A Cheat Code in Halo 4 Box Art Puzzle

Microsoft unveiled the box art for the upcoming Halo 4 game by emailing Xbox community members one of the 32 pieces of puzzle that when assembled together reveal the image.  The puzzle was cracked in about an hour, probably helped by the fact that the remaining 31 pieces could be seen by changing the last two digits of the image URL before the ".jpg" part, a fact that wasn't lost on the fans:

http://image.engage.xbox.com/lib/feca167070610c7c/m/4/12993-H4_02.jpg 

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

Play Scrabble Over Twitter With TwitterScrabble

Arrange 100 characters into the highest-scoring tweet of the day to win your box of Scrabble Trickster with this brilliant Belgian Twitter Scrabble promotion. Alas, only in Dutch.
- via Digital Buzz Blog

CreditLoan.com Cashes In On Rapture

Love how CreditLoan.com jumped on the Twitter rapture train by paying to for the sponsored tweet in the #endoftheworldconfessions top trending topic. 150 retweets as of this post.

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.

Hashtagart Turns Twitter Profile Pics Into Beautiful Mosaic Art

Hashtagart creates elaborate mosaic art out of Twitter users' profile pictures:"Hashtagart has proprietary technology and a suite of apps that make it fun for consumers to spread a brand's message. Consumers are no longer advertised to, they BECOME the advertisement, and they have fun connecting with the brand."

The images above are 11am and 5pm  screengrabs from a new Dark Knight movie teaser done with hashtagart's Mosaic app. Check out their other projects for Roku, Window Phone 7, and MSNBC 2010 election coverage.

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.

Make Your Own Facebook Book

Can't get around to writing that memoir of yours?  My Social Memories is an application by Deutsche Post DHL that rolls two years of your Facebook life into an 18-page printed book for about $30 plus shipping (I paid only shipping for mine thanks to a coupon included with the press release). Mine won't be particularly thrilling, I am afraid, but the app does a few neat things like calculating and laying out friend stats. It's not without its share of glitches: it put my hometown as Germany (not by a long shot) and it chokes on non-Latin characters. One genius move -- even though you can't embed the slideshow of the book, it does export a few pages as stills that it then places in your photo gallery as an album and posts it on your wall.

A French telecom did something similar last year, and you can order photobooks and posters of your friends' profile pics elsewhere.

Branded Music Visualization Plug-In for Land Rover

I last wrote about branded WinAmp visualizations five years ago and haven't heard much since until today when I saw the Land Rover team released a visualization plug-in for Windows Media Player.
-- via

As Seen on Google

A site is using its top Google SERP rank as a seal of approval:  Google Ranks DynaSpy.com #1 for "Spy Camera"
-- banner on dynaspy.com  home page

Tattoo an Ecko Logo and Get 20% Off For Life

Speaking of branded tattoos: Ecko offers 20% off for life to anyone who tattoos its brand logo (the rhino or the shears) and presents the appropriately inked body part at the store.  There's fine print: "Tattoo must be permanent and provided by a professional third-party tattoo artist operating in accordance with applicable laws. Multiple tattoos does not entitle the consumer to more than one 20% discount. Not valid on bulk buys." -- found on one of deal aggregator sites

Also, Techdirt asks: is it infringement to get your favorite sports team logo tattooed on your body? (They aren't sure.)

Publishers Promote Books On Document Sharing Sites

Random House is promoting its books by publishing illustrated excerpts on Scribd, with over 2 million total reads of 287 documents to date.

The recently uploaded in time with the TV premier and heavily promoted Game of Thrones has its own custom page and background:

Bill Gates In a Wall Street Journal Ad (1984)

via

Two Alternative Verizon iPhone Commercials

Long before yesterday's Verizon iPhone teaser aired on TV, fans had begun cutting their own ads in anticipation of the great day, some as early as April of last year. Below are the two best ones.

I need service, demands a half-naked girl:




We've got three words:



If you are lucky, you'll fall into a time-space warp and see an AT&T ad for its iPhone served by Google at the end of the second spot for Verizon, like so:

BMW Puts Its Logo On The Back of Eyelids

Putting the phenomenon of closed-eye visualizations to profitable use, the Dutch ad team for BMW flashed the car maker's logo in a darkened movie theater and then asked the audience to close their eyes to discover a bright BMW-shaped spot -- also known as retinal noise -- on the back of their eyelids.  Note that "CEV noise will not disappear if observed continuously over a period of time".
-- via Denver Egotist

Book Promos Help People Kill Time

A publisher in Thailand promotes new books by printing story snippets where people are likely to have the time to read them - queues, receipts with queue numbers, placemats in restaurants.  
-- creative criminal

Earlier: Airport Billboard Tires Kids Pre-Flight, Billboards That Give

Quake II Ad as a Grocery Circular

A 1999 ad for a Quake II port (click image for full size): "Hand-batter every opponent with customized control and a slaughterhouse of butchery devices. Ten slabs of juicy maps offer place settings no carnivore can resist."
-- Vintage Computing

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.

Jeep's Twitter Puzzle: Assemble Profile Icons Into a Picture

Jeep is running a game on Twitter and it's a nifty puzzle with a somewhat steep learning curve where you need to follow certain accounts in a certain order so that their profile pics arrange themselves into a complete picture of, say, a waterfall. If you want to play, you should watch the tutorial first and then roll back to the old Twitter interface for the whole thing to work.

Vintage Ads For Social Media

So, not only was there a cell phone in a Charlie Chaplin movie, but it turns out folks in the 1950s already had Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Skype if  these vintage ads are any proof.