Enjoy (and travel safely)

Davos debates
Last week, we featured the Pepsi CSR initiative and this week we see a similar approach from the brains at Davos (not to be confused with Dr Who’s nemesis, Davros). Rather than financial gain, the prize in this case is intellectual – tickets to Davos. The competition is over (all submissions had to be in by the 4th Jan) but I thought it was an interesting initiative to see: low cost, quick to set up and creates involvement through participation, as opposed to dicatat. Which, I suppose, is the point.

Thank you for the music
Quite a nice government-led initiative that I saw just before Christmas. From a creative standpoint, there is nothing new or overtly complex here, but it is nice to see a public body getting involved in a broader sphere of work than brochureware.

Submariners
As we are in the midst of a long term pitch to be one of the agencies ‘privileged’ enough to work with the Armed Forces on recruitment, I’ve been looking for examples throughout the world of how other Forces are recruiting. This is a nice example from Australia. The components are nicely stitched together, the campaign makes good use of the media (rather than simply relying on copy) and there is plenty of opportunity for user interaction.

Brand Analyser
One for our Solutions/more strategic clients. I’m constantly on the lookout for tools that analyse media to make an intelligent judgement about organisations – the Google Insights tool was one and this, which I came across in December, is another. Enter a brand name (for example one of your clients) and it will allocate that brand a score based on its use of social media, with a pie chart showing the breakdown. Enter two names (for example a competitor) and you start to have a competitive index. I’d be wary about using this in isolation, but it is useful as part of an overall competitive analysis.

P2P trading for airmiles
A nice initiative, which makes me wonder why someone hasn’t come up with the idea before. Does what it says on the tin.

World news has been completely overshadowed by the death of Michael Jackson. The YouTube vid above is an interesting way of seeing how quickly the information was picked up on Twitter and then became a Storm. As an interesting addendum, MJs videos have stormed the viral video charts, to represent the entire top 20.

Odds on a Top 10 mainstream chart of Michael Jackson videos by the weekend? It would be worth taking a punt, certainly…