This Citroën DS5 Twitter Race is the first race ever (as far as we know) via Twitter. The concept is quite simple; you can navigate the DS5 towards yourself via Twitter and win it. We’ve seen a similar concept by Volkswagen and Achtung!, but using Twitter as the navigation tool is new. On the dedicated Facebook page Citroën constantly gives the Twitter crowd a choice (e.g. left or right) and the ‘wisdom’ of crowds decides where it should go. A count down clock decides when the race is over and (this feels as a bit of an anti-climax) when the time is up, the car pulls over and a sign is held up with a message. The first person to tweet this message wins the DS5. At the time of publishing this post there’s about half an hour to go and the car is near Bussum – if you live there start looking out for it. We always wonder what kind of people have time to be engaged in a game that consumes most of your day, but since it’s trending on Twitter (NL) it does get the needed exposure. It was created by EuroRSCG and Perfect Fools.

Weird, but pleasantly weird. That was our first thought when we saw this commercial for telco provider Ben, created by Kumpany and directed by Hein Mevissen. The story roughly combines the tradition of Sinterklaas (the Dutch St. Nick) with the style of a Spaghetti Western. The protagonist is wearing Ben’s corporate colour and needs to “deliver this sack to Holland”. We don’t know what our blue friend is carrying or when he will be arriving in “Holland”, but that’s o.k. cause according to the press release nobody knows. To make the campaign integrated, you can follow him on Facebook and see what places he is visiting. One thing seems pretty sure, he’ll bring something for everyone – which is probably an interesting telco deal with Ben. It’s quite a bold choice of Ben to change its advertising property so radically. Then again, it is the only wise choice to make Ben stick out again in the overcrowded competitive field. Ben was introduced in 1999 by KesselsKramer with a legendary style that was so distinctive that the brand obtained instant fame. Then T-Mobile bought the brand, killed it in 2003, and made it come back again in 2008. But it was never able to reclaim its fame. This brand new commercial has the potential to do so. Let’s see what happens.

Last time we judged KesselsKramer’s work for Hans Brinker more of the same. Well, here is something new. And we like it. This dedicated YouTube channel invites people to create some advertising for the Hans Brinker hotel – “the most discouraging hotel of Amsterdam”. The reason that Hans Brinker asks the crowd to help out, is that it believes in advertising, but not in fancy advertising agencies. It doesn’t matter whether you share “a talking kitten, your drunk friend cycling or a Rick Astley video” you just have to make sure that you mention Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. When a video reaches a 1,000 views, Hans Brinker will pay you €10 in cash. It looks like KesselsKramers – Hans Brinker’s fancy advertising agency – made some nice examples to trigger the crowd. If these examples help to make this campaign actually get picked up by the crowd, we’ll like it even more.

Quite an integrated campaign this new work ‘See what light can do’ by Tribal DDB and DDB Amsterdam for Philips. A ‘lightover’ team – based on the successful home make-overs – visits 29 homes in 8 countries around the world to show how the right lighting can transform your house into a much more atmospheric environment – the insight behind it; light changes your mood. The results are presented online. This content is not exactly our kind of content, since we’re not big fans of home make-over TV, but we can easily imagine it will persuade enough consumers to start thinking about LED and – more importantly – see Philips as the thought leader in this field. Part of the platform is a ‘3D Home Lighting Designer’ app that helps consumers to choose between different lighting options and advises them on which (Philips) products to buy. There’s also a Facebook page where you get in contact with the experts on ‘light design’. To generate mass attention Tribal/DDB also created a (bit of a corporate) commercial in which Philips presents its platform as the future of lighting. Together with the recent Wake-up Light campaigns, Philips is firmly reclaiming its strong heritage of being the lighting expert.

Brands that beg for Likes – without presenting any Likeable content – don’t really understand how social media work. We usually don’t ‘Like’ these brands, because they just want to spam your Wall. But when every Like begged very smartly represents a condom to support an educational project set up by Stop Aids Now! in Kibagare, Nairobi (Kenia), you can easily earn our sympathy. Even if the content (in Dutch) is not necessarily very likeable; Nicolette Kluijver – who presents a TV program about sex and drugs – asks for your condom (read: Like) in a few different short films. Apparently we’re not the only ones that find this campaign sympathetic, cause the target of 20.000 condoms was met in merely 2 days. The target has now been raised to 40.000. Created by Achtung!

Not really groundbreaking, this banner created by Kong, but way more interesting than your average banner and therefore more effective we’d guess. The banner educates us about using our mobiles as a weapon to identify offenders; “Catch the thief Use your mobile”. We wouldn’t recommend the shopkeeper to use his mobile, cause he’s being robbed with a gun – clearly a stronger weapon. It’s for the bystanders. The banner allows you to move your pointer over the scrambled thieve to make him visible. And with a click of the mouse you can capture him. You could call it practice. We can imagine it’ll help the police, but if feels a little dangerous nevertheless. What if this adrenaline pumped figure stops to direct his fear and aggression towards the person behind the mobile phone? Maybe the government should use this banner in combination with a disclaimer; ‘taking photo’s of criminals might get you killed’.

A very nice stop-motion film for Fair Trade created by KesselsKramer and directed by André Maat (hazazaH). The copy basically comes down to the fact that when you buy Fair Trade you are “fairbezig” (literally ‘fair busy’). It is clear that the commercial tries to persuade us to buy Fair Trade, but to know why buying Fair Trade is good for you (or your karma) you need to go to the fairbezig website. And there we see a big picture of a monkey choosing Robert Smit’s banana (no pun), which makes Robert win a golden fair trade banana. And that’s where we lost interest. Why not make a website about how Fair Trade works?

Beginning of this month we wrote about a viral – if we may – for the Amsterdam Maritime (‘Scheepvaart’) museum; “No Facebook without the Dutch” it was dubbed. Apparently – and wisely – all of the museum’s budget goes towards online, cause last week we encountered yet another great piece of digital advertising; a site take-over – again a collaboration between One Big Agency, CCCP, and SuperHeroes. When you pull the plug to let the water run away, the Netherlands all of a sudden has become part of Spain and the Dutch news site ‘Nu’ changes into ‘Ahora’. History changes and the news accordingly; queen Beatrix is merely a sculptor now, Dutch brand Philips is called Philips II (after the ruler of Spain in the 16th century), a separatist organization claims to stick to Dutch (a cameo for CCCP’s copywriter and art director); Wesley Sneijder (“Esnaider”) scores for Spain, and Jan Smit (“Juan Smit”) with mustache releases a new album. This time the message is: “Without shipping no Orange” (the royal colour) and again the Scheepvaart museum teaches us how important the maritime history has been for the Netherlands. Usually we ignore banners or – when they obscure a site – search for the ‘delete’ button straight away, but not with this banner that entertained us for almost 10 minutes. It could be a lesson for those advertisers who think that buying banner positions is the same as making an impact – it is not.

We don’t really like this case film – though Lemz’ new case film voice-over is an improvement – but we do very much like the ‘Live Reply’ concept conceived by Lemz. KLM wanted to convey the message that they have a social media service, which answers all your questions 24/7 through Twitter and Facebook within the hour. That in itself is quite innovative. And communicating it through 140 KLM employees that physically hold up the answer gets easily picked up by the same social media. The only unfortunite thing is that we tried it and only received an answer the next day. We’ll forgive KLM though, since it shows they embrace both new ways of communication and their customers. A lesson to be learned; if you actually listen to your customers, they will be very forgiving.

Last year we were much impressed by Tribal DDB’s work for the Philips Wake-up Light. The agency made an entire village in the Arctic use a Wake-up Light and share their experiences – they even made a documentary about it. This year Philips and Tribal DDB chose to go for the masses; everyone can test the product (for free). That is, not everyone, but a ‘selected’ group of consumers that ‘Like’ the Wake-up Light Facebook fan page. This group can download an app (on iPhone) to register the ease of waking up on a daily basis. You can also simply do a quiz to find out whether you are a “Morning person” – or a ‘zombie’, ‘grump’, ‘early bird’, etc. Apparently the proof of this product is really in the eating. But it fascinates us that even though this product feels scientifically sound, it is so hard for Philips to make everyone use it. That is, we’ve never come across one except in Tribal DDB’s campaigns. Is it the price of the product (around €100)? The appearance maybe? Or are consumers simply conservative by nature? Probably a bit of each. Anyway, compared to the Wake-up light itself, Tribal DDB has done everything possible to make things look attractive. The film was produced by Mini Vegas and Revolver Media. The animations were done by Keytoon Animation Studio and the website was built by MediaMonks.