In Case of Emergency, Eat This Book

Land Rover in the United Arab Emirates printed 5,000 edible copies of a desert survival guide. Twenty-eight pages of potato-based starch paper have a slightly sugary taste from the glycerin-based ink and are bound by a spiral that can be used as skewers. The book comes in  a reflective cover that can be used to send help signals.
-- Y&R Dubai; thank you, Guillaume

In Memoriam: Kodak Scenic Spots

I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of  film, and how they made people's lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.

Of course today the Kodak Picture Spot is something that could probably be built straight into the digital camera wired to recognize the subject and to statistically analyze thousands of photos taken from the same spot to recommend the optimal composition and camera settings.

A Kodak photo spot, (K. Mikey M on Flickr / group)

Eastmanhouse.org:

"As photography became more engrossed in American culture in the early 20th century, The Eastman Kodak Company began to look for new ways to advertise photography and its cameras. With the rise of the automobile industry and the development of American highways, the company began a campaign called “Kodak Scenic Spots.” Starting in 1920, Kodak began to place signs throughout American highways that advertised both their name and the practice of photography by marking interesting and beautiful scenery. Initially, these signs appeared on the roads outside of Kodak’s hometown of Rochester, NY in order to test the effectiveness of the idea. Within a year, they began sending members of their advertising department across the country to select the most scenic views to be awarded signs. By 1939, Kodak had placed 6,000 scenic spot signs across the country.

The exact phrases used in these signs changed over time. When the company began the campaign, the signs read: “Picture Ahead! Kodak as you go.” Eventually, the use of the work “Kodak” as a verb was stopped and the signs were changed to read: “Kodak Scenic Spot.” After the initial campaign ended in 1939, Kodak continued to place these signs sporadically in theme parks and tourist locations until the late 1980s. These signs also carried a new label, which read: “Kodak Picture Moment.”

Map of Kodak Picture Spots at Magic Kingdom (source)

Casual Mobile Advergames - For Cats!

Puss In Boots, boot up your tablet - Friskies has released not one but three Games for Cats advergames playable in any tablet browser thanks to the magic of HTML5/CSS3. The games don't scale down to the phone screen size, though, so smaller cats are out of luck. The games are Cat Fishing,   Tasty Treasures Hunt, and Party Mix-Up. Cats like.

Now waiting for a study on the advergames's effect on feline brand recognition.

Sofa-Shaped Popcorn Bags Sell Sofas

Sofa-shaped popcorn bags promote a sofa event at a department store in Brazil to the tune of a 17% increase in sofa sales, according to Ogilvy Brasil, the agency behind the stunt. Don't think I've seen popcorn bags used as an ad medium before. Very nice.

Airport Billboard Tires Kids Pre-Flight

A slowly rotating signboard for FirstBank in Denver airport  lends a helpful hand to parents before a long flight by wearing down their kids so that they fall asleep sooner on the plane. Made by TDA Boulder, who just made another airport billboard for the same client equipped with QR codes that link to freely downloadable books.

TDA are the same guys who did this cool signboard that worked as a business-card sharing station for small businesses, among other awesome work.

Filing this under Billboards That Give.

Rethinking Calendars

AdLab's Rethink: series is about creative that is built around core and often unexpected properties of a particular medium. The first and the most popular post was about print, but I also really like  billboards that give, a road that plays music,  shopping bags that turn into kites, and interesting fishwrap.

Today, we continue the series with these wonderful promo calendars.




Calendars have what?  Leaves. Which makes it a perfect medium to promote a leaf blower. This calendar is rigged so that its leaves fall off automatically one each day and pile up on the floor; see for yourself in a video.




The thickness (or, rather, thinness) of paper has been explored by this knife brand before, in a print ad. This calendar with a slice of onion chopped off every day is a year-long reminder of the knives' sharpness.




The least obvious property of a calendar -- that the dates match up every 28 years -- was tapped into by Italy's League for the Environment to promote recycling.


The calendars below are interesting, too, although in a different way.




This idea is built not so much around the physical properties of the medium itself as a related saying "An apple a day keeps a doctor away". A calendar with 31 real apples in a tube, for a health insurance company.





A calendar in the shape of a photo lens promoting photog's services.




And a bizarre calendar with a leaf for each of the 7300+ days (that's 20 years) of warranty that a solar panel manufacturer gives its clients.

Print Ads With Seeds for Haagen-Dazs

This Haagen-Dazs ad  ran back in 2008, but I keep talking to my friends about it and have to rummage through my file folders every time I do, so I'll just post it here. The print ad by, I believe, Goodby, had flower seeds embedded into to the linen paper and could be planted into the ground. Goes straight to the rethink and rethink print collections.

Remember how in 2006 the ice-cream maker printed flavored stamps?

Update: Here's a very similar Green Letter from Honda, a direct-mail piece that won bronze at One Show. (Thanks, anonymous commenter.)

Billboards That Give

I really like the idea of billboards that let people take something with them, like this Kenzo billboard with poppies. It's a good way to make them bookmarkable, to extend their shelf life. Here are a few more billboards that give blankets, samples, and a life raft.

Send SMS to Complete This Ad

This Axe ad from Uruguay is the best mobile "send SMS and get something" implementation I've seen. Send a text message after dark to a phone number listed on the ad, and you'll get the missing fragment of the picture. Good teaser, meaningful payback. Very smart.

Entertainment Weekly Issue With Video On Ebay

That Entertainment Weekly Sept 18th issue with a video insert that went out to subscribers in only two markets? You can pick your copy on eBay for over $100 apiece, and as of this writing, there are only four available. Crazy. Please share your impressions in a comment if you have actually seen the magazine.

A Story Told in Nine Billboards

A 1989 campaign for a Buffalo pub tells a love story that unfolds over nine weeks on a billboard.

Ten Half-Baked Advertising Ideas

Today, we are raiding Half Bakery for a glimpse of the improbable advertising future. Put your sunglasses on; the brilliance of these ideas is blinding.

1. Advertishoes. "Replace the soles of your shoes with soft rubber, impregnated with chalk or ink, that squashes out onto the ground as you put your foot down. Similar to a self-inking rubber stamp."

2. Get to the airport luggage screeners with X-ray-visible ads: "If two ads are printed on the same page in a magazine, but one is printed with large letters in radiopaque white ink, then the white-on-white ad will only be visible if the magazine is in carry-on luggage viewed by x-ray techs at airport inspection stations."

3. Ads on status bars (also independently described by AdLab):  "Put scrolling text messages in progress bars, and make some money on the side."

4. Skyscrapers as smoke jet printers:  "Except instead of ink being shot on to a page of paper it shoots smoke up in to the air. The print head is mounted on top of a high rise building, and instead of the print head moving it relies on wind to move the 'paper' to the side."

5. Rainbow advertising: "Using refraction and rainbow technology, it should be possible to advertise right on airborne drops of moisture. Simply vary the color makeup of your light source."

6. Books printed in sponsored typeface:  "Free classic books reprinted typeset in a font that has McDonald's M's and Special K's and so forth."

7. Ads on fake phone numbers in the movies: "Whenever they use a telephone in the movies, they always use a 555 number. I guess they do that so people won't go home and try to call. Wait a minute. Why not encourage them to call. Talk about a captive audience..."

8. Logo clouds: "Create large lakes in the shape of corporate logos. When the sun shines on them (on a windless day) logo-shaped clouds will appear above them. Note that it might be cheaper to change your company's logo to the shape of an existing lake."

9. Lonely?  Invite telemarketers in your life with a "Please Call Me" list:  "Maybe the local resteraunts could call you around lunch-time and tell you what kinds of specials they have, just so you don't have to go sit down to find that out."

10. Spitball billboards: " This display uses a computer aimed pneumatic spitball cannon which "paints" a picture out of colored spitballs. The display can be wiped clear with a water hose, so the next image can be painted."

AC/DC Music Video in Excel

An AC/DC music video in an Excel file (and on YouTube). A good example of a viral that didn't have to be (just) a video.

See also:
PowerPoint Karaoke
Make Games with MS Excel
Games for MS Excel
Contextual Advertising in Word Documents
Contextual Advertising in PDF

Road as Medium, Plays Back Music for Honda

(image: gigdoggy)

When we run out of space for billboards on our roads' sides, we'll embed jingles into the pavement.

GigDoggy: "A Japanese engineer by the name of Shizuo Shinoda was the first to come up with the brilliant idea of transforming roads into a playback medium. The system works by cutting thousands of little grooves in the asphalt that produce a sound when a vehicle drives over them. The grooves are a few millimeters deep and 6 to 12 millimeters wide, and the closer you bring them together the higher the pitch will be when driven over. Production cost is about $20 000. Mr Shinoda got the idea by driving his car over markings a bulldozer had previously scraped off a street and realized he was generating a series a tones."

Video below:  music roads in Japan.



From WSJ (thank you, Robert):  the making-of video of the Civic Musical Road in Lancaster, CA that played an overture from William Tell until nearby residents complained. It is now being rebuilt elsewhere.

The Other Second Life: Off-Label Uses of Brand Products

A page on Bounce from Joey Green's book Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose

"A sufficiently thick stack of Bounce will actually stop a bullet!" (source)

Adweek has an excellent article today by Andrew Adam Newman about marketers slowly acknowledging and at times embracing secondary and often unintended uses of their products:

"For several years, a list that details quirky uses for Bounce dryer sheets [AdLab - probably this one] -- including tying them to belt loops as a bug repellent -- has been the subject of viral e-mails and blog posts. Procter & Gamble, which makes the dryer sheets, was well aware of the phenomenon, but did not acknowledge it.

But the more online chatter the company observed about alternative uses, the more the resistance dissipated [...]. Brand managers decided it was time to "lean forward and take a risk on our part" and to try "to capture the consumers' passion for the product and use it as leverage."

It was time, in other words, to promote the off-label uses of Bounce."

"Canada Dry Club Soda, for example -- which, along with other club sodas, is lauded by consumers as a spot remover for clothes and carpets -- says it's just good business."


P&G collects ideas for off-label uses of Bounce on BounceEverywhere.com.


Two books:
- Joey Green's Fix-It Magic: More than 1,971 Quick-and-Easy Household Solutions Using Brand-Name Products

- Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose: And Hundreds of Offbeat Uses for Brand-Name Products

Previously on AdLab:
Ethnographic Research on Packaging Usage

The Apartment of Puzzles

NY Times: "The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky- Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home."
-- via Game Tycoon

Augmented Reality Packaging

Patrick Petersen interviewt Touching Media op de SpinAwards from AtMosttv on Vimeo.

Video capture of a toy packaging is displayed on a computer and augmented with the animated 3D image of the toy inside. The video is in Dutch; via Erwin van Lun.

I can imagine these installations in the stores, working similarly to price scanners. Very cool. A simpler (and older) idea: scanning the barcode in the store displays reviews and suggested add-ons.

NXT Packaging Lights Up

NXT blog comment: "hahaha holy crap. never thought my bathroom wud be trippy."

A story in NYTimes about a new line of men's care productss that will come in a package that lights up lava-lamp style: "NXT is sold in an arresting triangular container that lights up from the bottom, illuminating air bubbles suspended in the clear gel. The plastic is tinted blue, and when the AAA batteries in its base are lighted, the whole thing looks like a miniature lava lamp or a tiny fishless aquarium.

To call attention to themselves, the products, which are aimed at 18- to 24-year-old men, will glow on the shelves, inviting customers to pick them up. Every 15 seconds, a light-emitting diode (LED) in the bottom of the container flares on, stays lighted for a few seconds, then fades out."

Lots of other interesting details: the units are shipped upside down, different lights signal different ingredients, it's better to position units on lower shelves. Innovative enough to get Target, Wal-Mart and CVS on board without any supporting ad spend.

Try to see if you can Google the product up, though. Seems like someone needs some SEO. The site is here. The only "Hello, World" entry on the blog already has a few comments.

Animated Business Cards

This animated business card by Chung Dha works on the same principle as the animated packaging for the hearing aid covered here last November. The author explains:

"This is my animated businesscard, I design after receiving a special book called magic moving images. I learned how to design myself and developed a special way to make this. The card exist of a outer sleeve with vertical raster and the animated pictures are made in a special way."

(This is probably the book: Magic Moving Images.)

Watch the video of the card in action:



See other cool business cards on Adlab.

-- via Brand Flakes

Bathrooms As Brand Experience: Charmin Is Back

Charmin's public bathrooms in Times Square that were such a hit last year are back, with a microsite, maps and train directions. NY Times blogged last month:

"The restrooms — along with a plush waiting area — occupy a 12,000-square-foot space on the mezzanine of an office tower 1540 Broadway, between 45th and 46th Streets. The restrooms have luxurious features like wainscoting, hardwood floors, crown moldings and — new for this year — Kohler plumbing fixtures. About 200 workers (18 to 30 working on each shift) are available to clean each restroom after each use.

The Times Square program grew out of a Pottypalooza, a marketing effort that began in 2001, in which Charmin drove a 53-foot trailer, fitted with 27 toilets, around the country, to events like the Super Bowl."

The first installment took about a year to plan.

Here's a video of what the bathrooms looked like last year (and another one from a grateful reviewer).