out of the box :: The awesome world of digital

Desire - New short film for Jaguar

How do you launch a car in todays market? There have been a slew of creative ways car brands have been innovating in this space, from interactive movies controlled by your smartphone to lifting a car in the air with likes. But this could have the ability to be something quite special.

To launch the new F-Type, Jaguar have decided to team up with many ‘of the moment’ stars to create a short gangster movie. Shot by Ridley Scott’s team, starring Damien Lewis and even bringing in Lana Del Rey along for the ride to sing the theme tune. This has the potential to go beyond traditional advertising and actually become a cool, watchable piece of content. Let’s just hope it actually has good screenwriting to match the high-caliber production values. Watch this space when it launches soon.

Creating a new kind of digital advertising - Captcha Type-IN

The clever guys over at Solve Media think they may have come up with an idea that helps solve a long-term problem with advertising messages online. Banner ad click-through rates are down, and they have calculated that people on average spend 14 seconds filling in captcha forms (that are in effect gobbledygook). Why not combine the two? By using brand messaging within the captcha area, and getting the user to retype it, they believe they can get 1200% more message recall than a banner ad. It’s a smart idea and a very clever use of ad space online. What do you think? Would you use it in your next digital campaign?

Wonderbra ask people to ‘Decode’ their ads

Here’s a cool idea from Wonderbra in the UK and France. It’s called Wonderbra DECODER. People download the app on iPhone or Android and then they can interact with the campaign across a number of channels. Hold your phone up to the print ads, the window displays or even the YouTube video and see the model in her underwear. It’s a clever use of Augmented Reality, especially in the YouTube experience, as it reveals video content that is otherwise hidden.

For those of you like me that are not lucky enough to live in the UK, you can download the ads here and try it for yourself. And if you have the app installed, check out the YouTube video, it’s pretty cool.

Ford creates ‘new car smell’

The Ford selection is a range of ‘nearly new cars’. They have all the same benefits as a new car but Ford found that one thing was missing… that new car smell. So, they used some of the best ‘scent creators’ in Spain to create and bottle the smell of a new car, that came free with every car sold. The idea then ran out through ambient and radio. Quite a nice simple idea built on a powerful insight.

Wimpy - Braille Burgers

To let the world know that they were launching a new line of Braille menus in their outlets, Wimpy decided to create 15 braille burgers, with specially crafted buns that let the eaters know what they were about to enjoy. A very simple and direct way to get the word out there.

‘Wee’ gaming comes to London Bars

This I just thought was priceless. We have seen in-toilet digital advertising before, but nothing this clever. While punters are taking a wee in the bar toilets, they use their urine to control an on-screen game. The inventors are now looking to partner with brands on new ventures, so if you have any game ideas for this ‘unusual’ new form of interaction, get involved. In the future, there are plans to even add multiplayer. Even though I don’t think people will go to the toilet solely because of this, you can’t deny that this is a time in someone’s life where you can captivate them in new ways. Pretty funny.

New VW video ads rip off Blog

A new series of ads by VW play on the idea of an iPhone wrongly interpreting what you write in text messages. Unfortunately, as creative as it initally seems, this is not a new idea, with sites such as DamnYouAutoCorrect already aggregating funny sentences from users all over the world. Just by having a quick look around the site I managed to uncover the following image, which is almost an exact copy of the video above:

What do you think? A shameful rip-off or just a take on something cultural? Are there any new ideas?

Microsoft NUAds - will it save TV advertising?

Last week at Cannes, Microsoft unveiled it’s new form of advertising that it will be rolling it later this year across its X-Box platform. So, ‘why should I care’ I can hear you saying? Well, with X-Box, Microsoft has units in consumers homes that, with Kinect enabled could offer some really exciting tools to advertisers. With voice enabled during certain ads, I can ‘share them’ with friends on Twitter, as well as find local dealerships, or even take part in quizzes.

OK, so the first ‘roll-out’ is a little underwhelming when you consider what else Kinect can do - Motion tracking anyone? But, it’s small steps like these that could really ad another dimension to a once static medium. The features they are suggesting are not too complex, and you can really see them offering useful extensions to viewers. It’ll be very interesting to see how this platform develops once it gets released, and how brands use these new features.