One Big Agency created this handy ‘Live with it!’ app. But as you quickly find out, it’s not made in collaboration with Shell, but with Friends of the Earth (or: Milieudefensie). In fact, it’s not even an app; the URL at the end leads you to ‘Worse than bad.’ The locals of the Niger Delta can use the fictional app to earn Shell points (that can be exchanged for “helpful survival gear”) by being the first to spot oil spills. The same goes for reporting contaminated water. The app also indicates where the locals can find alternative water sources and it maps gas flares and pipelines. It will be interesting to see what Shell will do against this spoof. Will they act against it – “David Ruse is not our Chief Facade Officer – we have someone else for that!” Or will they sit still until the storm is over? Probably (and wisely) the latter. In any case, the spoof made us think of Chevron’s ‘We Agree’ campaign that was hijacked in 2010; immediately after the release ‘The Yes Men’ launched their own ‘We Agree’ campaign. Their spoof used phrases like “Oil companies should clean up their messes,” instead of Chevron’s copy saying “The world needs more than oil.” One Big Agency’s app also reminded us of this column on Amsterdam Ad Blog (“Shell and clean don’t match in advertising”). It’s good to see that oil companies cannot get away anymore with trying to come across as environmentally constructive – let alone friendly.
Quite a flashy film. It is an activation by the Dutch Openluchtmuseum (‘open air museum’), a museum that displays the last 200 years of life in the Netherlands. Since the Openluchtmuseum exists 100 years it decided – together with interactive agency SuperHeroes – to select ten iconic objects that should be preserved and exhibited for the next 100 years. The crowd can come up with things like … a toilet brush. SuperHeroes made a high quality film to promote the contest – we especially like the styling – but we wondered if it’s not overselling the product a little. Maybe the museum should have first spent some money on a new website.
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!
This film reminded us of the animation quite recently created by CCCP for the Scheepvaart museum. Both are similar styled, both promote a museum, and both use the same voice-over. Apart from that the film is of course making the museum look quite attractive. And we didn’t know that Naturalis owns one of the world largest collections of organisms; 37 million items! The animation also gives us a peak in the future; who needs to visit a physical museum, when you can make edcuational films like this – which is kind of ironic. Created by Plus One Amsterdam.
It took us a bit of discussion to have an opinion about this teaser and website created by SuperHeroes. Some reactions: scary, gay, and stereotypical. Why show 6 men that demonstrate the different motions of an LG washing machine? Are women morons? Or are we taking this too seriously? Maybe we are. Maybe LG simply offers a good excuse – for some – to watch these hard bodies doing the laundry. We don’t really know. What do you think?
saw it… love it… very clever use of what most big brands/ agencies consider to be a useless medium…. WELL DONE!!!