Bit strange. “Your dad and mom have a great surprise for you. We’ve been thinking about the winter holiday, and this year we won’t stay in Tirol. We’ll go to…Holland”. The kids immediately know what that means; the ‘Vaalserberg’ (a shitty hill that cannot be called a mountain) and ‘koek and zopie’ (the term for cookies and a warm drinks sold on the frozen lakes where people ice skate). The son is so thrilled that he asks dad to play some music. Then the voice over: “Our winters are starting to stand out, so you better be prepared. Do the Peugeot winter check.” It’s quite entertaining. And it’s also well produced (First on Mars), directed (Herman Poppelaars), and acted, but it almost makes you wonder whether the idea was there before the client briefing. Created by EuroRSCG.

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.

What we like about this ad is that you can fully imagine these guys sitting in one car and all reacting differently on the crash that got them decapitated. We especially like the stare of the driver, facing his destiny bravely – a nice case of method acting. And of course it’s all well captured by photographer Krijn van Noordwijk (hazazaH). Somewhat ironic maybe that TopGear Magazine asked EuroRSCG to create an ad (yet another – here’s #1) about the risks of driving, but then again, Heineken also asks its customers to drink responsibly.

There’s a new kid in town; Kingsday, a EuroRSCG 4D break away, founded by Sander Volten, Bram de Rooij, Sicco Beerda, and Eric Ytsma (in the photo – taken by Jasper Zwartjes – from left to right). The name is inspired by Queensday, a day that turns Amsterdam into one big party and during which “openness, spontaneity, and entrepreneurship meet”. Since these guys always look ahead – digital is incorporated in their DNA – they are anticipating the succession of the Royal throne by Willem Alexander, who will be taking over from his mother, Queen Beatrix. Hence, Kingsday. The agency wants to merge advertising, PR, and digital, which does sound like the ultimate mix. After all, advertising is mainly good in building a strong message, digital mainly in using state of the art techniques, and PR mainly in seeding. Not many agencies master all of these qualities at the same time. Kingsday’s ambition is to work for both Dutch and international clients and to start playing ‘Champion’s League’ straight away. Though there’s not one big founding client, the agency is talking with many different potential clients, so we trust these talented admen to be back on the pitch soon enough. We wish them all the best!

Adidas is moving its digital account from 180’s Riot to Sid Lee. A worrying move for 180, since it makes Sid Lee, already working for Adidas Originals,  own yet another piece of the advertising pie. Through the grapevine we also heard that Boston based Arnold will be opening an Amsterdam office at the end of this year to service its international client Volvo. This sounds like an efficient move since Volvo’s international digital agency EuroRSCG 4D is already based in Amsterdam.

World Cup: Bavaria’s Dutch Dress babes arrested in South Africa
It almost sounds like a hoax, but through the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, we learned that a group of girls showing off their Bavaria Dutch Dress (created by Selmore) were arrested from their hotel in Johannesburg last night. Since Budweiser is the exclusive WC sponsor, no other beer brands are allowed in the stadium. The girls (getting paid by Bavaria) were disguised as Danish supporters when entering the stadium to see Holland-Denmark play. Once they were in, they revealed their sexy dresses and started to draw attention from the crowd. Ambush marketing in its purest form! And ironically, thanks to the arrest this news will travel the world!

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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.

EuroRSCG4D created a Facebook page – together with LBi Göteborg – for the Volvo C30 DRIVe. The new Volvo can drive 1333 kilometer on a full tank, thanks to the start/stop system and regenerative charging. Surprisingly enough these technologies are not mentioned on the website, which is a different approach from Volkswagen that recently introduced a special ingredient brand: Blue Motion Technologies. Instead, Volvo chose the playful route. On the dedicated Facebook page you can invite your Facebook friends to virtually drive around the world in as few stops as possible. So for example, if you live in Amsterdam you virtually drive to Berlin, where a Facebook friend drives the next lap to Moscow, from there another friend drives further east, until the car has completely circled the earth. To win the game, every single lap has to be as close as 1333 kilometers as possible.  If you win, Volvo donates € 15,000 in your name to a project that fights global warming. Since we couldn’t play the game (the site told us “Oops, something went wrong. We are working on fixing this problem”), it’s difficult to judge it properly, but we wonder whether this prize gives the consumer enough incentive. We know, global warming is ‘hot’ and all, but consumers are still very opportunistic. So if you want them to play a game online, it either has to be very engaging or give away great prizes – a C30 DRIVe for example.

This year Amsterdam is hosting the Eurobest festival, so as Amsterdam Ad Blog we thought it would be appropriate to pay a little more than average attention to it. As you you’ve been able to see in the banner on our website – that has probably become a little annoying by now – the festival will be held on the 25th until the 27th of November. Yesterday the jury was announced. The following Amsterdam Creative Directors have the privilege to judge the best of Europe’s advertising: Chris Baylis, Tribal DDB (traditional); Sicco Beerda, Euro RSCG (jury president interactive); Coen Weesjes, Downtown (direct & sales promotion); Eugene Bay, VBAT (design); Andy Fackrell, 180 Amsterdam (jury president integrated) and Magnus Olsson, Saatchi & Saatchi (integrated).

This website was made by EuroRSCG Amsterdam. Through a security camera, you can follow the indecisiveness of a KFC customer ‘live’ – but not really. As if to say, at KFC it all looks so good, it’s too hard to make a choice. If you guess what he will eventually choose, you can win ‘fantastic prizes’. In itself a nice idea. But it immediately made us think of the subservient chicken, made by Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King in 2004. It went very viral and was one of the first great examples of the interactive potential of online advertising. Although the KFC guy is not dressed up like a chicken (he only wears a fake beard) and does not do funny moves on request, it is the poor quality of the footage, the fake perception of live action and the funny ‘highlights’ that it has in common with the Burger King ad. And of course the CP+B campaign was (ironically) also promoting chicken. If you think the link to the Burger King campaign is too farfetched; the website even more reminds us of a commercial from the other big fast food chain; McDonald’s. In 2007 TBWA\Neboko made a commercial with kids not being able to choose at the counter. The pay-off: lots of variation in our happy meals, makes it a tough choice.