28.07.2008 by Zoltan

We’re back

Seems like some little fuck hacked the blog. Don’t really know how or why but the little prick/s lost me more than a few hours of my life. I will never get these back, so thanks for nothing you fucking bastards. I hope you got your rocks off.

For those interested, the wordpress support forums were great as was (mt) support. I am also now a big fan of the exploit scanner plugin. If you run wordpress, you should get it.

26.07.2008 by Zoltan

Down

Not sure what’s happened with our hosting service? We’re trying to get the site back up as quickly as possible. Please bear with us.

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

brandtags

Brandtags is an absolutely genius idea by Noah Brier (a strategist at Naked). The idea is to chart public - a.k.a consumer - perception of brands via user-generated tags.

Where the project becomes really valuable though is in playing backwards. Here you have to guess the brand, and the tags become a chart of the efficacy of a clear and coherent comms strategy. Those that have got it right are immediately identifiable by a few massive tags. Those unsure of exactly who they are (and obviously have conflicting comms messages) are reflected in a mass of different tags.

Hardly a true and accurate cross-seciton of the population (yet), but nevertheless if i was a brand manager, I’d have this bookmarked and be charting change over time.

Big up to Naked as well, no doubt this idea was hatched on their time ;)

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

The future of DJing?

Seeing this makes me think of how my mother used to think spinning vinyl was ‘just not how you make music’. Nostalgia for real wax aside, it seems to me that this is a bit too clinical and (potentially) takes a lot of the skill out of DJing. Almost like being able to see the waveform is cheating, as you no longer need to ‘feel’ the music.

But in time i’m sure kids will grow up knowing that they can touch any screen, and expect it to react. Then this will be OK, and we will most certainly be in the future. Or maybe that will be when someone ports this software to the iPhone and tells Andrew Andrew (of the legendary NYC iPod parties) about it?

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

Converse diaspora

Converse has just unleashed a myriad of puzzling and irreverent urls. Get the overview here.

For example, Out of your league girl teaches the hapless about everything from being creepy, to confidence, motivation and passion. Then there’s the trials of Silky Steve and his very English dreams of becoming a superstar US basketballer.

But the most interesting idea by far is the spelling bee, where you get given a word and then have to google it and then click on an adsense ad to get to the next round. I wish it would work for me, but the doesn’t :( I guess because i’m not in the USA? If anyone is, then I’d love to know more about how it works.

I can only assume it was done by their agency, Butler Shine Stern and Partners.
via leigh.

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

Dark Knight ARG - update

It seems like the endgame was nothing more than advance tickets? I can’t believe that’s it. Watch this space, there simply has to be more. From the wiki:

“After the countdown at Whysoserious.com/Overture ends, the Joker “Jokerizes” nearly every single website in the game, some containing a puzzle piece. In addition, “Joker signals” are projected onto the Woolworth Building and Sears Tower. Solving the puzzle piece riddle leads to Whysoserious.com/Kickingandscreening, which offers free tickets to a pre-release screening of The Dark Knight.”

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

Stop spam, read books

Everyone hates proving that they’re human. Captcha’s are those annoying sequences of letters, deformed beyond OCR, in every online form where you have to prove you’re smarter than the computer. But rather than use randomly generated sequences, some clever bod decided it could be put to better use by helping to digitise the world’s library, via a project called ReCAPTCHA

According to the site, “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent… more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” Put it all together and you get an endless distributed workflow, making good on their promise of “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time”.

A noble cause no doubt and a very simple and powerful idea. Honestly though, if these little puzzles are all that separate us from the machines, we’re fucked anyway, digitised world library or not.

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

Be KANYE

Another one from Absolut and this time the seem to be right back on track! Be KANYE is a pretty fun piss-take on late-night infomercials. Its not quite as good as menergy, but the girl is hilarious.

Not much on the site except for some pretty good bad design and a countdown timer - to who knows what? The infomercial was enough to get my address so let’s hope its worth it! Well disguised branding until the end frame…

via viral video chart

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

Through the eyes of a master

4Creative are simply awesome. To advertise the Kubrick season beginning this week, they’ve recreated the set of Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ with mind-boggling attention to detail. The ad becomes a behind-the-scenes romp via all the main characters, resolving on ‘you’ being handed the script as the famous tricycle scene is about to be shot.

Its compulsive watching if for nothing else but to appreciate the sheer scale of a feature film. The ad itself was shot in one take as well which makes it all the more beautiful and breathtaking. Unfortunately its not embeddable, but you can watch it here.

11.07.2008 by Zoltan

Classical rollercoaster

Lovely piece of motion graphics for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Such a simple idea - to make the piece of music into a literal rollercoaster, to mimic the emotions embodied in the music. The only thing that lets it down is the cheesy red endline “Great Emotions” which seems slapped on at the last minute and is in no way integrated into the design of the piece.

11.07.2008 by Zoltan

Who said screensavers were dead?

Obviously they never got that message at Uniqlo HQ in Japan. Again they’ve released a lyrically beautiful piece of motion that just begs to be watched.

But unlike the uniqlock, this campaign ‘Dry in Motion’ is actually not weird and irreverent (albeit in that very compelling japanese way), but conceptually and strategically very strong. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that absolutely everything looks good in super slo-mo. What I really like is how they show the same clip at different speeds, aided by power of good graphic design.

Get the screensaver or visit the site.

10.07.2008 by Zoltan

What was I thinking?

I love the simplicity of this graphic, which neatly sums up my waning love for virtual friends. Although I still have my profile, I use Facebook now almost exclusively as an advertiser. And for this its absolutely awesome (though expensive at times). Anyway I just had to get it out there - I’m not in love with Facebook anymore. Phew. I feel better already…

10.07.2008 by Zoltan

Batman heats up on 10.07.08

The Dark Knight is almost upon us, and it seems the marketing campaign to end all marketing campaigns is only getting warmed up. 10 PM today seems to be a big event, as seen by the countdown at whysoserious.com - one of the plethora of links within the ARG.

For example, there’s a new group called the C.F.B (Citizens For Batman), with their own recruitment video leaked on youtube. They even put the Bat signal on buildings in both Chicago and NYC.

But if you really want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, then head on over to the wiki, where you’ll find things like email accounts from the Gotham Police as well as the Gotham Bank, fortune teller tickets edited by the joker which are codes to a map of the city (see the images below), text messages sent by human resources people and only god himself knows what else.

Honestly my head physically hurts considering the breadth and depth of this campaign. I would love to meet the team behind this. I can only suspect its actually The Architect from the Matrix. No one else could possibly keep on top of all of this…

04.07.2008 by Zoltan

Absolut Colours

Absolut has done more than its fair share of amazing online campaigns. And seemingly it cannot, or at least has not, put a foot wrong. Which is why this newest site Absolut Colours surprises me a little bit…

Gay pride is a good thing don’t get me wrong. Hell, most pride is a good thing, if it’s not without reason. But I struggle to see many people jumping on this UGC bandwagon, and the fact that its empty seems to prove me correct.

via the venerable adverblog (really, how does she keep down a full-time job?)

02.07.2008 by Zoltan

If it’s not for you, it’s not for you

The thing i love most about this is the exclusion of the end line. Brilliant. Nothing like preaching to the converted! Gold film lion at Cannes for La Comunidad Argentina. Well deserved, and its not just because I have a moustache either…