The level of engagement depends on how immersive the brand wishes to communicate with their audience. Coming out with refreshing ideas has always been the constant challenge for brands seeking to break through the clutter. Looking at Danish brand, Castello, a cheese company in New York City creating impact in their brand marketing effort is simply astounding. Check out how they erect a museum in New York’s grand central station. They even elevate the experience further by introducing edible art pieces! Passer by can have a taste of their delicious cheese by reaching into the paintings! Not only does the experience intrigue both smell and taste, it is visually appeasing. Awesome.
Wow, this has got to be one of most incredible dance video I have seen for the past few months. Excellent execution by Brooklyn-based studio Wild Combination, for Pillar Point’s single, “Dreamin”. What we see is the flexible aerobatic moves from dancer Daisuke Omiya, as he slice through the streets of New York. So much grace and tempo, director Jacob Krupnick managed to capture beautiful intricate details in tandem to the strokes of dance moves. I am certainly stoked by this brilliant combination of music, art and technology. Why do I sense that this could be some promo video for clothing giants like Uniqlo? Anyways, check out the video.
Tell me you love this. Whats more amazing than to prank on others, gets a heap of awareness and still communicate your message without physically showing it? Prankvertising as they called it, has been quite popular in New York. AMC’s Walking Dead returns with a rather loud opening isn’t it? We see people getting shock as they stroll past street grates as zombie hands raise from beneath the drainage. Love those shocking moments from passerby. Nice!
If you haven’t played Plants vs Zombies yet, you can go check out how lovely and adorable a Yeti can look like. Hehe. Personally, I have always fancy having a snow Yeti toy. One that is flurry and fat, it just make you wanna cuddle it so badly. This holiday, creative agency, Iris Worldwide has done a fantastic job for Saks Fifth Avenue’s store display. What they are featuring this Christmas is a Yeti! They unveiled the installation on November 25 and bring forth a blasting light show with an amazing light projection of the face of a lovely yeti right on the building itself. Check out the video and have a look at how the shop windows were all decked up in a whimsical theme where there were storybooks with interesting interactive content featuring the yeti as he goes on a journey from being one obscure snow monster to a lovely well appreciated snow artist! Awwww Nice! They have also brought the experience on to mobile, making the experience seamless. You can literally activate the app, type in your name, and with a swipe of your finger, throw that snowflake you created on your mobile into the window display live! Awesome! Apart from mobile and outdoor, there is an online experience where site visitors could create their very own yeti! What do you know? This year mr yeti is here to bring you a rather integrated christmas experience!
In Singapore, drivers text while they are behind the wheels, be it waiting for the lights or halfway through along the expressways. The act of doing so, makes it extremely difficult to focus on the road causing possible road accidents as well as road hogging if one slows down inevitably to answer a text message. Interestingly, New York has developed a really brilliant initiative to curb this problem for drivers. They decided to come up with the idea of creating ‘text stops’ along the roads. There are currently plans to roll out 91 ‘Texting Zones’ along state highways, all in the effort to recommend drivers to pull over to a safe zone and do their texting before continuing. There are signs like “Text Stop” or “It can wait” that has a note on how far away is the nearest texting zone, rest stop as well as parking area. This provides drivers with higher tendency to take a break there and complete their texting ‘duties’.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has lately signed legislation to increase point penalty as well as license suspension and revocation for texting while driving.
“New York State is continuing to use every tool at its disposal to combat texting-while-driving,” Governor Cuomo says in a statement. “We are sending a clear message to drivers that there is no excuse to take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road because your text can wait until the next Texting Zone.”
When will Singapore come out with an interesting policy like this? I’m guessing it might not be in due time as we are sacred on land and over crowded with enormous amount of vehicles on the road. Meanwhile, drive safe people.
Technology, innovation and creativity are potentially the main ingredients to the solution of our future. With these elements, we are able to provide better solutions for those who are less fortunate. As able people, we do not see the possible difficulties that people on wheelchairs would feel. Unfortunately, to travel around in New York City, it could prove to be a daunting task for wheel chair users. Wheel NY, a new Kickstarter project, aims to bring on a less time consuming experience and easier transport solution for wheel chair users by collating all accessibility information together from various sources.
It will help users to plan much easier and earlier in order to forecast possible obstacles that may come. With the maps section, one could not only plan, they can also check to see if there are broken lifts, damaged pathways or cracked sidewalks that would deem unfit for wheelchairs along the way. Now, with the ability to get real-time updates on these accessibility statuses, the disabled would now be able to open up to more places. It opens up many possibilities for the disabled. They can now feel more than just the joy of having a nice movie or a great meal, but also a taste of transport freedom. It is a dream come true.
The current Kickstarter project status requires $50,000 to fund the app and web development. Currently running $40,000 short with approximately two weeks more to go, it hopes to have more people contributing as the bulk of these funds would go to a team of 4-5 responsible to bring this idea to live from ideation to design and eventually the development and launch. Definitely a great app with the ability to make a change to the world. It also has one of the key characteristics of a well planned mobile app – Scalability. One of the key considerations was the adaptation of this app onto other cities, helping the rest of world’s disabled people to regain their mobility freedom.
We have yet another funny commercial from Footlocker in collaboration with BBDO New York. This time featuring NBA players James Harden and Stephen Curry. It starts off with Stephen storming into the recording studio stopping Harden from continuing his music recording session. Harden wishes to progress his career more by developing his music talent. His concept of staying “Fresh” while being ahead in his career, was busted with Curry advising him to go get that freshness at Footlocker. A nice way to put across the brand message from an in-story script approach where we see a nice honest scene between two friends here. Thanks to Curry, Harden realizes his crappy recording after a play back. Interesting yet amusing approach to make celebrity endorsements less mundane.
“Google Maps’ receives a very good interpretation of it’s visual aesthetics from a graphical perspective depict through the eyes of New York-based graphic designer Matt Delbridge. Comprises of a collection of promotional prints, these graphical illustrations is a great way to show Google maps’ iconic aesthetics with the use of clever incorporation of Google maps’ graphics. You see how the artist place the iconic red pin on the graphics, making it sync with the context of the subject header. These interesting graphic prints tap on popular locations. In fact, you can see how Tokyo was represented with a bowl of ramen. Interesting yet visually engaging. Sometimes it is through very fundamental graphic elements that we derive simple messages. A very creative ad campaign by Google Maps.
Most people would instantly switch their mind off the moment commercials start hitting their screens. Commercials to them is an instant interruption. What we really want to do these days is to get them out of this paradigm. Of course, celebrity endorsements are by now, ranked the most utterly trashed way of product marketing. They get paid lots of money to say awesome things that really doesn’t appear so. Footlocker wants to make sure that their spokesperson, NBS player Blake Griffin, make it a point to say the truth. And that is how truly kick-ass Footlocker is. In addition to that, Blake also talks about how the brand actually make him shine at his best. Check out the amusing approach BBDO New York adopted for this commercial. Great job.
When it comes to job hunting, the first thing to the door is your resume. And like they say, the first impression counts. I still remember I once had a bottle of fresh milk delivered to my agency’s doorstep with a tag loosely knotted onto one of the bottles. The label reads, “freshly milked creative juice”. As much as I have to agree that it does caught our attention, I wouldn’t consider this creepy approach a healthy attention. Still nonetheless, it is important to create impact and that would inevitably score you some brownie points. In order to make that distinction, New Jersey-based advertising executive Chris Liu had his resume all jazzed up looking like a google search page. What you see is a results page with a list of search results displaying all his information. Looking just like Google’s page layout means communicating that same level of familiarism to his prospective employers. A rather creative approach to the traditional way of sending resumes.
Zack Chia 