Archive for July 2007

Forget everything that iPod has ever told you. From Motorola comes the MOTOROKR S9 - a wireless devices that connects you to your music without any wires to tie you up.

What is really catching the attention of marketers is how the product is being pushed through the market on YouTube without watchers even noticing. The promo-videos feature the “Wirebreakers” who are a group of Urbanite break dancers that are tired of being restricted by their pods. Says the leader of Wirebreakers:

“Everybody is too tied up to their music. They can’t move; they can’t dance.”

So, the Wirebreakers hit the streets to get the word out about the product that will free them from the earphones that suppress them.

Check out the Wirebreakers here.

Traveling with young children is one of the most taxing aspects of being on the go. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport hopes to have made the experience of weary baby-toting travelers a little bit nice with its recent opening of Schiphol’s Babycare Lounge by Nutricia. As Springwise reports:

Located in the airport’s main departure terminal, the lounge is (as the name indicates) a co-branding effort by Schiphol and Nutricia, a Dutch baby food brand.

Designed by MV Architects, the lounge is serenely stylish and geared to ensuring a baby’s well-being while en route. The 90 m2 area features seven circular ‘cabins’, each of which can be closed off with sheer curtains to create a personal zone. The booths have comfortable circular seating curving around a crib. Lights in the lounge are dimmed for sleeping babies, with individual reading lights for parents. For infants that need a bit of distraction, each booth has a gadget that projects coloured lights on the ceiling, just above the crib. Other facilities include a changing area, baby baths and a microwave for heating food… The space is open daily from 6 am to 10 pm, accessible free of charge to parents and children aged 0–3.

Springwise notes that the Babycare Lounge is a good example of brand space - “a place where consumers can try things out, work or relax, without being expected to buy a product or service while they’re there.”

Springwise: Baby Brand Space

-contributed by Christine Huang

The planning for the PSFK Conference Los Angeles is going well - and we’ll publish later this morning an update on the agenda for the day. Remember it’s Tuesday September 18. The early bird tickets have all sold out - so it’s a simple $300 for the rest of you. Tickets here: www.psfk.com/psfk-conference-los-angeles.

Here’s something we did - and we’d love to get your reaction. We dumped the word ‘marketing’ from the description of the day. Of course, PSFK Conferences are business events but we felt overtly constrained by the term. The basic structure remains the same: a morning of trends and inspiration and an afternoon of ideas. The thing is, that we felt that, firstly, ‘marketing’ doesn’t really encompass the solutions that people are generating in business today; that ‘marketing’ comes with all the bad baggage that advertising and promotions has generated (e.g. urban spam); and that ‘marketing’ isn’t accessible to a new generation of creative minds.

Even though this rising generation of entrepreneurs seem to be conducting what text book scholars once considered marketing, folk today don’t want to do what their peers today consider ‘marketing’. We want the content of the PSFK Conferences to be inspiring and motivating for everyone and that’s why we’re switching from the term to Creative Ideas.

Any feedback? Leave a note in the comments box.

STA Travel specialise in providing students and young people with tailored travel arrangements. As a result they’re probably a brand that has been suffering from the trend that has seen young audience move away from traditional media consumption and in particular onto the web.

Rather than try to disrupt and interrupt STA Travel and electricArtists came up with a better way to engage with their customers. They gave them something back in the form of widgets and applications for their Facebook and Myspace pages.

Marc Schiller of electricArtists had this to say:

“For STA Travel’s customer base (the college market) today it’s less about “browsing” the web and more about “clipping” the web.

“The marketing team at STA Travel not only “got” the importance of branded utilities but they also knew that they needed to embrace change quickly.

“I’m pleased and excited to announce that earlier today, eight weeks after our initial meeting, my colleagues at electricArtists and at STA Travel have launched an initial suite of four customizable travel tools that can be used to assist in everyday travel planning. The four widgets are:

* a trip countdown widget the shows the days until your departure.
* a weather comparison widget that shows the weather not only where you are now, but where you’re headed.
* a travel to-do list widget that helps you organize you packing and shopping lists.
* a special offers widget that streams to your desktop the latest low-priced fares”

Here in the UK the British Government have released this ad:

The ad takes the carbon footprint metaphor literally but to good effect. Hopefully all the awareness that’s currently being generated will translate into some much needed action.

via Influx

The New York Times has run an article highlighting the fact that the former General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party is the new face of Louis Vuitton. The man that brought an end to the cold war through Perestroika and Glasnost features in a set of new ads from the designer that have been shot by Annie Leibovitz.

Whilst Gorbachev is no newcomer to starring in commercials, he was one the face of Pizza Hut, it seems a strange place to find the last President of the USSR. However, the photography from Annie Leibovitz shows him in a very natural setting - what appears to be the back of a diplomat’s limousine in eastern Europe. The ads certainly set themselves apart from the usual immaculate models in impossible settings.

via Agenda Inc

This is a great image from Edwin Tofslie showing how Apple’s computer range has evolved through the ages. From the Apple I to the first Macintosh in 1984, the PowerBook, Cube and iMac through to the iPhone and MacBook Pro. You can donwload a high res version here.

Via Noisy Decent Graphics

This is a fine film put together by London advertising agency Mother and design agency Airside. The film explains, in an engaging and easy to understand way, the effect of climate change and what we can all do to help out.

Via Iain Tait

Ever wondered what social media people are using in Brazil or Croatia? Valleywag has mapped out the world according to which social network a country is using the most:

• Orkut leads in the Indian subcontinent, as well as Brazil.
• Facebook is stronger, internationally, than Myspace, with surprising strongholds in the Middle East.
• hi5.com is the most international of all the social networks, leading in Peru, Colombia, Central America, and other, scattered countries such as Mongolia, Romania, and Tunisia.

Valleywag: The world map of social networks

-Contributed by Erin Middleton