Well – it’s been nearly 5 months of WEIR+WONG and we’ve barely had time to take a breather! We’ve been doing some great work for these great clients (and some clients we can’t mention!) and having a lot of fun on the way. Onwards…
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WEIR+WONG
Tag Archives: quality
The Chalkbot
I seemed to miss this the first time around but have just found Nike Chalkbot whilst perusing the 2010 Webby Awards nominees. This is a great example of how a thought or sentiment can be captured digitally and then turned into something that is real. The campaign, centering around Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong charity, allows people to send a message via sms, twitter, online banners or at the WearYellow.com website. That message is then delivered to the Nike Chalkbot – a state of the art pneumatic robot that is towed around the Tour de France stages, printing out each message in turn on the tarmac. Also – people who uploaded message get delivered a geo-tagged image with their message on it. So you didn’t have to go to the Tour de France or watch every minute of it on TV to see it.
In a way it’s the same idea that you see if you go and do a charity fun-run (marathons are too much for my knackered legs). Runners write mesages on their T-Shirts for the people they are running for, the people who have been affected by an illness and sadly, quite often the people who have died from that illness. This I think is a really nice, sensitive, clever and worthwhile way of getting more people to see those messages, getting them to see just how many people’s lives are affected by cancer.
Full marks to the production team must be awarded because this idea is quite obviously one of those ‘extra’ ideas that always get presented with the usual straightforward creative stuff (“I know – lets build a robot”). It could so easily not have been made. To build all the message interfaces , build a robot, connect it up to a server, ship it to France, organise permissions to grafiti the roads, maintain the robot etc etc is a massive job, fraught with technical and physical difficulty. Hats off to the creatives who came up with it and I bow down to the producers who built it! A great effort. You’ve got my vote!
Wrangler Bluebell
Interesting take on a catalogue site. I’ve never wanted to be able to throw the models around like they were toy wrestlers but if I did I would do it here.
Hot Wheels
My son is obsessed by toy cars. He can’t leave them alone and nothing delights me more than to be able to come home with a new ‘motor’ for him. So there I was ‘researching’ some pretty cool toy cars when I stumbled upon this Hot Wheels – Custom Motors, You Tube game. Choose your vehicle, fine tune your engines, tires and weapons and race against 3 other mean machines on a variety of racetracks. Dungeons and Dragons style multi-route You Tube campaigns have been around for a while (check out Choose a different ending for another excellent example), I just thought this one was quite fun! Vrrrooooooooooooom
Fanning the flames
Imagine a one stop shop where you could create your own interactive campaign’s regardless of whether you are an ad agency, large corporation or even small business. It would be able to create sweepstakes, contests, give-aways, incentive-based surveys, publish them on your website and seed them to multiple social networks at the same time. They would be able to skin the campaign in any way you wished. You need not be a complete geek to create the campaign. You can easily monitor stats and there is a scaleable pricing model.
Imagine no more. Wildfire is here. It’s creating a lot of buzz and is indeed a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at the SXSW event.
A truly innovative idea that capitalizes on emerging technologies and turns it into something extremely useful. Competitions, campaigns and promotions tend to be seen by many agencies as ‘dirty work’ as it involves many third parties (coupon providers, mail drops, Social network’ tech teams and API’s, hosting providers) and logistical challenges. It seems that Wildfire are taking the donkey work out of this process for us all and joining a lot of the dots. Good luck to them and we’ll certainly keep them in mind for our client’s promotions in the future.
I am T-Pain (in Robin’s ears)
This afternoon I have mostly been rapping. The song of choice – I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper). Robin is disturbed and frankly my rhyming skillz aren’t up to much. The author of this track – a Mister T-Pain, who despite his rather loose morals and disturbing lyrics released a rather nifty iPhone App last year – the source of my fun this afternoon. It allows you to sing along karaoke style to his latest instrumental tracks and record your own version. The app then uses AutoTune to try and get you to sound vaguely like a US Hip Hop megastar. It works – although my silky Geordie undertones are still present, it has made me sound a lot more in tune and in time. I won’t be giving up the day job though!
In a rather neat way you can then share with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or by email. And no, I will not be uploading my version. It’s terribly embarrassing and my wife might divorce me when she hears me singing some of those disgraceful lyrics. User’s can then listen to and comment on other people’s tracks as they are broadcast. As an added bonus you can then sing over any track in your iTunes library.
It’s karaoke with gloss. The autotune element makes it much more interesting than just a simple audio playback. It is produced by Smule who have pedigree in audio iPhone Apps. They produced sound tool apps like, leaf trombone, Zephyr, Ocarina, Sonic Vox, Sonic Boom. I am T-Pain takes it to the next level though, perfectly targeted at an engaged audience.
Get it here…
My Space Fan Video
Check this out! Facebook Connect usage is a bit passe these days but I really love the finished quality of this. It’s extremely elegant in it’s use of depth of field, focus and the reflections on the glass are amazing. Check out the bit with Fiddy for the best examples of this. Awesome work!
The site can be found here.
Suburban Superbia
Disclaimer: Arcade Fire are my favourite bestest best band ever. So I’m likely to be slightly biased about this!
Have you had a go at this yet? Go on give it a go… I really enjoyed it and found the experience quite moving. Given that I had grown up in the relatively protected ‘burbs of Newcastle, the overlaid streetview images fitted very nicely with the sentiment of the song and the album. Not sure how well it would work if you were brought up in Streatham though, or at the other end of the scale, a luxury pile in Monaco.
The whole experience has a feel of a ‘final project at university’ or something (in a very good way), where they’ve just decided to sod the taboo of having multiple pop up windows running at the same time. Ok so it struggled with runtime a bit and made my laptop slow down to a snails pace if I tried to do anything else – but it’s an immersive experience and one that warrants a bit of artistic license.
The things I liked about it;
1. The use of multiple windows
2. The integration of streetview and google maps
3. The ‘unexpected’ 3d animation at the end
4. The text animation/effects on the ‘Postcard’ section
5. The fact that they’re using up loads of your processor power but just don’t care that much – even putting a processor disclaimer warning for you to shut down other programmes. ‘Ok so it might be inconvenient to watch this but hey – who cares!’
It’s also probably one of the most high profile HTML 5 experinces out there at the moment, passing the test as an interactive experience, although I think I’ll reserve judgement on the technology for a while yet! Would love to see more HTML5 experiences like this – send them to me if you have any…