The new LG TV is so thin that you can easily smuggle it outside a store. The film made us immediately wonder why you want to be looking into a security camera when stealing a TV. But when you know that this viral scored 2.4 million hits on YouTube within 2 weeks, receiving the message that LG has the world’s slimmest TV, you can only call it a job well done. Created by Y&R.

There’s not many ad agencies that open a second office in the same city – especially when you live in the village called Amsterdam. Agency Nothing did though. And not just at some random location, but at IKEA. When we asked Nothing, is this a PR stunt or is there something else you’d like to share with us, Michael Jansen, partner at Nothing, answered; “Our office at Spaces [their current office building, AAB] is not very spacious. Maybe it’s good PR, but it’s especially the great m2 price, compared to the €250 per m2 we pay at the Herengracht, that lured us to this new location“. O.k., we get your point, a sense of humour it is.

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.

A nice concept to indirectly ask the visitors of a museum what the definition of art is – made us think of Banksy’s work smuggled into famous museums around the world. But we immediately thought, why on earth would KitKat want to expose its ‘art’ in a Museum in Twenthe – of all places? The only comparison between KitKat and abstract American art is…um… nothing. But of course it’s not about the people in the museum. They are just part of the candid camera show. The target lives on the internet and is so busy with checking their Facebook a zillion times a day, hoping to be entertained by random content shared by their friends and wannabee friends, that every now and then they might need a little break. Or even better, for most people the break is checking their Facebook. Tada; we have a match! Have a break, Have a KitKat – or ‘Have a Breakism’ as the ad was dubbed. We hope it’ll go as viral as KitKat Jesus – though we’re afraid our hope might not prove strong enough. Created by UbachsWisbrun/JWT.

That is probably the question the entire advertising world will be asking consumers in 2011. It’s quite incredible that in such a short time Facebook has turned brands into virtual ‘friends’ that politely ask for acknowledgment. This week we received two special ‘Like’ requests. One by Heineken (initiated by Fitzroy), asking us to ‘Like’ 2011 and to simultaneously wish our social network a happy 2011. And the other one by ‘Consumer & Safety’ (initiated by Eet Banaan, or eat banana), allowing us to warn our friends for the danger of fireworks. Since the branded ‘Like’ is still relatively new, most people click ‘Like’ without giving it much thought and the message goes viral in no time. Interesting times… Anyways, we hope to see you all back in one piece in 2011, so go easy on the Heinies when you’re doing fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

This is a bit of an odd one. So You Think You Can Dance – one of the many talent shows nowadays on the commercial channels – meets Radio 538. The latter is a radio station that recently introduced two radio helmets (in the colours of its visual identity) as advertising property – dubbed the ‘Stereoheads’. We like their distinctive character. We’re not quite sure what to think of the big dick though. We can imagine that – in their eagerness to create a ‘viral’ – the agency searched for something shocking, something completely over the top. However, somewhere in between the fourth spliff and third bottle of vodka, things got a little out of hand; “we’ll have the guy break dance on his dick!” someone screamed, immediately followed by testosterone fueled laughter. And since the client was sitting in on this intoxicating brainstorm, they even agreed on doing it – there and then. Only when 538 saw the end result, they realized their agency had actually been serious that crazy night. It was created by Pool Worldwide and directed by Paul Meijer – who has is own agency BeyenMeyer and shares his office building with Pool. This might very well create some traffic, but what to think of Radio 538 now? Crippled, but still potent?

Dutch navigation device manufacturer TomTom offers a very special set of new navigation voices in joint promotion with Star Wars. This viral – yes, we do consider it a viral – created by Pool Worldwide and directed by Willem Gerritsen (CZAR), advertises Yoda’s voice – on sale for US $13. In May Darth Vader was released. Very funny, though we can imagine – as the commercial already shows – that this voice will (literally) drive you nuts after a while. On the TomTom website you can also listen to voice samples of the other Star Wars characters – Darth Vader, C-3PO, and Han Solo. There’s also a Star Wars game – we could almost hear the client say “let’s also do a game”. It has to do with augmented reality through your webcam, using the force and winning ‘a personalized Yoda voice’ – whatever that may be. All in all, TomTom – in difficult times because of the recession and tough (mobile phone) competition – and Pool have done a great job in turning TomTom into a more likeable brand.

Source: Adformatie

Just when we thought that virals were a bit passé, we came across this fellow, made by CCCP. It’s a mockumentary about ‘liquid mountaineering’. The video tries to sell waterproof trainers from Hi-Tec, a British sports brand. It has been viewed 4.5 million times in one month. The Sunday Times – for what it’s worth – called it one of the best hoaxes of this year. We’re not sure if we concur, cause you can hardly call it a hoax – unless you believe that Jesus could do the same. But we like it. The fact that you know it’s fake doesn’t really matter, since the execution is subtle enough to be able to enjoy it – it was directed by Gerrit Willemsen from CZAR. And unlike many other virals, it even conveys a message; If you go Jesus hiking, Hi-Tec is your brand.

Romke Oortwijn (Copywriter and partner at N=5)  showed Stanislav, a short video made by N=5’s digital agency Kong. It tells the story about criminals abusing profile photos from social website Hyves (Dutch Facebook). It was spread through the members of the platform and showed every user a custom made video featuring his/her own personal data. The big idea was not making a web film about the ‘cyber mafia’ abusing a social network platform, but the big idea was smartly (and digitally) integrating social profile data in  the video.

As opposed to Oortwijn, Matthew Atkatz (ECD Riot) clearly represents the digital generation. Atkatz showed another very strong online case for Adidas featuring Dwight Howard – playing basketball in the NBA. During All Star Weekend he was documented with modern communication tools (like vodcasts, Twitter, etc.) and could thus be followed by his fans. Again, you could ask whether ‘digital’ was the big idea here. Or was it closely following Howard for three days with existing communication tools? Probably the latter, but maybe a bit of both.

Another topic of the evening was – as Raphael Mazoyer, digital communications manager at Asics, put it – the difference between seeing and doing (or as Oortwijn put it: one-way vs two-way communication, or as Atkatz put it: bottom up vs top down). Asics wants to engage its consumers by letting them do something that is useful for them. Ironically he considered Nike+ as the benchmark, while at the same time showing an Asics website that did not support his point – the website clearly conveyed a message about Asics, but it didn’t seem useful to the consumer at all. The distinction Mazoyer made between seeing and doing did make sense though. As we would put it; digital helps brands to create brand utilities; digital tools that render brand related services.

Florian Schmitt (Hi-Res) dialed in to tell us something about the alternate reality game ‘The Lost Experience’ he built for Channel 4 and the hit TV program Lost. Creatively a brilliant case, but Schmitt always advised his clients not to try to do the same thing – keep it simple. The reason might be that clients will always be clients; they want return on investment. And the question is how many new viewers this ARG generated for Channel 4/Lost. Or as the marketer in Mazoyer put it typically: the success of a campaign can only be measured by the “KPI’s” (key performance indicators).

Finally the discussion went into the direction of production value. The hypothesis was that advertisers expect online film productions to be cheap. And this surprised us a little. If you only talk about ‘virals’ it is probably true. But we’ve seen so many good examples of long form content with big production budgets recently. To name a few; Martini, Ararat and McDonald’s. Therefore we would like to state the opposite; in the future advertisers will have more budget available for big productions, because they can create their own (online) channel and don’t need big media budgets to be wasted on (traditional) TV channels.

We still don’t know when exactly digital is part of the big idea and when it merely facilitates it, but it was an inspiring night and we look forward to the next one.