You've probably seen that silly gag featuring a fake leg hanging out of the trunk of a car, and it usually isn't very alarming. Or funny, really.
But AMC's Walking Dead took it a step further with their truck cruising around Comic-Con that features lots and lots of zombie arms and legs. What's not to love about dead people?
Do you still have friends who don't use gmail? Help them be less lame, and more like Google with an email intervention plan. And then you can get them all over the G+, too.
Bulmers cider has launched a fun experiment that pits humans against birds in a tweet off. (Birds are those flying creatures that you'll experience when you go outdoors.)
How do we show the birds who's boss? Just tweet your butt off from 1pm to 2pm (London time) and use the #bulmers hashtag. Birds beat us yesterday, and are due for a beating. Make it happen.
Tell your boss that you need a trip to NYC in November, for Pictoplasma. What sounds like ghost hunting juice is actually a conference dedicated to character design. This is where mascots are born.
Artists: go to show your stuff and develop new characters. Brands and agencies: go to discover the next big thing to represent that new line of widgets that you're launching. From @khyal
Fiscal policy, blah blah, debt crisis, snore. Yeah, politics can be pretty boring, huh? So boring, that White House Twitter follower, David Wiggs, decided to file a complaint with the big house on Twitter... because running a country isn't hard enough. So how does the White House respond? With a Rickroll. A little late on the meme (like 2 years), and kind of out of context, but it was a valiant effort White House. Nice to see someone has a sense of humor in the midst of all this panic lately.
Up and coming travel site, Hipmunk, wanted to create an ad that made them stand out from the competition. As if their adorable name and chipmunk mascot didn't already do that, they went above and beyond with this silly little video of some of the most popular animal memes reenacted by weird, chubby men. Proof that it's only cute when animals do it. Too funny!
This video by Paul Briganti is three things: true, creepy, and possibly hysterical (though you can't ever admit it because that would be very unhipster of you). While the wolf sweater montage seems to be the fan favorite, I have to go with the under 100 pounds scene at about the :47 mark.
In a world where friendship no longer exists off the social internet comes a touching film about a man who refuses to fall victim to the cold, harsh world of social media. A man looking for real connections, in real life, without a computer... The Man Without A Facebook.
Created by Dan De Lorenzo and Ben Stumpf (team Delstumpfzo), this incredibly dramatic and pretty darn funny video is a trailer for a mock movie about an "untaggable" friendship.
It's so well done, I wouldn't be surprised if this actually becomes a real movie someday. Perhaps marking the end of the world?
Man, when we were young the only games to play on long car rides were "I spy", "stop touching me / I'm not touching you" with your siblings, or "how long before we can get Dad to actually pull the car over and come back there?". Now, kids have DVD players, handheld video games, and this trippy little app from Toyota.
This app lets kids be "Backseat Drivers" by taking them on the actual GPS route of their car ride, but in a unicorn and rainbow filled world where they can collect points and prizes to enhance their gameplay.
Looks like a pretty cute game for kids, though with kids attention spans these days, they'll probably be over it by mile 15.
A lot can happen in a day. While you sit comfortably on your couch a man dies, a baby is born, a hawk captures a mouse, and a turtle ventures into the sea for the first time. It's pretty amazing and overwhelming when you think about it. So amazing that it's hard to fathom what it would look like if you could have a front row seat to it all for just one day.
That is until One Day On Earth, along with 60 non-profits and the United Nations, worked together to capture film from over 3,000 people across the world showcasing what they saw on just one day. Just one day to bring to life the "amazing diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that occurs." The result is an absolutely stunning and eye-opening film of amazing moments in time across the globe as well as thousands of archived clips that made up the film.
Want to get involved? They'll be doing it again on 11/11/11 so you can sign up on their website to contribute film. And if you're not into creating film but want to show your support, you can help fund them on Kickstarter.
We've all seen the videos of people doing crazy things on webcams in Apple stores. And we all know Apple employees don't really do much to stop them. So, to test the boundaries of exactly how far they'll let you go, comedian Mark Malkoff staged some pretty weird pranks in their stores and captured it all in this fun video.
Any good designer knows font choice is a very important decision. It can make or break a design. Or it could take a perfectly innocent design and turn it into a lewd, potentially nsfw design like these. Whoops!
Voicemails are annoying and pointless, except when they're in the form of cool, animated chalk drawings like these ones from filmmaker Dustin Grella.
In the middle of a creative rut, Dustin decided to let the people inspire him by setting up an Animation Hotline where anyone can call in with a story. He then chooses one story a day to be animated. Viewed all together, they give you an interesting snapshot of America.
Got a great story? Leave a message on his Skype voicemail at 212-683-2490 and it might be turned into animated awesomeness.
...if you nod your head to one or more of the statements in this brilliantly hilarious post by Tom Oatmeal at Slackatory. Sadly, we all know too many of these people. And if you don't, you just may be one of them.
I Can't Believe It's Not... completely fake that Old Spice actually plans to replace the lovable Isaiah Mustafa with the beefcake we love to hate, Fabio. Apparently, many other people feel the same way, so to settle the debate for good they challenged each other to a duel.
Totally rigged or not, it's hard to resist the curiosity of what it would look like to see the two of them go at it in some hand on peck, I mean hand, combat. The hot, duel action will unfold at 9 AM PST / 12 PM EST today at the Old Spice YouTube channel.
So with all the hype, the question is, will it be lame advercrap or another brilliant concept like the Old Spice Guy was to begin with?
Just when you think you're finally up on the latest fashion, some fancy, smarty pants designer named Hussein Chalayan hits the runways with this: amazing robotic clothing that transforms in front of your eyes.
Ladies, how sweet would it be to have clothes that could go from office appropriate to late night chic with a click of a button? Or men, a dress that comes off a women with one touch like in the one at the 2 minute mark (nsfw)?
Nobody enjoys filling out a census form. And many people don't understand the value of the information, or where they fit into a society that's been properly documented.
So Australia produced a pretty sweet interactive showcase of what the numbers all mean by making it personal. Users customize the experience by entering in some of their own information (presumably some of the same info the census requires), and then get a personalized info graphic realization of who they are, where they fit and what it all means.
GE continues to show that business to business marketing can be fun, engaging and as well produced as consumer marketing.
Dreams of Flight, their latest in the GE Show series, asks both kids and actual aviation experts what the future of flying might look like. Surprisingly, there are some similarities in their answers, thanks to new developments that GE has in the works.
Blue fire bologna sausage propeller planes can't be too far behind.
This would make for an excellent series of beautiful, live action store window displays. Or a video for a product or brand that helps people blend (or not blend) in. From @benkunz, via Google+
To promote the new Beauties and the Beasties season on Eden TV in the UK, they created a fun Facebook app that's absolutely guaranteed to lose you some friends.
You go through your friends and decide who's cute, beautiful, creepy and dangerous, and then the Eden app will build a custom trailer featuring your friends. Even the creepy ones.
You never really enjoyed the company of those ugly people, anyway.
You've got a story, and you want to bring it to the bloggers. But how do you even begin to find the bloggers that are relevant in your industry or topic?
PR agency Edelman created BlogLevel, a search and rescue tool for marketers looking to find and evaluate who they should be reaching out to.
There are a lot of blog lists and search engines available, but this is one of the first geared specifically to marketers and PR pros who want to reach them. (And it's also a pretty sweet way of showing how Edelman understands blogger outreach.) Go forth, find bloggers.
How about a quick photo tour of one super awesome workspace to make your cubicle land feel more bland than ever?
Because everyone dreams of working in a pirate ship or a treehouse, product development firm Davison shows that a creative workspace can go well beyond the brightly colored cubicle walls that your boss thinks are so hot.
Where would you rather be - in the pirate ship, the treehouse, or the race car track? Thanks, Casey!
Here's a fun story about how Los Angeles' carmageddon, emotion, and some poor forecasting led to skateboard company Santa Monica Airlines posting a $7,000 tweet.
It's also a lesson in classic marketing and business positioning. Marketers make mistakes. It happens. Dealing with the consequences of those mistakes in a responsible way is what separates the superstars from status quo. Hooray for Santa Monica Airlines. Thanks, Casey!
Now you can explore New York City in a whole new way: through the eyes of people on the streets who have shot video. From the comfort of your cubicle.
MyBlockNYC is gathering video clips of NYC block by block, event by event. When complete, the site will feature a visual, historic view of New York, unlike anything that's ever been assembled before.
Got video that you've shot in your hood? Want to explore? Make it happen. MyBlockNYC is the city that never sleeps.
Bring out the short shorts and tube socks. Roller skating is hot again.
You can tell because Uniqlo is opening a roller rink at the High Line in NYC next week. And because nothing compliments roller rinks and beer gardens better than shopping, there will be a new Uniqlo store there to serve you merchandise.
Yes, someone's actually keeping score. Life Scoreboard is keeping track of the all important battles of life: Mac or PC? Democrat or Republican? Dog or cat?
Register on the site to cast your vote. Thanks, Stephen Sholz!
China has long been known as one of the places that manufactures near perfect bootlegs of actual designer products. Now they've taken it a step further.
Meet the fake Apple store. An almost spot on copy of the actual Apple store, except not really an Apple store. You can tell by the most minor detail and almost the only thing they missed: the unnecessary "Apple Store" type on the sign. That, and the fact that they're not featured on the official Apple website as locations.
If you see an Apple store opening in Canal Street in NYC anytime soon, be suspicious. Very suspicious.
If you haven't seen or played Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure, then you haven't been to the mountain of cuteness where rainbows come from.
Here's a game that was created by five year old Cassie and her dad in a couple of days. They didn't need billions of dollars in production budgets or a team of developers. Just some sparkly drawings and a game engine. And that's how magic was made and Cassie's college fun started.
Wonderous with chocolate covered ponycorns. Thanks, Casey!
New Yorkers: eyes off the text messages, and up to the trees. There could be some sweet headphones waiting for you. Follow Skull Candy on Twitter for more street action. From @skypulsemedia.
What's really cool is that they took the time (and the client investment) to 3D model the water graphic, ultimately giving the brand unlimited flexibility in the way that it is realized, and that wouldn't have been possible with an illustration or photograph.
This is a wonderous example of the power of great identity design. Because sometimes a brand deserves more than a $300 logo. ;)
Here's a fun info graphic illustrating just how far we've come in the internet world, and where we might be going.
The piece promotes Cisco's Planetary Skin, which is some device that will sit like a blanket on earth and hog our internet traffic. Or something really cool like that.
If your grandma isn't yet on Facebook or Google+ - not to worry. You can send her an actual letter (it's like an email, but written on paper).
Just type your message (in an email - no worries, you won't have to pick up a pencil or anything), indicate whether you want a doodle, some perfume, a lipstick kiss or other options, and then click send.
Your grandma will be stoked as ever when the mailman delivers a handwritten message. From you. Kind of.
If you've never been to NYC, you probably already have a very good idea of what some neighborhoods look like. Especially Times Square.
And if you're a gamer, you've probably also seen NYC realized in a bunch of different ways in the multitude of games that use it as a playing field. The dudes at Achievement Hunter realized this, and edited together a load of Times Square views, from a multitude of gaming titles.
So hop on the tour bus, and take a tour of NYC like you can only see from the front of your television monitor. There's no place like home.
"I am thinking about hangouts for business. Would you like to be able to connect with your Dell service and sale teams via video directly from Dell.com?"
If you've used Google+ Hangouts, you know how easy it is to create a video chat, and how robust they can be for sharing.
So...what if your Dell customer service rep was available via Google+ Hangouts? How would that change the customer experience? How would that impact the talent/workplace/policies on the brand side? Get ready...this could push things sideways, just a bit.
FourSquare delivered a sort of State of the Union email yesterday, celebrating their now 10,000,000 users. If throwing a ten million number around wasn't already impressive, they've created a load of super fun info graphics for you to enjoy.
There are lots of interesting FourSquare factoids for your enjoyment - like tracking happiness by the types of words people are using when they "check in", or tracking the most popular destinations. (By the looks of it, central Manhattan is the happiest place on earth.)
Now you can cut these up and put them in a fancy PowerPoint presentation, to share with your friends. Cuz that's how you do it, yo.
Here's something fun to do with your coworkers this morning. See if you can identify the movie from only a single image of the last scene in these films.
This is why they invented Tumblr. (And you didn't really want to get any work done this morning, anyway.) Brands: there's a whole lot of awesome content out there, just waiting for your partnership/branding/sponsorship/big money.
Creem Magazine, one the most bitchin' music mags of the 70's and early 80's is coming back. They're publishing a quarterly edition of the magazine. In print. On paper.
This could be a genius move to capitalize on nostalgic baby boomers who still love the music, and for Brooklyn hipsters who want to read things on paper so they'll look cool in photos next to their turntables.
Can nostalgia bring a brand back to life? Perhaps. The world is being turned upside down, and you can no longer see the future.
There aren't many causes or campaigns that you get to light people on fire for, but Remember a Charity has come up with an excellent campaign that does exactly that.
Rocky is a stuntman. (Cuz that's what you do for a living when you're named "Rocky".) And he's going to re-attempt his most dangerous stunt ever. With loads of fire. But first, he's updating his will, to remember a charity.
The effort shows that even if you don't light yourself on fire for a living, you could by chance die tomorrow, and it would be really cool if you remembered a charity in your will if you did.
Don't try this at home. Or at work. Or anywhere, really.
It's time to give planking a well deserved summer break. Find your way to a pool, and start leisure diving. It's the only way to relax in the summertime.
You can order office supplies from just about anywhere. So Poppin has made the experience a brand experience, that will likely have you coming back for more, and more and more.
Poppin sells well designed office supplies, and they've realized that their clientele appreciates the design experience. So they didn't let that go at the product they sell, but carried it all the way through delivery. To even the inflatable package protecting stuffing stuff that fills the empty space in your box.
Just another example of how you can offer surprise and delight with your customers in the most mundane, unexpected places.
You may know typography nerds at your agency, but chances are that you've never met Font Face. A man who controls fonts. With the power of his face. From Quispologies
Because you know that the Grimace was not a creation of an ad agency, but an actual purple blob creature found in the woods of Vermont. Because the Peanut Man was captured hiding in the woods outside of a suburban neighborhood in Bakersfield.
Here's some valuable marketing insight, courtesy of the dudes over at EyeTrackShop:
When looking at photos on the internet, men spend 40% more time on the face, compared to women. And women look at the chest area before anywhere else. That's the conclusion of an eye tracking study done on an H&M website, that tracked the eyeballs of 100 participants.
Proof that not all men are pigs? Proof that people aren't always looking at what you're thinking they're looking at? Only EyeTrackShop knows for sure, and they're ready to tell you exactly what people see when they stare at your site. Bikinis optional.
Instagram is the tool that's turned you into a world class photographer. You know intimate details about your friend's cat, their travels to the market, and their weekend at the beach. And you've shared everything, via iPhone photos.
Now you can get a snapshot of your Instagram universe, with Statigr.am. Lock it into your Instagram account, and you'll get all the stats you need on your Instagram history.
This is an awesome toolset for brands that are just jumping into the Instagram world, and want to monitor what's happening, from the comfort of their desktops. It's about time.
All the internet nerds around you are raving about Goole+, and you're getting a little scared. You're on Facebook, Twitter, dabbled in FourSquare, and you're just not sure how it all works or fits into your life.
Huffington Post has one of the better getting started guides that will help you to unravel how the land of the + works.
Share it on Facebook, and then tweet about it. And then we'll see you on the + side.
After denying the existence of the internet for years, Hollywood has discovered social media. And now they're here to play.
The Inside Experience is a new kind of production experience that's part film, part social media. It launches in a few days, and you'll be able to begin integrating with the film.
We're not sure exactly what integrating will look like, feel like, or how it will work, but rest assured that it will include YouTube video creation, Facebook sharing, and the ability to affect the outcome of the story.
Now's the time to band together, and turn this suspense flick into a PeeWee style big adventure. Together, we can do this.
We're not sure how the campaign activates, but are promised that it's about to come to life. We fully expect that the mannequins are robotic zombies, waiting to be powered up and put to work by Greenpeace engineers. But it's probably something safer than that.
Update: the campaign is live, and the challenge is on. Calling Nike and Adidas out, Greenpeace is asking brands to manufacture apparel product without polluting water. Bring it.
In a superfab partnership with the Ace Hotel in NYC, guests will be given Google Chromebooks, outfitted with an ultimate field guide that's been put together with Superfuture, the NYC shopping experts.
This is how three perfect partners come together in a hotel room and make something beautiful.
What do you love? is a fun creation from Google Labs and agency Big Spaceship that showcases all of the things you can find in a search.
Just answer the question "what do you love?" and Google serves up a page full of wonderness perfectly tuned to your desires.
Like mac n' cheese? Learn to speak it in 57 languages, how to make it, where to find it, people to discuss it with, and so much more cheesy goodness. Start searching for the stuff you love. Google is here to make you happy.
Being the tech-geeks that we are, we've all probably pondered what it would be like if our technology were sentient. Sometimes the notion seems pretty cool. A music player that understands your mood and serves up playlists accordingly. A refrigerator that suggests what to make for dinner based on the ingredients inside. And other times it's just plain creepy. No one wants to wonder if their TV is secretly judging them for all that reality crap they watch.
This latest look at the sentient home created by Ericsson is beautiful, intriguing and creepy at the same time. Although, I'm assuming that since Ericsson is a telecom company, this is supposed to portray a positive future of what a connected network of devices can bring, it almost could be interpreted as sad and lonely. A world where technology will someday replace human connection. Though it could be argued that it's not far off.
Meh, enough with the deep thoughts. Either way, this is a pretty cool video.
Social media moves quickly. So, with that, we all get a free pass on using initial caps, proper punctuation, the overuse of silly acronyms like lol, and even the occasional typo. Hey, we're all human. But this so does not give us a pass to throw everything we learned in 5th grade English class out the window.
This is especially true when we're trying to sound intelligent, witty, or snarky like these YouTube commenters in Jack Film's 2nd installation of "Your Grammar Sucks." Let this be a lesson.
404 pages are the pages that are served up when your visitors arrive at a place that no longer exists, or is at an incorrect url. They're still on your site really...but just not where you need them to be.
For smart and creative companies, 404 pages can be a fun way to hide something entertaining into your visitor's experience. For Steve Lambert, his 404 page became so awkwardly awesome that it's gone viral...ultimately driving mondo traffic to his site.
Sometimes the little things are really the big things.
Now you can create them willy nilly wherever and whenever, and all you'll need is an iPhone.
GIF shop lets you create and share animations, pretty much at the push of a button. It's 1996 all over again, and it's totally awesome. From @matthunsberger
One of the greatest things about the new leadership in tech, creative and dot com environments is their willingness to do things differently. To not settle for "this is the way it's always been done, so this is the right way."
The IT vending machine at the Facebook office is a beautiful illustration that this is a workplace that allows (and celebrates) ingenuity.
The fact that Facebook employees were given the time to pursue such a solution and the freedom to implement it says tons about their culture. Could you say the same about yours?
It seems we're all enamored with animated gifs, and I know we're all enamored with beer, so when you bring the two together it's a big ole love fest.
These beautiful shots are brought to you by photographer, Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist, Kevin Burg; the same geniuses that brought you these beautiful cinemagraphs we wrote about a while back.
This time, they created similarly beautiful pieces for Dogfish Head showcasing the making of their new gluten-free strawberry and honey flavored Tweason'ale. A unique and beautiful campaign for a unique and beautiful looking beer. Love it!
AndyTDesign would like there to be a new Pee Wee Herman show. And he'd like it to be based a little on the old TV show, and a little on the Pee Wee's Big Adventure film.
It seems that men make up the majority of early adopter nerds, and as such, women made up only 10% of the audience of Google+ (as of last week).
We suspect this will change as quickly as this Friday, as the masses begin to flock to the service. But in the meantime, Lynette Young has assembled a pretty awesome list of smart women on Google+.
So if you're looking to balance out the people who you listen to and +1, you can start here.
Internet dude Josh Harris has a new project, and he'd like you to help fund it. It's called Wired City. And while it professes to be kind of like Star Trek, it feels very much like YouTube meets American Idol.
We're happy to support anything that puts real people in bright red future suits, and then broadcasts it live from some command central sort of place. Make it happen, please.
If you're a band starting out today, you've got a lot of social media responsibility on your shoulders. You need to maintain a mailing list, photo gallery, concert schedule, tweet stream, and so much more.
If you can't afford an agency or a social media manager, what's a band to do? OneSheet is a new tool that makes it easier than ever for bands to put up a page, promote themselves, stream their music, integrate their social feeds, and have an online destination.
This is what MySpace could have been. From @ryankuder
It's summertime, and that's the time where the real rock stars hit the road. And by rock stars, we mean internet geeks.
In true summertime geek spirit, our friends at Bizzy are about to kick off their very first nationwide tour, taking them from sunny California to grey New England, in a location based checkfest that's guaranteed to hit the hottest/best/most awesome eateries, bars and cool places along the way.
Bizzy's all about "checking out" (because there's already too many tools to let you "check in" to places), and their tour is the perfect showcase of why Bizzy is the most bitchinest checking in/out/tell all your friends where you've been app.
Check them out and get checked out when they hit your city!
The color of is a tool that takes any word you can think of, pulls all of the related Flickr photographs, and produces a color based on the aggregate color of the photographs found.
That's color magic, made with internet juice. Use it to choose your new living room color, and then tell your spouse that it's the color of "drool". From Anjali Ramachandran, via Google+
Brainstorm not delivering exactly what you expected? Feeling tired and dry of anything new? Not a problem. Thanks to the Wheel of Concept, your next winning idea is only a spin away.
Impress your clients with breakthrough ideas like QR codes, augmented reality, crowdsourcing and more. The Wheel of Concept even creates the slide for your presentation deck, complete with agency speak.
You go take a nap. The Wheel of Concept is here to save the day. From adland.tv
Berlin street artist, Sweza, is bringing back the old-school boom box in a new-school way with his super cool project called QRadio. Just spot his QRadio boombox on the streets, snap a pict of the QR code with your phone, and your phone is transformed into a cassette tape that fits perfectly with the piece. Sweet.
Can you ever really get enough of brands and their agencies committing #epicfails on Twitter? First Kenneth Cole, then Chrysler, now the beloved maker of all things awesomely sweet, Entenmann's, who noticed that #notguilty was trending on Twitter and decided it would be a perfect time to relate that to eating donuts. Yeah, except apparently the whole world knew what #notguilty was in referring to except them. But not to worry, their agency, Likeable, posted this public apology. So with that, Twitter lesson #3, check your hashtag meaning.
Life might be a lot easier if we could all get to the point. That's the premise behind Shortmail, a new email service that ties to your Twitter account, but lets you send email that's only 500 characters.
You can send messages to anyone inside or outside the Shortmail universe, and use it on your desktop or mobile device of choice.
This is perfect for the person that absolutely definitely needs someone else to say "Edit that down. You're being too wordy."
