Eco Zoo – Form and function combined
A while ago, we featured a site called Ecodazoo as a beautiful example of Flash craftsmanship. Well, its back and upgraded with new characters and some lovely design features. Look at the pop-up books and just imagine if we took this approach with some of our graduate brochures.

Mock-ups made easy
One for the creative bods. A simple way to create iPhone mock-ups in Illustration or Pencil style. The Ronseal of design websites.

Holy cow! Art made simple
A few years ago, cows started to permeate the global landscape as part of what was touted as the largest public art project in the world. For those of you who don’t remember it, back in 2001, hundreds of blank, life-sized glass-fibre cows were painted, set up at prominent sites around London, then, after several months on display, auctioned off. Recently, some bright spark in Norway has created a site that allows you to create your own cow art and upload it to Facebook. It’s good fun but require that you either speak Norwegian, or are happy to experiment. (Hint: If it is anything like Swedish “Jeg vil lage min egen ku” probably translates as “I will make my own cow”…)

Canada says “no” to drugs by encouraging teens to experiment
This is a weird site. See the effect of certain drugs on human beings, by choosing a drug and watching its impact represented by a human eye. It takes a while to load (the pre-loader is at the top of the screen)  and features games, videos, and some pretty intriguing effects. The site may seem irreverent and distasteful to some, but personally I think it is extremely clever – talking to teens in a language they understand without being patronising. And by language I don’t simply mean copywriting, but in the overall approach to communicating about drugs.

Obama and the power of Facebook (http://my.barackobama.com)

The Barack story is interesting, because there is a parallel with the Conservative rise to power of the early 70s. In both cases, the political parties/candidates recognized the power of new channels to activate and capture the attention of previously hard to reach candidates. In the 1970s the channel was TV; in the case of Obama it was the internet.

There is a lot of material about the Obama campaign (I’ve included two links below), but for me one of the most interesting and unique features was its use of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Chris Hughes, the founder of Facebook, was brought onto the Obama team and immediately set about activating a whole tranche of activities, run by engaged supporters. Some of the stats have been included below:

·         More than 1.5 million people visited the mybarackobama website and organized themselves into 35,000 separate groups

·         Over 150,000 meetings and events were organized during the 21 months of Obama’s presidential campaign

·         Supporters bombarded YouTube with videos of his speeches to boost his online presence

·         The campaign raised over $600m in donations from 3million people, many of whom contributed online

·         When the Republicans started the viral rumour mill, the Obama camp used the internet to counter the various rumours that were being aired.

Simon Rosenberg, who worked on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, said: “He’s run a campaign where he’s used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he’s reinvented the way campaigns are run. Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multinational corporation versus a non-profit organisation.”

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24610850-5018194,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7412045.stm

Pincha La Rueda de Hamilton

In the run up to Sunday’s Grand Prix, competitive fervor was at an all time high. For those of who were either dead or simply don’t care the premise was this. Felipe Mass, racing on home turf, needed to come 1^st or 2^nd and needed Hamilton to come 6^th or 7^th respectively to win the grand prix. If Hamilton came 5^th or higher he would automatically win. Added to this, Fernando Alonso, who had very public spats with Hamilton last year, had implied in press conferences that he might try to assist Massa (or at the very least hinder Hamilton). Man vs. boy; Spain vs. England; black vs. white. Take your pick – there were plenty of angles to choose from.

In the pique of nationalistic fervor, TBWA, an Omnicom agency created a site called Pincha La Rueda de Hamilton. The site, which translated means “Burst Hamilton’s Tyre”, invited visitors to place a virtual nail on the track at Interlagos, the setting for Sunday’s title showdown with Felipe Massa in the Brazil Grand Prix.

The site was closed down after hundreds of abusive messages were posted, some of which referred to Hamilton as a “half-breed” and others which used the n-word. It’s a classic campaign of an organisation creating something and then foolishly not monitoring how it gets used.

Now let’s be clear – this isn’t the first time that a voodoo style campaign has been created; in the most recent football world cup there were sites where you could stab effigies of key players with a pin in an attempt to curse them prior to a game. It isn’t even the first time that an agency has used the web to push the boundaries of acceptable marketing behaviour. The problem here was that the agency didn’t respond immediately when offensive comments started to get published and when Lewis won the championship, the story became incredibly newsworthy.

There is only one fitting epithet to this story…