The ‘Nike Football+ Challenge‘, that’s quite a mouthfull for this ’transmedia’ campaign created by Boondoggle. The challenge – accessible through Hyves (the Dutch Facebook) – asks Hyves members to show their football skills to Dutch football player Wesley Sneijder. The best ‘players’ are flown into Milan to train with Sneijder – who plays for Inter. We tried the first challenge, testing whether you can quickly asses match situations and predict where Sneijder played the ball in real life matches – by clicking in the game footage. We performed really badly, but were impressed by the intelligence and the execution of the campaign. It looks like Nike and Boondoggle properly invested time and energy to make it work. The only pity is that you have to be a Hyves member to participate. Though the social network site has a very strong penetration in the Netherlands (it has about 8.5 million members and the Netherlands counts about 16.6 million inhabitants), we suspect that a big part of Nike’s target is not actively involved in the site anymore – it either switched to Facebook or uses other social media tools to stay in touch with friends. On the other hand, these are the kind of games that make Hyves more interesting. So eventually it’s a win-win concpet for both Nike and Hyves.

The cheapest tickets, that’s all that matters. Budget Air makes its outdoor posters as small as possible to be able to offer the cheapest tickets – which makes the Mupi lightning visible. We ourselves never use Budget Air, since they never end high enough in our Google search, so maybe next time they should spend some money on Google Adwords. Nice ad anyway. Created by New Message.

We love animation. Especially because it makes so much more possible than traditional film. This commercial is a combination of real stage design and animation – how skillfully made! It tells the story of Achmea – a Dutch healthcare insurer. 200 years ago some farmers decided to work together and share the risks – what a great bolt of lightning! It was these kind of cooperations that led to the foundation of Achmea. According to the narration a lot has changed over the years, but Achmea’s principles have stayed the same. Then the animation changes into a new area; Achmea wants to ‘unworry’ society with initiatives that no one expects from an insurer and that make the working environment safer. And also, providing better food for school children. However big a ‘probleem’ is, it becomes smaller when you tackle it together. If we had to place one critical note; no real choices were made. The ad contains more information than the average consumer can handle and the myriad of styles doesn’t convey one single visual identity. But maybe that’s just us being anal. It’s a wonderful ad altogether. Created by DDB Amsterdam and directed by Raphaël Bartels.