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…

These are the Easter eggs that were hidden by Holland’s biggest supermarket chain, Albert Heijn (AH), in the latest version (1.5) of its iPhone App. The App, called Appie – a good choice of name, since many Dutch use it as the grocer’s nick-name – helps its customers to make a grocery list, search for recipes and of course find the latest ‘Bonus’ offers. Though probably only a tiny part of AH’s customer base will frequently use the App, it shows that AH wants to create added value for its customers in an innovative way. And that, we believe, makes the grocer very likeable. And since we’re only at the beginning of the App revolution, you can expect many more services on the App(ie) in the future. Anyway, to show that AH has a sense of humour, some Easter eggs were hidden in the App this Easter. On Twitter (#Appie) hints were given about where one could find the eggs. AH also hid a IRL Easter Egg in one of its stores. The person that found it, won an iPad (not on sale yet in the Netherlands). The Apps were built by digital agency Muse. If the 1.0 version of the App won’t win an award (for digital advertising) at the SpinAwards tomorrow, the 1.5 version definitely should next year.

This is quite an innovative ad for Samsung. We’re a bit late showing it, since the Olympics are already over, but the mechanism of this ‘spectacular’ is quite impressive. The video basically speaks for itself; you can film and mail yourself directly from the interactive tram halt. The content is a bit lame, but we’ll forgive Samsung. At least we’re getting the message that de Samsung Omnia has an app that allows you to follow the Winter Olympics wherever you are – although we have to say that we could do the same with the offcial Vancouver App on our iPhone. Anyway, it was made by Media Republic and 2010 in collaboration with JC Decaux.

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.

We’ve been writing quite a lot about Vodafone in the past months. Mainly because the mobile company seems to be in some sort of identity crises. Every time we see a Vodafone advertisement it communicates in a different way, with a different style and seems to be targeted at a different group of consumers. It started with the mutated guinea pigs, then they were giving away phones and other stuff, then you had to search for them (off and online) and the previous promotion asked us: ‘Who wants to be a prepaid millionaire?’. This time it’s not about your knowledge, but about your luck. That is, if we go by the campaign proposition: ‘Lucky Calls’. The concept is simple: you just call your favourite phone and ‘Anouk’ picks it up by moving through the screen in different ways. When you can answer a really simple question, you might win the phone. Not until you’ve submitted your personal data though – so Vodafone can add you to their database. Fortunately digital agency Super Heroes tried to make it all as digestible as possible.

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!

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…

This week we read on Adrants about an iPod app made for Hardee’s, an American fast food chain that makes – among other things – supersized, cholesterol building French Dip Thickburgers. The app, called Parisian Pick Up, allows you to pick-up girls and Hardee’s burgers – both meat, right? Adrants’ Steve Hall writes: “users can select their favorite French mouth image, select a message, and then hold the screen over their mouths to deliver it with a swarthy French accent or in perfect French with subtitles”. Great app, you would say. But the idea is not new, unfortunately. It’s practically identical to Vanabbetotvessem’s Lovelips app, we wrote about two months ago. And a remarkable detail – that more or less rules out the coincidence  of two great minds thinking alike – is that 72andSunny, the agency responsible for the Hardee’s app, has an office in Amsterdam. Opening up an office in Amsterdam for ‘inspiration’, now all of a sudden renders a whole new connotation.