To promote its football broadcasting service on Orange TV and Orange mobile, the French Telco just launched a very nice micro site.

It is a full window flash video, where Sebastien Chabal, a French rugby player, kind of an icon here, is about to shoot a penalty. Only for that he's gonna need your help. So, you are asked to fill in a form, with your mobile number. (Unfortunately it won't work outside France ...)
You then instantly receive a call, with Chabal asking you personally, to give him a hint, on which direction he should shoot. You can press a button on your mobile that will determine his shoot on screen right after.

I LOVE the idea behind Farfar's new site for Nokia - The Unloader. The problem is that the first five files I tried failed as they were not compatible. Shame. I tried a .xls a .swf a .vsd etc but only had success with a .doc and a .pdf etc... Hope you have more luck. If you make something like this make sure it accepts all extensions as the user will just run away otherwise.

One year after viral game Stare Out, O2 and the England rubgy team are ready for another challenge to the online audience. This time the game is called Batak and it tests your peripheral vision.

The game is based on a training device popular with International Rugby coaches called Batak and which has been recreated it online allowing rugby fans a chance to compete head-to-head with the top players in the England first team.

The agency is archibald ingall stretton.

From Greece, a campaign for a chocolate bar that is proving very successful. As Panos from OgilvyInteractive explains us, "Love at first site" is a 17 minute interactive film, shot on the Greek island of Paros, and in Athens.

It is a story of how Petros, a young Greek man and Joanna, an English girl on vacation at the island of Paros, fall in love "at first sight", and spend a magic week together, only to break up and never see each other again. The story unfolds in "flash back" and users get to experience the love story from the beginning. Only through their actions and correct choices can they progress the love story and bring the two heroes back together at the big finale, two years after the events at Paros.

I don't know why but i've spent the last two days watching these puppies through a live webcam, as well as the other 23.000 people watching them at the same time... even full-screen size... also, it's really funny the variation in the number of users depending on the puppies being on screen or not

I guess there must be an advertising lesson somewhere in this content... or is it just that they are adorable... ? Whatever, it would very interesting the exposure that a brand would get if they appeared somewhere on the screen... or is this the kind of thing that being sponsored is not worthy anymore?

(Thanks Pit!)

This season Jean Charles de Castelbajac has decided to unveil his Spring/Summer 2009 collection with an animated LEGO-populated fashion show video. The result is amazing (and amusing).

via

Crime Medicine has nothing to do with CSI. Crime Medicine is a campaign launched in Sweden to inform citizens that more than 60 percent of prescription drugs sold on the internet are counterfeit and potentially dangerous, or substandard.

The online experience starts on a fake online pharmacy, but after a few seconds the user is taken to the backstage of the site, to discover the truth that hides behind that e-tailer.

If you're looking for a lesson in creative digital marketing, you should have a look at the latest website created by Achtung! for Volkswagen. It's called Volkswagen Clever Innovations and it clearly shows how Flash and video can be cleverly used to develop premium online experiences with the product.

On the website, you are taken through five typical dangerous or simply complicated situations you might face while driving. For each case, Volkswagen has developed a technology that can help you overcoming the difficulty, and it makes you discover the feature in a smart, interactive way.

What I love about working in digital marketing is the fact that digital tools can be become even more powerful, cool and engaging if and when they are integrated with the "offline" world. You can apply them to marketing action as well as to art, as this brilliant project made in Pennsylvania demonstrates.

What happened is that a group of people decided to bring to life on Google Street View Sampsonia Way, located in the North of Pittsburgh. As Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, the minds behind the project, explain on the a Street with a view website, Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more. Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform.

The collaboration between H&M and Comme de Garcon creates a world made of red bubbles and outfits ready to be explored. The website is simple and effective in presenting the collection and explaining the co-lab, but it misses a bit of magic.

Of course I don't expect H&M to be inspirational, but given the peculiarity of the project I would have expected an additional touch of coolness. Everything is clean and easy to explore and, as usual, the prices of the items are always there to immediately satisfy your curiosity.

Did you know there are 42 good things you can do with the Samsung Omnia mobile phone? You can discover each one of them by watching 42 short videos on the dedicated website.

Yes, I know, at first sight the idea of watching 42 videos sounds a bit boring and frustrating, but if you give it a try, probably you will change your mind, as I did.

As usual, I love to discover and present projects from all around the world. For example, today let's fly to Norway, to join The Eco Dance. Thomas, from King (the agency behind the project together with From STHLM with love), provided us with some background information to better understand the work.

ICA is Scandinavia?s leading grocery chain. Their advertising concept is a long running international award winning sit-com about a store, running in Sweden and Norway. For the introduction of the private ecological label "I love Eco" in Norway, one of the characters, Marius, came up with the idea of an ecological dance.

I like very much the communication approach from the guys at Shackleton. Even when they've been the Direct Agency of the Year in Cannes Festival for the last couple of years, they do not limit themselves to one field and cross from digital to traditional and vice versa in each and every one of their campaigns, doing very well the so-called integration, 360 or whatever you wanna name it. Some of them, also, are very funny, as for instance, the famous iJamas a gift for Christmas.

Their latest action is done for Accion contra el Hambre (Action against Hunger), an NGO dedicated to denounce the severe malnutrition of over 19 million infants all over the world, problem that should be solved with just 3 thousand million euros, no more.

And as after the massive exposure of his An inconvenient truth documentary Al Gore appears to be the go-to guy with this kind of social causes...

I really like this new site from Goodby. It just supports the product so well. Big idea done really well...

Christian Haas, group creative director: 'We wanted to create something that was simple yet which demonstrated the full potential of this amazing card. We asked ourselves "What does 'now' look like?" It was a long process to curate an interesting set of entertaining and informative widgets from little-known facts to popular web feeds. But we love how it turned out - a one-page dashboard of now.' Here

I've been fascinated by QR codes since the very beginning, a couple of years ago. And I've always asked myself the same questions: how many people have the QR reader software installed on his/her mobile phone? How many people really understand there is something they can do and access to through that barcode? Is it really worth and cost effective to launch an action with QR codes (outside of Japan, of course...)?

The disappointing thing is that I'm still looking for relevant answers to the questions above. I keep reading about QR actions but it's impossible to get any number on the spread of QR enabled phones nor on the results of QR campaigns. To give you an idea of the lack of information in the industry and among consumers, I think it's interesting to read an article Ralph Lauren has published on its online magazine. A fashion brand that explains its consumers a technology... let me say that this is a bit curious, unless you have realized nobody has interacted with your QR code...