The ‘My Baby & Me’ app made for Philips’ sub brand Avent can help you keep a log of your baby’s growth, weight, sleep, and feeding. The app also allows moms to upload photos, register milestones – like first time crawling – and gives practical tips. Here you can see the instruction film. With this new app, created by Muse and Ice Mobile, Philips is yet another step closer to the simplicity in its own pay-off ‘Sense & Simplicity’. It shows that Philips (finally) understands the importance of intuitive software that enhances the functionality of its hardware. Welcome to the future of consumer electronics.
An online thingy for mobile provider Ben, created by KesselsKramer and (technically) realised by We Are Just. With the light on your mobile and a webcam the site berichtinhetdonker.nl (message in the dark) helps you to write an appropriate message to your friends in these dark days before Christmas. It isn’t easy we have to say. The darkness is really important for the ‘light writing’ technique to work and you need to keep a little distance. It took us 6 attempts to create this very arty AAB message – as you can imagine “Merry Christmas” was a bridge too far. Once you’ve created your own message, you can share it via different social media. Meh.
This very basic phone, branded John’s Phone, was created by Amsterdam agency John Doe. As it is the most simple mobile phone you can imagine, it is dubbed ‘dumbphone’ – you cannot even text with it. But it’s also made with a sense of humour, since it carries a pen and small address book (at the back) to write down (sic) mobile numbers. The phone’s simpleness gives it a stand-by time of three weeks. And since the phone is also made of soy it’s (partly) bio degradable. John’s comes in different colours and this week a golden limited edition (picture) will be released at the luxury department store De Bijenkorf. The phone is not the first product John Doe has created. With the brand From The Supermarket (“Buy it, and it’s yours”) the agency already made Japanese styled water cartons, t-shirts, and even a scooter called Toni Electroni. John’s Phone could be very successful for its simplicity and the fact that it combines design with eco, but its limited ‘smartness’ could just as well be the nail in its coffin. Only the future will tell. In any case John Doe has once more put itself on the map quite smartly.
There’s so much to see a the Uitmarkt that you might need a few extra sets of eyes. That’s what this poster communicates quite literally. It was created by Studio Jona (photographed by Arjan Benning) for the Amsterdam Uitburo. The Uitmarkt, which was held last weekend, is a market that shows what the new cultural season has to offer. Artists publicly give a free sneak peek into their acts to get the cultural audience excited and make it run to the box offices. Because there’s so much to see Delft/Amsterdam based agency Fabrique – together with Q42 – created the ‘Uit app’, an app that displays the full Uitmarkt program. The app is navigable by artist, genre, time, and place. After the Uitmarkt the app is still useful for showing – and updating – the ‘Uit’ agenda.
On September 13th the World’s youngest Fomula 1 racer, Lewis Hamilton, will compete against a virtual racecar, built up from 28.800 Facebook profile photos – we’ve also uploaded our own. The question is, who will finish first; Hamilton in a racecar, on a 2.7 Km track, or the 288 MB Facebook car that will be downloaded with Vodafone’s mobile network. It wouldn’t surprise us if the Facebook car wins, since the campaign is there to display the speed of Vodafone’s new, upgraded network. According to Vodafone, it is as fast as the average computer connection. That is quite a claim. And if true, how about communicating; “Vodafone’s new network; as fast as a landline”. Anyway, if you would like to see the actual race, it will be shown live on Facebook. Created by Achtung!.
“If you don’t want to miss a thing this summer, send a SuperSwyper“, is what this poster communicates. Since Apple has introduced the iPhone, every mobile phone manufacturer tries to copy its intuitive navigation. Samsung is no exception. There’s one thing though that Samsung tries to do better, and that’s ‘Swyping’ instead of typing. With one continuous movement of your finger, you can swipe a word. And since typing on an iPhone can be very frustrating, the potential of this technology might prove an important innovation. The mobile phone manufacturer that is steadily growing to become one of the big players in the land of consumer electronics, claims that swiping is 1,5 times faster than typing. We cannot judge whether this is true, but it sounds promising. Muse was asked to create a campaign that explains the ease of use of swiping – for the Galaxy S. The Amsterdam agency came up with Samsung SuperSwypers, a team of journalists that you can send to an event to register it. It’s one of those ingenious campaigns that displays tech savvyness, but doesn’t seem to tap into a genuine consumer need – why need journalists, if you have friends to keep you posted on interesting events? That’s why we think it will fail to reach a broad audience. Having said that, we are curious whether swiping will become the new category standard.
Update: Today (August, 12) Samsung bought a blogpost on GeenStijl. This means the SuperSwypers will get some serious attention now!
The Nivea Sun app – created by Muse and app builder Ice Mobile – provides the consumer with up to date news about UV radiation. The app combines your GPS location, time of day and skin type, to tell you how long you can stay in the sun with a certain type of SPF. In fact, it will give you a notification when you have to get out of the sun. Though we would expect this kind of brand utility to be created specifically for the Australian market – where 1 out of every 3 persons is diagnosed with skin cancer at some point – it’s a pretty smart way to become the expert in ‘protection’. The only problem might be that it’s a little too innovative for Nivea Sun’s core ‘utility’ target – mother’s with young children? We also have to mention that it made us immediately think of SSSS&Orchestra’s Sun Radar – a brand utility that tells you which ‘Wieckse Witte’-serving terraces are sunny. But advertising is an incestueus industry anyway, so let us praise Nivea for not choosing the obvious road and understanding the added value of a brand utility.
We quite like this teaser that smoothly combines film and animation to announce a very ‘hip’ party in London. Throughout May and June the Volvo Subject60 launch party will be touring the top 5 European cities – Berlin, London, Paris, Milan and Madrid – to promote the new “naughty” Volvo S60. These parties top off the Subject60 code search campaign; 20 cubes – giving access to the parties – were hidden in the different cities. And readers of the most influential fashion/design/music blogs were hinted about their locations on a map. Through augmented reality app Layar the exact cube locations could be unlocked. As far as we know it’s the first time that Volvo directs its brand so clearly into the direction of ‘hipness’. That sounds like a bit of a stretch. We don’t know about the rest of Europe, but in the Netherlands the sound car brand is primarily driven by doctors, accountants and other reliable folk. So here the positioning might be pushing it one bridge too far. Anyway, the campaign was created by EuroRSCG 4D – Volvo’s digital agency that already for a long time quite successfully runs Volvo’s international online account.
This commercial by Amsterdam agency N=5 for LOI – a commercial education institute – was awarded a Dutch ‘SAN Accent’ last week. The SAN Awards is the only award festival organized by advertisers. With the pay-off “Holland gets smarter and smarter”, the commercial tells the story of a family visiting an Italian restaurant. The waiters are talking not very respectfully (in Italian) about the ‘blond’ daughter, her mother and the ‘ugly’ dad. Then the dad says in fluent Italian ‘Hey, pasta face, if you’re finished talking with your girlfriends, can you please give us some of your time?’ Three other N=5 campaigns were also awarded, but the most important award for N=5 was ‘Agency of the year’. An understandable choice. The agency is known for keeping a strong balance between esthetic and strategic advertising – though in the past years they’ve somewhat neglected this unique positioning. Bol.com (the Dutch Amazon) was elected advertiser of the year. Its catchy campaigns, created by Etcetera, all communicate the message ‘Another reason to buy at Bol.com’. Albert Heijn – the biggest supermarket chain in the Netherlands – was awarded the ‘Consitency award’ – the smartly integrated and very succesful campaigns are created by TBWA. Among all the winners, our favourite campaign was created by Brand New Telly for LG. The LG Renoir, the first mobile phone with a 8 megapixel camera, was hyped by shooting the entire campaign with the camera itself. The agency asked renowned photographer Carli Hermès to follow and photograph world famous DJ Armin van Buuren during a 24 hour long stay in Jakarta. The beautiful black and white pictures were used in print, for Van Buuren’s new album cover and for an exclusive photo book for LG dealers. Some short films of the project were spread online. With this truly original approach the LG Renoir became both the medium and the message.
Finally, the first example of Layar – the augmented reality browser – applied in advertising. Created by TAB World Media, a company that specializes in augmented outdoor advertising. With an Android or iPhone you can watch the new trailer of Walt Disney’s ‘Prince of Persia, The sands of time’ through Layar. But of course there’s more. The Dutch AR browser also gives access to a game. The movie character Tamina speaks to the player (see image) and explains you need to answer three questions. By answering correctly the player can earn 50 ‘Movie Minutes’ – for 90 MM you can buy a DVD. The Layar also gives access to an augmented cinema locator and the option to share the game within your social network. We look forward to the future – this is just the beginning…
