Mobile App

This is a great idea from Canadian advertising agency Taxi.  Apparently there is a particular time of year when Montreal experiences really bad potholes, unsurprisingly this is called Pothole Season.  To help Montreal residents Taxi built this awesome app that automatically recognises a pot hole when you drive over (thanks to the iPhone’s accelerometer) maps it and shares it with other users in real time so they can avoid the pesky road craters! Effing genius!

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When you think of Jeep what springs to mind?  For me its the great outdoors and the spirit of adventure.  But how do you make that relevant today?  How about a completely mobile location based game!  It”s a perfect fit from a brand perspective, harness the power of the smartphone and leverage the GPS/location based capabilities to get people out of urban environments and into the wilderness.  Very Jeep!  What I love about this campaign though is that Jeep didn’t sacrifice the essence of the brand for participation.  It would have been easy to place the rewards (explained in the video) in easy to reach places to increase the numbers but that wouldn’t have been very Jeep would it.

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The world has been waiting for a killer location based service and I think we’ve found it.  Its called Crash Corsage and essentially the app pulls in publicly available data from wedding planning sites such as The Knot and eWedding creating an ever changing list of nuptials just begging to be crashed!  Produced by R/GA’s Eric Schlakman the app is equal parts ingenius and devious and is bound to cause some mild panic amongst brides everywhere…especially with the added encouragement to ‘get involved’!

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In Greece Lacta chocolate bar wrappers have been used for decades by smitten men and women to share love messages.  Lovers simply wrote their message on the wrapper and passed it on until a recent packaging change meant the traditional paper wrapper become plastic.  Luckily Olgilvy Athens brought the tradition into the 21st century with this cool AR mobile application that lets you send & receive love messages on your smartphone, which are then displayed via augmented reality over the top of a real Lacta chocolate bar!

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The run up to Christmas has revealed yet more Christmas campaigns with an added sprinkling of ad agency Christmas cards.  All good fun and some surprisingly innovative ideas.  Enjoy the best digital and social media stories of the last week;

1. The Worlds Most Social Christmas Tree By Heineken
2. Info-graphic : Who Exactly Is Using Google+
3. The Never Ending Digital Christmas Card
4. Wieden + Kennedy Christmas Card : A Choir Of You
5. New App Ensures You Are Never Late For Work Again!

Now you’ve enjoyed your fix of ad related shenanigans spare a thought for all the Christmas Cats in Christmas Hats and head here for a visual delight!

Ingenius!  Have you ever been late to work because when you wake mother nature has dumped 3 feet of snow on your car or Jack Frost has iced your wind screen to within an inch of its life?  Never fear, the team at agency Boondoogle have created a super smart alarm clock called the ‘Winter Wake-up’ that monitors the weather over night and wakes you up early if things outside have got a little hairy!

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So apparently Swedes know what condoms are but aren’t very good at using them!  To help change this sexually irresponsible behaviour the Stockholm County Aids Prevention Programme came up with the idea to build a mobile app to record Swedes sexual encounters!  To activate you simply turn the “Sex Profile” app on and lay the phone next to you, the app then records your rhythm and duration before graphing your very own Sex Profile!  You can then upload your personal sex graph and compare it with other participants!  I’m lost for words!

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Another corker of a student idea, this time from the Institute of Design in Germany.  Its great to see unrestrained creativity like this, without the worry of brand guidelines, legal approval or even plain old relevance.  This idea by Christian Baur and Thimon Machatzke is centred around your social circle and challenges you to keep those friends literally in a circle around you…a circle of 2 meters!  If you can keep up the close proximity for 4 hours your next night out is covered by Fisherman’s Friend.  Great piece of creative thinking.

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Old Navy seems to have gone all Willy Wonka with its lastest piece of made for web content which goes behind the scenes of Funnovations Inc a fictional factory of fun where Old Navy surprises and delights it customers in weird and wacky ways. One element that does seem interesting though is the Snap Appy app. Simply use the mobile app to snap the Old Navy logo anywhere (in store, on a bag, in the mail, online, even on TV!) receive an instant reward. As Old Navy says, it’s the world’s first magic logo!

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Friends that don’t mind embarrassing you online?  Unflattering photos causing you problems?  Online security firm Securitas Direct has the answer with their new identity protection application called “Verisure Yourself“. The mobile app uses humor via fictional character Sargent Verisure to address the serious issue of online abuse.  The Sarg is sent to violators to give them a lesson in online manners they won’t forget and then strangely try’s to recruit them!  Interesting idea with a strange ending!

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