. At the time of publishing this post there’s about half an hour to go and the car is near Bussum – if you live there start looking out for it. We always wonder what kind of people have time to be engaged in a game that consumes most of your day, but since it’s trending on Twitter (NL) it does get the needed exposure. It was created by EuroRSCG and Perfect Fools.

Since the Coolpix AW100 is shock, water and freeze proof and has a camouflage look, having someone in a bear suit doing outdoor sports and thus going ‘Into the wild’ is maybe a little obvious. But we have to admit that this film clearly conveys the camera’s USP and makes it look extremely cool – to the extend that we all felt like checking out the camera’s specs. The sportsmen that play the ‘Cameo Bear’ are French freestyle skier Julien Lange, champion Portuguese BMXer Daniel Americo, and Lisbon-based surfer Miguel Fortes. The film was created by Perfect Fools Stockholm-Amsterdam.