Natwerk created this activation campaign for Diesel, which neatly follows up the Diesel Island ad, “Land of the Stupid, home of the Brave”, created by Santo London beginning of this year. So drop whatever you are doing when the ‘Beach Express’ drives by. We recommend you to grab the bus next week, when the temperature will be rising, cause it might be the last beach weather the Dutch ‘summer’ produces.

Royal Club (Vrumona-Heineken) and Schweppes (Dr. Pepper Snapple) have quite a lot in common. Both soft drinks are not your standard soft drink, because of their distinctive tastes. And both are often used for mixing drinks and thus easily associated with stylish get togethers. So it’s no coincidence that both brands at the moment use a character in a white suit to communicate the brands’ distinguished personalities. Royal Club already uses this character for a while. He was introduced in 2010 in a pretty smooth commercial created by Alfred. Now he’s back in this online activation that tells you how socially evolved you are; from amoeba to super hero. It uses your Facebook data together with the answers on some questions about how you would act in awkward situations during a date (“you accidentally kill your date’s parrot with a cork by popping the champagne while she’s away to slip into something more comfortable” What would you do?). We couldn’t tell how socially evolved we are, cause we didn’t have the patience to sit it all out – it’s quite a lengthy affair. Nevertheless the website is smartly designed by Rhinocreations. Then there is the Schweppes activation on the Schweppes Facebook fan page, created by Red Urban. We have to say that compared to the Royal Club man, the Schweppes man doesn’t look very attractive. He measures your ‘Schweppes appeal’ by letting you repeat some pick-up lines (with a French accent) in your microphone at the same speed and intonation – a very difficult task. It is hard for us to judge these Facebook-data/webcam/microphone interactions, cause we see them all the time – it has become more of the same. What’s good about them is that they engage the consumer for more than 30 seconds, but we’d be really curious to learn what they do for these brands – other than increasing the brand awareness.

Yet another car activation by Achtung! for Pon, the biggest Dutch Volkswagen (group) distributor in the Netherlands. This time for the Skoda Yeti. The concept, dubbed ‘Yeti Night Catch‘ resembles Achtung!’s successful ‘Catch the Polo’ from 2009, since the consumer has to catch a moving Yeti. The difference though is that the Yeti is not driven by a consumer, but moved secretly overnight to a new location. The consumer can follow the Yeti’s route on Google Maps and set a trap along its (predicted) route. Every time you catch it, you earn points and the overall winner wins a trip to South Africa. South Africa?! Doesn’t the legendary Yeti live in the Himalaya? Mmm. Maybe it’s a global warming thing.

Heather LeFrevre, head of account planning at StrawberryFrog (and columnist for Amsterdam Ad Blog) is seeking participants for her yearly global planner (read: adverting strategists) survey. It is the 7th year in a row she is conducting the survey. The survey includes questions like what do you like about your job, what do you earn, and where would you like to work as a planner. LeFevre started the survey because she wanted to find out if her salary was fair compared to her peers. Today the survey has grown into a serious affair. LeFevre is supported by a team of international volunteers in order to keep all the questions fresh and – more importantly – crunch all the data. LeFevre: “there are an estimated 10,000 planners in the world. Last year 1,578 participated and the goal is to reach more than 2,000 this year.” Here are the results of last year’s survey. The survey is open for three more weeks and the results expected around mid-August. If you call yourself a planner (or ad strategist), you can participate here.

Two weeks ago agency We Are Pi threw a heavily sponsored fund raising party for Japan where 350,000 people lost their homes due to the tsunami; “AI NIPPON ♥ 日本” – meaning ‘love Japan’. All the artist friends of We Are Pi were asked to create some artwork for the silent auction held at the party. The auction featured original artwork from Olivia Bee (Portland), Christian Weber (NYC), Genevieve Gaukler (Paris), Alvaro Sotomayor (Amsterdam), Superdeux (San Francisco), Akinori Oishii (Tokyo), Pierre Janneau (Amsterdam), Jeff Kling (NYC) and many more. So far the auction raised over $20,000. If you couldn’t make the party, the auction is still going on Marktplaats. The brand new agency We Are Pi was founded by Jamie Kim and Alex Bennett Grant who met at W+K Amsterdam. The agency’s model is based on creating ‘shared value’. With this auction the agency clearly practices what it preaches.

Last Thursday the Spinawards were divided between the top digital agencies in the Netherlands and Belgium. In ‘Online’ there were two golden awards; ‘Philips wake up the town’ (A fantastic concept by Tribal DDB) and ‘Hi-Tec Liquid Mountaineering’ (a very strongly executed viral by CCCP – judged as the best mockumentary of 2010 by Adage). There was one silver in Online; KLM Surprise (see embedded case film) – this also won gold in ‘Cross Media’. KLM Surprise winning two Spins was indeed a surprise. The concept is quite thin; passengers at Schiphol airport using Twitter or Foursquare were given a special gifts that matched their travel plans – seeding the shaky film footage online didn’t make it a stronger concept. In our opinion the only fair award for this surprise would have been in ‘Social Media’. Speaking of social media, in this category Boondoggle won silver for ‘Take Mokum’ – “a great way to activate your audience” is how we judged it back in September. The three awards for Boondoggle made it digital agency of the year – regardless the surprise a fair decision. KLM – also winning a second golden award for iFly Magazine in ‘Content’, created by Born 05 – became digital advertiser of the year. Considering the amount of innovative stuff KLM has created in the past year, their award was entirely deserved. Muse & Ice Mobile won gold in ‘Innovation’ for their app ‘Appie’. Indeed one of the more innovative concepts we’ve seen last year. Another gold went to the addictive game ‘Noisia Infection’, created by Flavour – “playful branding”. A very strong Spinaward (gold) went to the Blurshirt for Beachmasters (party holidays for teenagers), in the category ‘Young Talent’. It was  created by Nik Sluijs and Nanette Visser of de Willem de Kooning Acadamy. The shirt has a shotcode underneath the collar so that, when embarrassing pictures are uploaded on social media, the face above the collar automatically gets blurred. Now there’s a concept that taps into a serious target group need.

This is the concept of a new campaign by KesselsKramer for mobile phone provider Ben in a nutshell: if you are stuck to an extensive mobile phone contract and you can’t get rid off it, you might have an interesting story why you want to get rid of it. Tell your story through your webcam and if provider Ben likes it, it will buy off the contract and give you a flexible Ben contract instead. On top of that, you’re story will be ‘reconstructed’ by a bunch of actors. So the picture in this post is an example of the original versus the reconstructed story – here’s the ‘commercial’ (in Dutch) that comes with it. And just like the previous Ben ad, the takeout is of course that Ben is as flexible as a straw. Reconstructions remind us of missing persons and uninteresting television, but maybe it’ll work on the internet. In any case, it’s interesting too see how Ben adds production value to user generated content so that it becomes more interesting to watch.

We often wonder how long it will take before Google will bring us ‘Live Maps’. Hard to imagine, but at some point it’ll be there. Kong must have had the same thought when creating this ad for Cordaid. The online agency created a Streetview of Sudan, showing you a village where refugees live. At first it’s a normal streetview; you can scroll around, with your 360° view, and pass Justin Tambuz, 19 years old. She looks into the camera, not very happy. And then, all of a sudden, she starts to talk to you and tells you about her miserable conditions. “I was abducted by a rebel army and violently raped over a period of three months. I managed to escape and flee to Sudan. Now I’m in Makpandu refugee camp. We have little food and water and no bed to sleep in”. Wow, that’s heavy. Once she starts talking, there’s no escape. After all, you were curious enough to check out her refugee camp, so it feels a bit rude to click her away. And when, at the end, you are asked if you want to simply watch or take action – by paying only 10 Euros to help thousands of refugees in need – there’s not much that will stop you. Simple, impressive, and effective.

American Express – together with Cultuur-Ondernemen (‘Culture-Entrepreneurship’) – organized a design contest for the new ‘cards welcome’ sticker that shows which businesses accept Amex in Amsterdam – not very many we’ve always learned. The designs were to convey the essence of Amsterdam’s DNA. There were 86 entries, 31 nominees, and 5 winners. Last week the winners were announced at the Supperclub. The design pictured is the winning design of Thomas Clever and Gert Franke. They used the Andreas crosses from Amsterdam’s coat of arms in a pointillistic fashion. The second winner is Maja Bouwer, who combined Mondriaan with Amsterdam’s tolerance. The third winner is Sylvia Stølan, who was seemingly inspired by Van Gogh. And the fourth was Nina Zulian, who depicted Amsterdam’s canal houses in a fairly abstract style. Saliently 4 out of the 5 winners were born outside the Netherlands, which shows that apart from Mondriaan and Van Gogh, Amsterdam also raises non-Dutch ‘artists’. We guess it also proves that people feel easily at home here. Anyway, a nice example of consumer generated content – though the word ‘consumer’ doesn’t show quite enough respect for these guys.

A few weeks ago Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool criticized Amsterdam’s city marketing, because it would lack creativity. Quite ironic when ‘creativity’ is supposed to be one of Amsterdam’s USP’s. The only thing that connects the city’s scattered marketing activities is the brand ‘I Amsterdam’. And though these two words are quite visible throughout the city, no one really knows what it means. Responsible for building this brand – or not building it, if you will – is Amsterdam Partners, an ‘agency’ solely responsible for the exploitation of I Amsterdam. One of the most recent I Amsterdam ads, is this film through the eyes of a tourist. It asks tourists to explain (in video or writing) how they would spend €1000. The best submission wins *tada!* €1000. Indeed, not what we’d call creative advertising. We do think however that the catchy film makes Amsterdam look sexy and exciting – though we wondered why the Red Light District is more representative than a coffeeshop, another very important USP. The ‘commercial’ was created by Big Shots, an online video production agency that put itself more or less on the map with their wonderful anti-O’Reilly (Fox News) video ‘The truth about Amsterdam’ – the best piece of city marketing we’ve ever seen.