how widgets are made
This old General Motors sponsored public relations production is eerily entertaining. In a little more than five minutes, you'll learn everything you need to know about how business and commerce work.
It'll also leave you thinking how our ancestors were stupid, slow, simpletons who could not process multi-dimensional programming and story lines like we can today. Thanks, Dan Bishop!
human vending machine
Here's another really fun vending machine stunt.
Nothing will ever top the coke happiness machine, but it's still good to see people having fun with an otherwise boring machine that sells food.
totally awkward families on vacation
Virgin America has partnered with Awkward Family Photos for a totally awkward contest. Submit photos of your own awkward family on vacation, and you could win four round trip tickets to anywhere.
This is a cool partnership that a lot of agency people could have easily written off. "Are we saying that vacation with Virgin is awkward??" Sometimes it's good to let go and have fun with your brand (and let your customers join in the fun.)
Let the awkwardness begin. Thanks, Eliza! Again!
your banana looks hot
Apparently Chiquita Banana just had a user generated design contest to re-create their banana stickers. Usually user generated design contests are filled with lameness and tired beyond the point of yawning, but this one generated some nice results.
I like the robot banana a lot, but wifi banana just kicks total banana ass. Thanks, Eliza!
what does your junk drawer say about you?
Artist/photography Brittnybadger is photographing the contents of junk drawers from different people, and turning them into artwork.
While the series is just getting started, it's a pretty cool look into someone's life. A junk drawer tells you about their interests, hobbies, cast offs, and other things. It's also interesting to see some of the same elements across multiple drawers (or in my drawer at home). From Coudal.
the app for making your tv more social
yap.TV is an app for your phone or iPad that serves as your ultimate tv companion. Find out what's on without having to navigate those annoying cable directories (love this), chat with your friends, create polls and otherwise use it to integrate your social into your tv life.
Really into giving Yap.tv a spin? Ultra-geek Steve Wozniak will be tweeting using the tool on Thursday, when Big Bang Theory airs an episode featuring his guest appearance.
Geeks + social + tv apps = everything you need for a night on the couch.
asteroids everywhere
Now you can play asteroids all day long, while doing work on the internet.
Just install the Erkie bookmarklet on your browser, and turn any internet site into a productive game of shooting space rocks. From @ryanatMGH
nothing but curse words, all the time.
CurseBird monitors the tweet stream and aggregates all of the tweets with swear words in them.
The result is a stream of tweets filled with f-bombs and other words that you probably use at the office all day, but that your IT department is attempting to block you from seeing.
You'll even see the top swear words of the moment ranked by popularity (the eff-word is currently leading with 39% of all swearing tweets) and plotted into handy graphs. Effing awesome. From Laughing Squid
what would classic art look like as tilt shift photography?
I'm sure you've asked yourself this question hundreds of times.
Art Cyclopedia has realized 16 photomanipulations of Vincent van Gogh paintings just so you could see them in a new way. Cool.
if only you had a proof machine at the office
How do you know that the new Samsung SD cards are waterproof, magnet proof and shock proof? You know because they ran it through the Proof Machine.
So much fun, you'll want to send your friends through a Proof Machine ride.
how to introduce an ipad app
Actor and Coconut Records bandmate Jason Schwartzman makes a cute introduction to the New Yorker iPad app.
I don't know what it is, but there's a certain charisma, confidence and fun level that make this entertaining. From @iBoy
your twitter account never tasted so good
Because you realize how stupidly ridiculous it is comparing Twitter stats to other users, you will absolutely love Donut Stats. This delicious app that values your Twitter account in...donuts.
You'll find out where you stand, and more importantly how long you could survive on only the donuts from your Twitter account.
I'm proud to say that I'll live another 90 days on those Dunkin Donuts chocolate glazed masterpieces. From @prblog
view other people's tweet streams
Sometimes your friends have really interesting friends. Wouldn't it be nice to spend time in their timelines? Now you can.
TwtRoulette is a super smart new tool that lets you view other Twitter users timelines. This is a great way to find new, interesting people to follow when you get bored of your lame old friends.
From @kateKendall
soon, everything will be controlled with your phone
BMW/MINI is showcasing a new electric scooter at the Paris Auto show.
An electric scooter is cool and everything, but what's totally awesome is that your iPhone snaps into the dashboard to serve as the ignition key (genius), GPS and whatever else you normally use your phone for while driving. Awesomeness on two wheels.
From @mandylipka
hot girls teach guys how to groom
The fantastically famous Shave Everywhere site just got a makeover, and this time it's all about a hot girl teaching guys how to remove unsightly body hair. And there's nothing wrong with that.
From BrandFreak
get stuff done. $5 at a time.
How many times have you been in the situation where you need video of someone in a catsuit doing something awesome, but don't have the budget to shoot it?
Not to worry, because Fiverr is a site devoted to marketing things that people will do for you...for just five dollars. Like Nicolinator - who will do anything in a catsuit. For $5.
This is the most fun shopping site ever. From Scott Baradell, via Facebook.
it's like chatroulette without all of the penises
This is a GREAT idea. ChatRoulette (visit at your own risk) is fun, but it's pretty much filled with guys showing their penises. Because apparently that's what guys really like to do when they're anonymous on the internet.
What if you took away the anonymity? vChatter is video chat that's tied to your Facebook login. What makes vChatter awesome?
1. Because it's tied to your Facebook profile, you're less likely to show the world your penis.
2. You can chat with strangers or your Facebook friends. (The dude that we chatted with looked pretty bored and too lazy to get out of bed.)
Pretty cool. We approve.
the future is electric
Here's a cool production from GE showing the past and predicted future of electric vehicles in our lives. Play with the past/future widget, use the range calculator or play Elective Avenue.
This production is a part of the GE Show series, which we've posted about before. Once again, proof that complex messages, b2b and educational marketing can be interactive and fun.
don't eff with a panda
Maybe you've already seen these Panda spots. If you have, you should watch them again because they're so awesome. And if you didn't see them yet...
Never. ever. say no to a panda. Thanks again, Eliza!
girls like flowers, guys like puke.
Ever wonder if that shirt you're wearing is a "girl" color? Boys and girls react to color differently, and trend toward different color variations.
Artist and scientist (you can be BOTH of those things??) pulled together truckloads of color data and produced a visualization of what girls and guys like.
It turns out that girls trend toward metaphorical names like "robins egg blue" and guys prefer the more literal names like "darker green". Oh, and you won't find "hot pink" on the guy's side of the fence. Thanks, Eliza!
under construction doesn't get better than this
This is the best "under construction" site that was ever produced on the internet. Really. From make the logo bigger.
there's a roach in your chips
This ad for Terminix puts a roach right into a sweet bowl of potato chips, with an acetate overlay that captures your attention. The reveal removes the bug and then displays the Terminix branding. So smart.
your pixel friends
How many good friends do you have online that you've never met in the real world? More and more, this is becoming commonplace.
Artist Johan Rosenmunthe has created a series of photographs where the people are all pixelated so that you can't really see them, but their environment is clean and in focus.
It's like they're there with you, but not really there...kind of like a Twitter best friend.
shop in facebook, pick it up later
MyGofer is a new tool that lets you shop for basics like groceries and paper goods from the comfort of your own Facebook tab. Now you'll never leave
The MyGofer app lets you shop for stuff within Facebook, and then your order is completed on the MyGofer site. Once your order is placed, you can pick up your goods at a local Kmart.
This is a cool trend that will be fun to watch. Remember the early days of ecommerce? They're being reinvented all over again, but this time, within Facebook. Welcome to the beginning of your Facebook future. Soon, people will get married, have kids and live happily ever after, all without leaving Facebook.
the most awesomemest thing ever
What is the most awesomest thing ever? Only the wisdom of the internet knows, and agency Big Spaceship created a tool to find out.
Go to the Most Awesomest Thing Ever and begin your voting. (Just be prepared to give up some productivity from your day, in return. It's addicting.)
This brand new version of the awesome measuring tool includes metrics for measuring the awesome. Currently, Nirvana and Tim Burton are both doing well in the awesome department.
how college students spend time
Aren't info graphics filled with the awesome?
This one details how college students spend their time, and how life changes from high school to college.
I guess that we can assume "other" means Facebooking.
welcome to the lunatic asylum
Here's a fun song about agency life as we know it.
Nick Pipitone from Milwaukee agency Jigsaw produced the piece for the annual Milwaukee 99 Awards show. Totally fantastically awesome.
if you live in london, things are about to get tasty
Our favorite tasty internet cake making Creative Director is up to something awesome again.
Eat Your Heart Out is an event/cakeshop devoted entirely to nastily delicious cakes made only for adults. The event is taking place October 28 - 31 where 666 custom crafted scary cakes will be sold each day.
To counter balance the delicious evil, they've wrangled sponsor Alibi to be a part of the promotion, and many of the cakes will have Alibi ingredients - helping to offset some of the bad things that you may be putting into your body.
Like everything that Miss Cakehead does, you can count on this event being well photo documented to the point where you'll want to fly to London and chow down. (And if you're already there, you'd better tweet about it.)
the personal style of technology
Think that technology doesn't come with style?
Techpeek is an entire blog devoted to sharing the personal style of people using technology. From CoolHunting.
the colors of internet business
Colour Lovers examines the color of the identities of the biggest internet brands. (Looks like blue is still a safe color choice.) From Quipsologies.
foursquare can sell burgers
Is your boss one of those dudes that's always asking the ROI question before committing to social media efforts, but then spends half his budget on some billboards without any thought of ROI? Well, here's another case study to share.
McDonalds spent $1000 on a FourSquare promotion that netted a 33% increase in foot traffic, generated 600,000 new fans of the brand and is credited as part of a campaign that increased profit by 29%. That's some serious burger business.
a better way to get in shape
Earndit lets you collect points for every visit to the gym, or mile that you run, and then spend the points like you'd spend reward points for a credit card.
The network ties to NikePlus, FourSquare, Garmin and other networks and devices that you might use to track or check into physical activities.
They've just started getting partners into the program, and this is begging to embraced by a behemoth brand who could bring it to the next level, while getting us doughy humans fit in the process. Super smart.
try it before you buy it
This Neuvo Watch iPhone app lets users see what the product will look like on their wrist before they buy it. Sooo smart.
Could your product be sampled in new ways by your potential customers? From Springwise via @ericfleming.
the trashiest hotel in the world
The Save Beach project looks to educate European beach-goers on the importance of not leaving all of their trash on the beach.
The organization has raised awareness of the issue by creating a beachside hotel made entirely of garbage found on European beaches.
The hotel will travel around from beach to beach, and even features celebrity guests...who don't mind getting trashy for a good cause.
finally, an app to track your poo
Let's face it, you're probably tired of writing down all of the details of your poo on paper. Now, finally...there's a poo log app. Now you can log the details of your excrement activity and have fun showing your friends with graphs, facts and more.
I can't wait for the Twitter integration, so that you can tweet every time you poop, and then log the FourSquare location of the poop. These are things that need to be shared.
bingo people are freaking weird
If you go to a live bingo game, the callers like to make rhymes when they call out the bingo balls to the bingo crowd. It's all a part of the zany bingo culture.
So when Gossip Bingo wanted to get the word out about their online bingo site, they took to the streets like a bingo caller. Bingo.
how fighting can be inspiring
This short for HBO Boxing is absolutely beautiful. (Yeah, I didn't think that boxing could be beautiful either...but it can.) Wow. From @breakfastlinks.
sneak peek at facebook's competitor
Diaspora is a social network started by four NYU students who were fed up with Facebook's privacy policy, and who quickly earned a vote of approval from the internet community in the tune of $200,000 in funding on Kickstarter.
They're making headway, and have released snapshots of what the product looks like. (Looks a lot like Facebook, actually.)
They've even released their code to the community, so that other developers can improve the product before release to the public.
Think a Facebook killer could never come along? There was a time before Google where people thought no company could ever compete with Yahoo. This will be an interesting one to watch...
google icons living happily in our world
Holy wonderful. Check out these gorgeous illustrations of a world where Google comes to life. From @coudal.
that red puppet monster is back
Not all TV is dead. Sesame Street is coming back to the middle-sized box in your living room, with a whole new season of puppetry.
And that's not all...they've even started a Tumblr blog to get you all pumped up for the season. Even more details on the muppet wiki. (Yes, there's a wiki devoted to muppetry.)
strap a rocket on your back, and let's go.
They've deployed actors with jetpacks to promote the new Halo: Reach game release.
People flying around with rockets on their backs is a guaranteed media event, right? Where's My Jetpack, the authority on such matters, is not impressed.
(Still looks fun.)
attack ads push the limits of zany
I've resisted putting most political ads on Brand Flakes, but oh...geez...how could you not share this Wizard of Oz production?
ridiculous lawn ornaments
A collection of ridiculously silly lawn ornaments. This is what makes the human race so freaking awesome.
all of the links from all of your twitter friends
SiftLinks creates an RSS feed of just the links that the people in your twitterstream are sharing.
This is a great way to view what you might have missed from the people that you follow, while you were doing work during the day.
Want to see how it works? Here's a link to the most awesome people in the universe: the people in my Twitterstream.
you should do something like this on your lunch break today
If you have some free time today, you might want to run to the store and pick up 14,000 dice and see what you could turn them into. These dudes created pixel art.
This would be a cool idea for a live outdoor installation/stunt for the right brand.
what really smart people can do with their ipads
This light painting made with iPads will make any art project that you've ever produced look like a middle school production.
This is how engineers and smarty pants make art. Holy crap, this is awesome.
time travel through a video time machine
If you love time travel and your hot tub time machine is getting repaired, then you'll really dig the YouTube Time Machine.
Choose a year, change your media filter, and enjoy loads and loads of media in the time period of your choice. Excellent...you could spend the rest of your otherwise productive day watching this stuff. From The Denver Egotist.
philips does romantic comedy
Maybe it's because Victoria is so cute. Or maybe it's because we can identify with the clumsy marketing guy at the shoot. But there's something that's almost engaging about this Philips webisode. This is the first in a series of productions that Philips is releasing to the internets to promote their myriad of products.
It's cool to see brands investing in branded entertainment, and will be interesting to see where the series goes, and what kind of audience it develops. I'm rooting for more Victoria.
could bill murray kick chuck norris' ass?
Bill Murray is quickly becoming a pop culture icon/hero rivaling Betty White or dare I say...Chuck Norris.
If you're a Murray devotee, then you'll need to head to Los Angeles this weekend and check out the Bill Murray tribute art show. Yes. An entire show dedicated to the worship of...Bill Murray.
what's really happening at fashion week
Wish that you were at fashion week this week in NYC? No worries, you have a bunch of friends that are documenting it for you.
Milk Made is a photo blog that captures what's happening at fashion week, from the cell phones of participants. No media company could possibly be at all of the shows, parties or events, so why not let the community tell the story?
The result is a live stream of what's happening in NYC through the eyes of hundreds of contributors. Super smart.
people don't care about their tv
Dirk the Rabbit has some fantastic analysis on what we need. His review of a couple of recent surveys show that people care more about their microwave than they do about their tv.
Two interesting points made in this post:
+ The tv is seen as a delivery device. It's not the content that's unimportant, but the device no longer fits well into our routines
+ The younger the audience, the less important the land line. No surprise here, but always great to see numbers that support the trends that we tout in presentation deck slides. ;)
Also interesting that a clothes dryer ranks high on the list of "must have" devices.
the parties that you weren't invited to
Maybe you're not on the hip list that gets you invited to all of the cool parties during Fashion Week in NYC.
That's ok, because Refinery 29 is clearly on the list, and they've taken the time to put together a bitchin slide show of the best invites of the week. Sweet. From Quipsologies.
what's obscene?
Are You Obscene? points out that not everyone thinks the same things are obscene.
Take the quiz (and stop whenever you want to view the results), and you'll see if what you believe to be obscene coincides with what the rest of the world thinks.
This is all to promote the release of Howl, a new film about the once considered obscene Allen Ginsberg. Thanks, Tom!
what if poop had wheels?
Poop jokes are funny, but remote controlled poop that chases people around the streets is downright awesome on wheels.
That's what this promo for Dig Toilets Not Graves is all about. Because poop on the streets is killing people in some countries, and digging toilets can help change that. And there's no better way to illustrate the cause than to have poop chasing people.
eat those words for lunch
Sometimes all you need is a little bit of stop motion (and a labeling machine) to produce pure awesomeness.
someone who is 22 doesn't remember your campaign from the 80's.
Here's proof that a brand's legacy is only as good as it's audience's memory.
And in the case of KFC, people between the ages of 18 - 25 don't remember Colonel Sanders. Or know his image. Or that he was a real person. Why should they, if they haven't seen any campaigns to teach them?
You can say that heritage is earned, but it never hurts to remind your audience who you really are.
signs are beautiful when you remove the clutter
I may have posted on this some time ago, but who cares - it's beautifully genius: photographer Josef Schulz has removed the information from signs, to turn them into pieces of artwork.
what can you do with what you've found on the internet?
Artist, teacher and graffiti evangelist Evan Roth created a video for GirlTalk's Cache Rules Everything Around Me using ONLY animated GIF's that he found on the interwebs.
Here's proof that you don't need production budgets with hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce genius. From @dpbiker.
how to get a town dancing
To promote their new Galaxy S phone, Samsung produced a super fun dance video that all starts with a little girl.
Even more impressive, check out the phone's promotional site, where the interactive video takes you through a dude's day, illustrating how the phone can be used. Really smart.
win balls by connecting with friends
Uniqlo (my favorite store in the world) just launched a Uniqlo pinball game to promote their new UK online store. Players get to play Uniqlo pinball and can earn coupons and discounts for the store. Want to play more? You can earn more balls by sharing with your friends.
Sweet, fun and elegantly produced - just like everything else they've ever released. (I did chuckle at the statement "Get more balls by connecting to Facebook.")
give these dudes an interview, and get a pizza
It's not an easy job market out in marketing/ad/internet/fantasyland. You need to separate yourself from the thousands of overqualified candidates applying for the same position as yours.
So Gus and Joe created a pizza maker. The tool lets you produce your own pizza using a host of choice ingredients. Even better...they'll bring you the actual pizza you ordered if you agree to give them a job interview. What's to lose? You're hungry, right?
Smart. (From one of my friends on Twitter, but now I've lost the tweet and can't credit them. You should just take credit.)
national day to remove yourself from society
September 18th. That's the day that Offlining wants you to give up your social networks, the internet, and your devices...and then go outside. They're calling it National Offlining Day. Gross.
check in here.
The University of Kentucky has just implemented an awesome outdoor campaign to promote checking in to Facebook's new Places feature while students are visiting their campus.
They've created giant real-life map pointers that serve as conversation points and visual reminders to "check in." Soooo smart. Thanks, Casey!
send a tweet to your grandma in a way she'll understand (stop)
Got a hankering for some old school communications? Thinking that a letter made on a typewriter isn't old enough? Send a telegram.
TelegramStop takes your message and customizes it to look just like an old school telegram. Then they mail it to wherever you want it to go. They do this all for just $5.65. This is a great way to get someone's attention when an email, tweet, direct message, Facebook message or Skype won't do. From @primermag
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