Blogorama: Agency Interiors

This Ain't New Disco is a new blog documenting ad agency interiors (see a few examples below). You can show off your digs by submitting pics here. If you are interested in the entire topic of spaces and creativity, Russell Davies made a number of comments some time ago.

Here are a few good books on the subject:

• 21st Century Office
• The Inspired Workspace: Designs for Creativity and Productivity
• The Designer's Workspace: Ultimate Office Design

The Hive Cooperative, Denver


Naked Communications, Australia


Clear Blue Day, Australia

Earlier:
Blogorama: CAVI Digital Experience

Inspiration: 300 Game Mechanics

If you are into advergaming design, are tired of the endless Bejewelled brand-skins, and are looking for inspiration, check out the 300 Game Mechanics challenge with Sean Howard posting one entirely new game mechanic each day for almost a year. Idea #22 -- an entire adventure game in a 81x31 banner.
-- via Kotaku

Altoids Clues Game in Google Earth

Altoids launched "Where's Cindy" game where you have to follow clues around Google Earth to locate, well, Cindy. There's no immediately available back story explaining why you should care about her besides the suggestion that she's "super hot", but it's an interesting attempt that highlights the difficulties around creating interactive applications around Google Earth. The gameplay, at least at the early stages that saw, is about showing you a drawing of a location and asking you to type it into the "passport" to download a kml file with the corresponding placemark in Google Earth. The placemarks don't do much besides showing a link back to a different page on the website with a new clue, so there's a lot of switching between the program and your browser as each clue has to be downloaded as a separate kml file. Also, it is not entirely clear why Altoids chose Google Earth over the much more convenient Google Maps.


Earlier:
Spiderman 3 in Google Earth

Apes Talk, Understand Brands

credit: abc news

ABC News: "The residents of the Great Ape Trust are part of groundbreaking language research where the apes are being taught to communicate with humans by pressing 350 lexigrams -- symbols that appear on a screen and represent thoughts and objects."

Something tells me monkeys will be back in the next year's SuperBowl ads:

"I read Kanzi [one of the apes] a series of words, and then without fail, he hit the corresponding lexigram symbol on a touch screen.
I said "Egg."
He pressed "Egg."
I said, "M and M."
He pressed 'M and M.'"

Google Gears Powers Offline Apps

"Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality." Search Engine Roundtable shows how Gears work to make Google Reader accessible offline. "Meanwhile, the company also plans to add other programs such as e-mail, calendar, word processing, and spreadsheet to its list of Gears-enabled offerings. As of now, Google has partnered with Adobe Systems to use "Google Gears" in their products." (TechTree)

Google Maps Get Street-Level View

Google has added street-level pictures for major cities (NYC and SF among them) to its Google Maps service. See the Time Sq. billboards?

NY Times on Consumer-Generated Crap

NY Times on Heinz's "create an ad for us" YouTube contest gone not quite as expected: "Companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves."

I don't think it's about agencies wanting free ads. It's more about brands trying to open up to participatory culture and letting fans into the institutionalized part of the meaning-making world, but the YouTube tool is often way too blunt for the purpose. It's also a convenient short-cut: "Hm, so how to we let people interact with the brand? Oh, why, let's do YouTube." I still don't understand why the contests should be about video. How many "user-generated" print campaigns have we seen besides Nikon's?

Anyway, YouTube has a special contest page; there you'll find Samsung, Cingular, TaxCut, among others.

Thoughtvertising on eBay

"Bid to sponsor ThoughtVertising. Successful bidder to provide me with the brand message, logo or product. Every hour on the hour for an entire week I think about your brand regardless of the social situation or circumstance."
-- via AdRants

Earlier:
Sony Patents Telepathy
Dream Machine and Subliminal Ads?
Future: Product Placement in Dreams

Apple Angry Over iGasm Posters

You've seen these popular interpretations of the silhouette Apple iPods ads before -- used for everything from political satire (iRaq et al) to promoting church services. Now, Apple is unhappy about this particular one for the iGasm vibrator:

"Women all over Britain are saying yes, yes, yes to the £30 iGasm that plugs into a music player and delivers good vibrations that pulse to the beat. But shocked iPod bosses are iRate—demanding stores take down all posters for the gadget or risk a fight in the iCourt."

Gotta love the tabloid copy, too.

-- via MacWorld

Blogger Testimonials in Ads

On the topic of using internet celebrities in advertising: just saw this banner ad (click it to zoom) on Digg: "In our very subjective opinion, AskCity has become the best mapping product on the internet." The quote is by Michael Arrington, the founder of the TechCrunch blog with over 400K RSS readers that covers tech start-ups. The URL behind the ad was this; it was dead last night when I clicked it, but I'm curious to see what the landing page is.

Arrington wrote about AskCity's launch last December in this post, but the banner quote is not from there and it doesn't come up on Google as published anywhere else.

Earlier:
Online Celebrities in Ad Campaigns
Product Placement in Lonelygirl15
Bruce Willis on iChat