Augmented reality app for music festivals
The Voodoo app was designed by New Orleans ad firm Zehnder Communications using Layar 2.0 to let festival-goers with enabled phones get information on performances, attractions and services simply by pointing their phone cameras toward key parts of the festival grounds. When viewing concert stages, for instance, one custom AR layer provided information on lineups, schedules and current artists performing, including artist profiles and Web links. Pointing a phone camera at a vendor would show menus and pricing, while other points of interest highlighted by the app included vendor locations, artist displays, restrooms, ATMs, entrances and exits, medical sites and other services. Zehnder was one the first 50 firms worldwide named as developers of the Layar platform. A demo of the Voodoo app is available on Vimeo.
Pretty cool if you’ve lost your copy of the festival guide!
http://www.z-comm.com/
Visual Jazz: New Website & New Blog
This past month of November see’s the team @ Visual Jazz launch a new website and new blog (“VJ Brew”).
2009 as has been a great year for Visual Jazz – soon we will post up a bit of a 2009 in Review, so look out for that.
In the meantime, we are going to integrate the VJ Sydney blog into the newVJ Brew blog to give the agency one united voice platform – so switch over to the new VJ Brew blog today.
AIMIA Best Mobile Advertising or Marketing
Just pitched the Visual Jazz entry to the AIMIA judges for Best Mobile Advertising or Marketing category.
Was great fun, need to do more of that.
Here’s what we put forward:
View the stats/results here
Here’s a live video of the game.
Get and play the game from the App Store
Latest VJ Brandtube: Nikon “Make a Scene”
Nikon has recently launched a new campaign “Make a Scene” via Sapient Nitro (Sydney), media agency Media Contacts (Australia) and in partnership with NineMSN.
The campaign highlights the various effects the new NikonD5000 has when using the settings.
Visual Jazz executed a new Brandtube online advertising execution as part of the campaign.
Summer cricket online: Johnnie Walker on SMH
I’ve been a fan for many of the past years of the Johnnie Walkers live score updates on the www.smh.com.au (or the age.com.au and others) websites for all the Australian Test Match cricket games.
You know summer is really here and the cricket season is in full swing (*bliss*) when this feature starts appearing. I especially enjoyed the download widget last year.
But this year as I tune in to hear Australia adequately (not brilliantly though) squeeze the life out of the West Indies bowlers on ABC Grandstand, I’ve noticed a massive leap-improvement of the Johnnie Walker offering.
This new enhancement has a lot of new information and live features at a touch of a button.
Pie charts, batting statistics, umpire statistics, newsworthy news flashes (FYI Hussey just past 17 Test 50’s) and much more all wrapped up in a new interface design.
Much less Johnnie Walker branding, but he’s still there walking….
The ONLY thing they now need to do is take the whole thing off and away from SMH/TheAge and put it onto NineMSN and get the rights to stream live video content through this branded application….or, do a deal with ABC Grandstand to stream their radio coverage….
It’d put a bit of a dent in productivity, but I’ve seen recent statistics that say workers in Australia do multi-millions of dollars of extra work for free for corporate Australia these days, so, you know, a bit of balance is called for!
I love it, and if you like cricket you’ll be a fan soon too.
Get the score live now here.
VJ Sydney representing #creative at NineMSN Small Business Tradeshow
Today through to Wednesday 25th November, Visual Jazz will be partnering with NineMSN at a tradeshow to educate small to medium business owners in Sydney about digital marketing
So far (1/2 way through day one) we’ve seen about 150 attendees come to the session.
First session crowd arrives:
Session #2 crowd:
NineMSN stands
NineMSN have pulled together an excellent array of targeted advertising packages and educational materials at the tradeshow, as well as investing some of their most senior talent to speak at the event as well as personally show business owners around the stands.
Visual Jazz will be producing all the banner creative for any customer that signs up to one of the NineMSN SME packages.
Filmaps is rapidly creating a crowd-powered database of filming locations around the world. Users can search by location or film title to bring up a Google Map that features location photos from Panoramio and videos from You Tube. Since its launch in January this year 998 films have been mapped in 2363 locations. Filmaps adds social elements through Facebook and Twitter connections, as well as embeddable location widgets.
Cooking Wiki that can be edited by anyone
We’ve all been there, downloaded a recipe, followed it to the tee and getting a result looked nowhere close to the picture or tasted any good..
Check out Foodista – the cooking encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. Launched late last year in Seattle, Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world’s largest, highest quality cooking encyclopedia. Rather than include hundreds of recipes for the same basic result, however—the way many recipe sites do—Foodista aims instead to perfect a few key recipes through the collaborative editing process. Thousands of high-resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons currently illustrate the topics on the site—though not the results of specific recipes, as TechCrunch points out—and users can also upload their own photos.
Perhaps a case to prove if too many cooks do spoil the broth? Let’s wait and see!
Dunlop Volley Campaign Review
(Adnews Digital Choice Article: 6th November 2009)
Dunlop Volley (Volley Warehouse Campaign)
I recently came across this very cool and humorous digital execution from Dunlop Volley – a well known brand but one I hadn’t seen much from in many years. I am probably not the exact target market for this brand, but it really appealed to me.
The Volley brand has a 70 year history in tennis attire and has more recently developed into a sporty/fashion brand for the sub-twenty-people demography (or those still aspiring to be sub-twenty).
The campaign centres on mock-invention ‘As Seen on TV’-style videos contained in a warehouse-style website, all of which is a tongue-in-cheek poke at trashy slash-price advertising.
The mock-inventions solve core issues of the target audience’s life, such as the Dish Jockey that enables you to do the dishes as if you were still at the party the turntables, and the Gig Viewer which ensures you can see the band regardless of where you are in the mosh-pit. The TVCs are extremely well cast, and comments on YouTube show that some viewers thought they were for real products. This is a rather scary fact, but indicates that the ads have hit the mark.
A terrific addition to the site is the user generated content capability in the Warehouse Blog which has drawn some very funny uploads. The stand-out clip for me is ‘Kaboom’. Warning though, trawling through all these clips is addictive.
With a buying audience that is very marketing savvy, the site is sure to appeal for the humorous take of slash-price star-burst adverting commonly shown today. Best of all, it’s delivered in the place where this audience spends most of their time – the internet.
What I really like about this campaign is that it doesn’t have technology as the core feature; it has a simple and humorous idea which is delivered very effectively to the intended audience online.
The campaign also doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the brand is subtly woven into the themes of the mock-inventions and site content.
A real winner for me, this one should pick up some awards but also lift sales of Volley shoes.
Kudos to Marilyn & Sons, who came up with the idea, and a big hats off to the client for running with it.
