Activation « Amsterdam Ad Blog

Archive for the ‘Activation’ Category

Who wants to be a prepaid millionaire?

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

What a catchy name for an activation campaign. And what a simple and strong idea from online agency Achtung! to engage prepaid callers – regardless their provider! It doesn’t need much more explanation than the name suggests. If you register yourself as a prepaid caller on the website, you can participate in the contest and receive one text message per day with a difficult question. The person that answers the quickest and closest to the answer, wins – voila! – 1 million text signs or mobile minutes. Questions are asked like, ‘How long can a cockroach survive without his head’ and ‘How many kilo’s of lipstick does a woman eat in her whole life’. And guess what, at the end of the day Vodafone has its database filled with fresh and eager consumers that very homogeneously fit within their prepaid target group!

Volvo C30 DRIVe around the world

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Volvo C33 DRIVe

EuroRSCG4D created this Facebook page – together with LBi Göteborg – for the Volvo C30 DRIVe. The new Volvo can drive 1333 kilometer on a full tank, thanks to the start/stop system and regenerative charging. Surprisingly enough these technologies are not mentioned on the website, which is a different approach from Volkswagen that recently introduced a special ingredient brand: Blue Motion Technologies. Instead, Volvo chose the playful route. On the dedicated Facebook page you can invite your Facebook friends to virtually drive around the world in as few stops as possible. So for example, if you live in Amsterdam you virtually drive to Berlin, where a Facebook friend drives the next lap to Moscow, from there another friend drives further east, until the car has completely circled the earth. To win the game, every single lap has to be as close as 1333 kilometers as possible. If you win, Volvo donates € 15,000 in your name to a project that fights global warming. Since we couldn’t play the game (the site told us “Oops, something went wrong. We are working on fixing this problem”), it’s difficult to judge it properly, but we wonder whether this prize gives the consumer enough incentive. We know, global warming is ‘hot’ and all, but consumers are still very opportunistic. So if you want them to play a game online, it either has to be very engaging or give away great prizes – a C30 DRIVe for example.

Treasure hunt for Vodafone’s mobiles

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

We ended our last post about Vodafone with ‘to be continued’. Why? Because we were surprised that Vodafone’s new, distinctive characters (the ‘mutated guinea pigs’) weren’t used at all in Achtung!’s brand activation, ‘Upgrade a stranger’. And while Vodafone internally is still being divided over the new ad property – created by THEY – Achtung! was asked to create yet another activation campaign for the (young) consumer. The principle is quite similar to the previous activation; through two different micro-sites Vodafone gives away more mobile phones. The first campaign is called BlackBerryHideout; phones (BlackBerry Curves) are hidden around universities, video clues are given by two students (in English) on the website and anyone can search for it – in real life. The other activation, is called TheYouFlickInMyHyveFaceChase; an online treasure hunt through social networks and blogs. This time the prize is a Samsung H1 (and some other prizes). We are not sure how many consumers are involved in these activations, but it definitely sounds like something that will cause a lot of rumour around the brand – this time mainly positive rumour…

Children Stamps with mature design

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Already since 1924 Holland has a tradition of Kinderpostzegels (children stamps). The stamps are issued once a year by TNT Post, distributed by school children throughout their neighborhood and sold with a surcharge. The money of this charity goes to projects that focus on the welfare of vulnerable children. Every year the stamp has a different theme and this year it is ‘let the children learn’. The distinctive and clean design of the stamps and this commercial was done by Christian Borstlap and brought to life by director Paul Postma. And the catchy music by Hopkins and Kenjamin tops it off nicely!

KPN undresses Fred from Het Net

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Fred from Het Net

For several years internet provider Het Net ran an advertising campaign with a very distinctive colour (purple) and character. Fred (‘Fred from Het Net’ rhymes!) was a bit of an odd character. But together with Het Net’s proposition, transparency, he became a strong ad property and the brand built up a fair amount of clients since 2004. However, since a few years mother company KPN (formerly the only national telco provider) is consolidating its brand portfolio and decided to kill Het Net – earlier it already gulped down the brand ‘Planet’. KPN asked Lowe/Draftfcb to kill Het Net in style though. The agency built a dedicated website (don’t go there, if you don’t have broadband) where Fred gives away all the props that were used in 5 years of advertising. He even takes off his wig and moustache! On the website you can click on the different props and leave your name and contact details – aha, quid pro quo! – if you want to have one. Although it might be inspired by agency 2009 giving away its inventory at the end 2008 (when its name changed into 2009), it is a sympathetic move of KPN and might be a smart way to prevent Het Net clients from reevaluating their internet contract in the extremely competitive market of internet providers.

Amsterdam scores well at IMC Awards

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

At the IMC Awards the Heineken ‘Trompet’ (a drum disguised as a hat for football fans, which was a follow-up of the speaker hat – a hat disguised as a speaker) by TBWA\Neboko won a golden IMC Award. Upload Cinema for De Uitkijk by Lowe/Draftfcb, also won gold. The Heineken Trompet was distributed around the European Championships 2008 as a premium – together with 8 cans of Heineken. We earlier wrote about Upload Cinema – creating long form content for a cinema, by making a compilation of long tale, short form content from the internet. All in all Amsterdam scored very well. And with 16 prizes in total, the Netherlands was the best awarded country in Europe.

FIFA Earth connects on and offline football

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

FIFA EARTH

Earlier we talked about FIFA 10, the new EA Sports game that was released beginning of October. Together with the game Wieden + Kennedy also created a new online platform, called FIFA Earth. This platform uses live data from the FIFA games that are being played around the world and translates these into a virtual globe. For example you can see how many games have been played (40 million when we took this screenshot!), which virtual clubs are hot and how they rank. The site also links to Twitter and shows football related tweets on the FIFA Buzz section – together with their geo location. We were told that there are plans already to enrich FIFA Earth with more data and functionalities that will blur the borders between the on and offline world of football even further. And it thus sounds like a very promising new Nike+like brand utility.

VEA persuades teenagers into advertising

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Papercut website

It has probably been done before, but that doesn’t matter, because this online ad agency (’Papercut’) simulator is very well executed by real life agency Qi. It was initiated by the VEA (Association of Advertisers) to give secondary school students a peek into the world of advertising. The site takes them by the hand in learning the ins and outs of the advertising process; there’s a difficult client – lingerie brand Guilty – a briefing, a timeline and a team of typical ad people. There are phone conversations, difficult questions, brainstorms, strategic positioning diagrams, sketches, traffic problems, deadlines and client presentations. Thoroughly done and very educational. It must have been a time consuming project! So either Qi got heavily underpaid or the VEA is very rich. In any case, a good way to persuade teenagers towards advertising at a relatively young age.

Vodafone introduces mutated guinea pigs

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

This commercial by THEY for Vodafone, is the talk of the (advertising) town at the moment. No wonder, the mutated guinea pigs are kind of odd. But we think it’s very brave of Vodafone to adopt such a distinctive ad property and respect THEY for being able to sell it. And since it is always hard to judge a completely new concept, we can only say we didn’t expect it from Vodafone. It is actually a campaign we would expect from a completely new player in the market – that needs to build up awareness in a short time – or one with a niche target. The brand proposition ‘Power to you’ sounds a bit like marketing talk. On the other hand, it should give a creative agency enough inspiration to come up with an ‘empowering’ campaign. And the phrase ‘life is too short for hasty calls’ seems illogical (we always keep our calls short for the same reason), but makes sense when used in different ways – ‘Life is too short to search for Wifi’ etc. The campaign is accompanied by a set of banners, made by Achtung! And there’s also a ‘Power to you’ website (also made by Achtung!) dubbed ‘Upgrade a stranger’. Complete strangers, filmed with a hidden camera, can win different gadgets (a mini laptop, a mobile phone, etc.) when the visitors of the website vote for them. We wonder why the mutated guinea pigs don’t play a role in this. You want to push your ad property through different channels, right? And didn’t Vodafone choose for the partnership THEY/Achtung! to enrich the market with truly integrated advertising? To be continued…

The proof of the pudding…

Monday, August 31st, 2009

If you think this great ad for Activia was made unauthorized by an amateur creative, trying to build up a portfolio; you are very right! The ad was made by Anna Komarek – or rather, advertising agency Pink and Poodle, that conceived Anna. The ADCN (the Dutch art director’s club) asked Pink and Poodle to promote the new ADCN website, on which the ADCN members can from now on integrate their portfolio and social media pages. Anna – sexy and ambitious at the same time – infiltrated the ad creatives’ social networks in search of a job. She promoted herself on Facebook and Twitter, using YouTube video’s and a very ‘promising’ Flickr portfolio. And although most of Anna’s followers knew she was a hoax (”too staged”, as someone commented), her job hunt made pretty interesting content. And this of course immediately proofed the value of the improved ADCN site. Wonderful strategy, brilliant execution. Pretty lamp (= ADCN award) worthy!