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.

Kong Amsterdam, the digital agency of N=5, built a very smart feature with Hyves (= Dutch Facebook) for the Dutch Ministry of Justice, called Stanislav. A video, with strong James Bond-like execution (the Eastern Europeans play  the bad guys), warns in quite a convincing way to be prudent about sharing your personal information online. When you watch the video through your Hyves profile, it uses your accessible data, like name, age, city and photos in the story. The subtle thing about it, is that you don’t realize it is using your profile content, until you all of a sudden see your friends’ and your own photo appear. Interesting detail: Hyves also gave the advertising agency access to the data of hidden profiles, which they weren’t allowed to do according their own terms & conditions – would that be a cyber crime? Anyway, a minor detail when you realize how useful and effective this message can be. And compliments to the government. Usually they make unconvincing, waste-of-money advertising.

Update: (August, 21st) Adformatie reports that the campaign was terminated this week, because of its overwhelming effect. Three million Hyvers watched the personalized video (out of 16,5 million Dutchmen), while the link was forwarded more than 7 million times. Impressive.

With the BMW test drive – a live, webcam broadcasted, online test drive – we already had a peek in the future of ‘on-offline’ activation. And although Pak de Polo (catch the Polo) seems heavily inspired by the BMW concept, this new Volkswagen campaign by Achtung! brings the idea to a much higher level. During one week the new Volkswagen Polo is driving through the Netherlands and anyone that sees it pass by can simply flag it down and become the next test driver. On the dedicated website you can submit your zip code if you want the car to move into your direction. A computer calculates an itinerary (based on the average of all the submitted zip codes) that is shown in the little GPS screen online. At the same time the co-pilot has little chit chats with the test drivers, making it a real life in-car soap that – we have to admit – is more compelling than we expected. There’s also a car following and filming the Polo, which enables the online viewer to change camera positions (top right corner). TV, Radio 538 and Hyves (= Dutch Facebook) give Pak de Polo extra exposure. Every day the test driver making the most kilometers is the day-winner. And at the end of the week all the day-winners battle each other for the most kilometers. We are really impressed and predict this concept to be the springboard to many more on-offine brand activations.

This great ad by TBWA\Neboko – featuring two housewarming hosts doing a tour through their brand new house and showing their favourite rooms - is conceptually strong and smoothly executed. The way we like advertising best! Interesting is that TBWA seeded the commercial through Hyves (the Dutch Facebook) before releasing it on television. The commercial is also a big hit on YouTube. There’s one thing we couldn’t figure out, though; why do the actors speak Dutch, when this ‘viral’ can easily serve the entire planet?