The Sun newspaper sends up Apple TV ads

This is really nice :) Say what you like about The Sun (I hate the damn paper, or rather, I hate the fact that most of my country chooses to read it above anything else), but this is a clever little ad, kicking back against the threat of digital.

It's not going to work, of course :) Paper - at least in the form we know - is living on borrowed time. I read all my news digitally, often on my iPhone. I'd love to try out eInk newspapers, perhaps ones that you can add money to (like the OysterCard) and it downloads your paper of choice as you pass a newsagent or your local tube station.

Augmented Human Reality from MIT

OK, so I've blogged a couple of times about AR used in marketing. I'm in that field, so it's interesting to consider its applications there.

But, more personally, I'm a Singularity believer, a Ray Kurzweil fan and (according to my big sis) a power dork :)

But, in honesty, the future of mankind is something that has flitted through my mind for the past 10 years or so, as I question my role here, the point of existence and all that other light-hearted stuff. Without being too heavy, I've been asking why man is so obsessed with creating artificial intelligence, and if we succeed, what that could ultimately lead to. For now, the benefit split between man and machine can be loosely described as machine:vast ability to retain data, reliability, strength, and man:creativity, lateral thought when speaking about intelligence. To combine the 2, could effectively provide our infinite imagination with all the knowledge of our past (through technology) and really give us a path to the future. I often consider the world in terms of meta data (for example, when I think of my friend Jim, I also think birthday: May 10, location: New York etc). Computers are far, far better at this, so what if we could project all that meta data into our physical world in a relevant way?

MIT have a project called Sixth Sense, which plays nicely into my feelings about the shorter-term future. The video below (bad as it is) takes you through how current reality can be augmented using a simple project and coloured markers with software. Part Minority Report, part Terminator, it's a fascinating, and relatively accessible future.

At the same time, I'm a huge advocate of open-source development, believing that removing the barriers that prevent it will accelerate our combined intelligence and achievements exponentially. Singularity Hub today reports that MIT has done just that with Sixth Sense, opening it up to all and sundry to create and share. The future just got more exciting...

Casper - live aircraft tracking

Lovely Google Maps mashup that shows live flights around The Netherlands



Visually, reminds me of the Firemint Flight Control game for the iPhone.

Casper site

Esquire's Augmented Reality magazine issue

Wow - that's quite a step up for AR. After writing about the recent Burger King AR ad I've been wondering what the next big brand would be to use it. But I didn't expect Esquire magazine to implement it, and in a number of ways. Watch the video below to get an understanding of the AR issue and how it's used:

It's simple to understand - buy the special edition, download the app from the site and hold the cover and selected pages up to the screen to kick in the video elements. Not sure I'd have gone down the download app route - this is a barrier to entry to me. It does make the app fullscreen, but I still think this could have been done from a page on the site, avoiding the need for users to download an exe (which no-one trusts) and going through the process of install etc. AR is essentially just an Actionscript library, so why not just embed the Flash with a Fullscreen option? Maybe it's a performance issue (I imagine FS video is pretty laggy). Either way, it's another new example of digital transcending its perceived boundaries and integrating with the old school :)

Orange's Friend-O-Meter

Orange has launched the Friend-O-Meter, a really nice example of UGC used by a brand. To advertise the Motoral DEXT with MotoBlur, Motorola's new phone that centres around keeping in touch with your mates via social networking apps built into the phone (Twitter, Facebook etc).



They've implemented APIs of the 3 most popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. I tried the Facebook one and it was quick reliable and accurate. After logging in with my Facebook details, I went through a 10-question quiz asking me questions about my Facebook friends (e.g. "How many of your friends are single?", "Who is in the photo to the right?", "Whose status is currently XXXX?") with 4 answers offered from each. Where the answer is a name of a person, the other 3 are also people from your network, which nicely adds to the effectiveness and believability.

Weetabix's take on Google Search

This came to me via an email from a colleague. Have to admit that for almost the entire duration I had no idea what this was for. I thought for a while it was a Google satire of some sort (like Blackle) but at the end the Weetabix logo pops up. The idea is that you're seeing what's inside Google delivering you those results (indeed, the Google page is shown reversed and translucent as if you're looking out from inside the computer). An old librarian runs around (in a blur) looking through books for answers and then writing the results (again, reversed) up on the screen.

It's a nice little idea - something everyone who's ever used the web will understand, but I thought it a bit throwaway until I saw the Weetabix TV ad as well, which has a jockey at a big race fall from his horse, but go on to run it himself on foot, and win.

Overall, it's a nice campaign I think; a nice, relevant use of pretty memorable and humorous subject matter and gets the idea across well. TV is by WCRS I understand.

Resident Evil's page takeover on Game Trailers

This is nice - Game Trailers is a bastion of videos for game geeks (yep, me included) and Capcom has positioned this page to look like any other Game Trailer page when advertising their new Resident Evil zombie-thon

Except, of course, that as the trailer is playing, the zombies bust out of the videos and trash the page, blood sprays out from the video edges, your screen appears to get smashed by the attacks, and you - the viewer - get to shoot at the zombies in real time.

It's a nice example of the shift from "LOOK AT US! WE HAVE SHIT TO SELL YOU! OI! OVER HERE" advertising, to the smarter entertainment- or utility-based advertising that is emerging.

Check it out at Gametrailers.com

Really nice Colgate Ice-Cream sampling piece

This is really nice (look! I'm not just digital :) ). Usually, a company like Colgate would be giving away mini toothpaste tubes as sampling, which is so painfully obvious and boring that I'd be surprised if it works any more.

It's nice to see them stepping out of their comfort zones and approaching the challenge from a different perspective.

Seen on Ads of the World