Here’s a very clever animation made entirely from street graffiti by Blu.

It’s quite amazing how a story can be created like this.  Because it’s different it rises above the clutter of content.

Can your brand message do with a new canvas?

via Chris Brogan

MSNBC have released a NewsWare site, which provides an interesting news spectrum which can also be customised into a widget to embed on your blog, social network profile, or desktop.

The news experience includes this spectrum which is very engaging.

There is also a Newsblaster tool which lets you read the news while you are playing an online game.

To promote this feature, MSNBC setup the world’s first interactive cinema crowd game.

Cinema goers became human joysticks as the collective crowd body movement controls the functions of a game controller.

NBC New’s social education iCue site is also mixing news videos with study guides and educational games in what they hope will satisfy Generation Y’s shorter attention span.

To help promote what is possible with the new digital economy, Bullseye has produced a limited run of T-shirts containing the Semacode of the Bullseye mobile site.

Here’s our creative director Kev proudly modelling the t-shirt, as I point my camera phone at the semacode, which takes my phone directly to the site without having to key in the full URL.

This link lets you tag any URL to create your own semacode.

Semacode readers are included on many new phones such as Nokia’s N95, but will also run on any recent camera phone if you download and install the free reader.

Here are some download links
Nokia http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/terms.htm
Other http://semacode.com/download
If you have web access from your phone you can simply go to http://www.i-nigma.mobi which automatically recognises if your phone supports the reader and provides a direct download (it’s about 400k).
Smartphones http://www.quickmark.com.tw/En/basic/download.asp

The uses for Semacodes are varied, but here are 2.

Print media.  Used in print media they can be used to link an article or ad to a particular website. Say you see an ad for a product  in a Health and Beauty magazine, the code could be used to enable people to directly go to a page containing more information about the product, a place to purchase or a page to enter a competition. 

Music. You have just released your first song and you want to provide people with a direct download to their phones. You create a semacode that links to the free song download URL.

Super Bowl advertising isn’t cheap, and at nearly $2 million for a 30 second spot it is the most expensive placement you can make.

So if you are going to advertise during the Super Bowl, there are some basic things that you should get right.

1. Create a microsite for the ad and show the URL in your commercial. If you are spending that much on placement, having a microsite is almost mandatory.
This year 84% of ads did this and unlike last year these URL’s led to the right landing pages.

2. Purchase search ads so that consumers can find your site before / during and after the event. 70% of this year’s advertisers did this. 28% purchase Super Bowl related keywords.

3. Call to action. Only 6% of ads had some kind of call to action in their ads. Ads that cost this much to run should link a promotion or competition to the ad to extend the investment. One of the best forms of promotions is one that invites people to interact with your brand.

Proctor & Gamble is doing just that by inviting consumers to submit spoof ads of the Talking Stain ad. The ad features a guy interviewing for a job and a stain on his shirt cleverly translates his comments drawing the interviewers attention. Since the airing of the ad, 5,500 consumer generated spoofs have been uploaded to the spot’s microsite mytalkingstain.com.

These can be viewed on Youtube here. Free ringtones, and related buddy icons are also available. You can also interact with the commercial by “being the stain” which is powered by Oddcast’s lipsyncing tool.

Reprise Media has a full scorecard on this years Super Bowl ads available as a PDF download.

In the UK Honda has launched a mini-site in support of its new campaign dubbed "The Joy of Problems".

The site features a nice Tetris inspired layout and a jigsaw that users are called to help solving.

Perspective: I like the idea that consumers can work together to solve an online puzzle, however there is currently little incentive to invite my friends to this.  For example, will the online collaboration of solving this puzzle reveal something of importance?

Tapping the growth and consumer appeal of sustaining the environment is this re-useble water bottle known as Tappening.

To add value to the proposition, the bottles have environmental messages, and the company has a pretty active blog.

The brand was cleverly seeded via a story in AdAge citing a PR stunt targetting Coke. 

The bottles are sold online and there has been lots of resulting blogosphere buzz (1,310,886 page views as of today).

His New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. Every day people can watch a video recap of his day. He will be living in IKEA 24/7 and eating all his meals in the restaurant (he may order Domino’s take out once or twice). Thankfully they have a shower for him in the back offices.

Mark has a website to record his week in Ikea

Perspective: This is a great initiative by Mark, but also by Ikea who will gain lots of free publicity from Mark’s live recording of his experience.