A great campaign from MTV against drinking and driving in those festive days.

Well to everybody who reads my blog a Happy Christmas; and what a better way to do that than with the most ... Christmas song (I don't want to offend anyone so you can fill in the dots ;-).

I know these short movies have been on YouTube for quite a while but I just found them and think they are soooo great so I had to show them on my blog. The first one is from 2003 the second one has been added in 2006 they are created by a Finnish company called woordpeckerfilm.

Jean-Claude Van Damme our Belgian "pride" in Hollywood appears in a commercial for WOW, he's added to a long list of other "Stars" like Mr T., William Shatner and Mini me.

Last week I talked about the "Miss Belgium" issue, the results of the words pageant, miss and Belgium in the title of my blog-post where really incredible, the readers of my blog where 10 times higher than on a normal day. So this proves the fact that trash really sells. We see a lot of examples on the Internet in Belgium of that concept, look at  Zattevrienden, the only thing on their is trash en still we know they have an incredible amount of visitors. Another perfect example of this is "Het Nieuwsblad", when you have a look at their mailings there are more games, contests, movies than actual news and when we look at the CIM numbers we see that the site of "Het Nieuwsblad" is much bigger than any other newspaper site although on the other sites the content is much more qualitative.

This all clearly proves that if you want to attract lots of readers it's always easier to put non relevant trash on your site than really relevant content.

Aol launched a few days ago their portal in Belgium, problem is at the moment that the portal is not really worth it. It's only a combination of the news of Belga, a link to their instant messaging, mail and some video. But than again, it clearly states the word BETA on the top so it's only normal "At the moment", looking forward to see the evolution there.

For AOL News they really created a great viral for 2007, what will happens when Miss Teen USA, Don't Tase Me Bro and Chris Crocker meet up in a shop. AOL shows us.

As I said yesterday evening the whole world mocks with Belgium... I think this meaningless fact has been taken enormous proportions and went all around the world from Las Cruces - Mexico, Dubai - United Arab Emirates, Bangkok to Australia and all this about a beautifully Miss that couldn't talk Flemish but speaks fluently 3 other languages. There is less coverage about the fact that we still don't have a government than about this occurrence.

Well it just seems so strange, but than again maybe it's only me.

Metatale should list the most influential Belgian blogs but does it really? If we look at their top 100 there are blogs that don't exist anymore or that don't have had a post since a long time.

blog.seniorennet.be/artistlover (does not exist anymore)
blog.seniorennet.be/lyalm (Asks for a password)
http://webwerkers.wordpress.com/ (last post 11/06/2007)
http://the-shadow-tigers.skynetblogs.be/ (last post 14/06/2007)
blog.seniorennet.be/martincarels (last post 23/07/2007)
little-lions.skynetblogs.be/ (last post 14/06/2007)
crapule-de-luxe.skynetblogs.be/ (last post 31/08/2007)
http://www.gazetvantienen.be/ (got a 404)

It all started really well but somewhere along the road it just stopped!!! They promised an update every week but I guess this didn't go trough neither. Does somebody know if they still want to make this thing work or did they simply give up?

I couldn't believe my eyes when a colleague of mine pointed me out to the Yahoo.com site today.

Again Belgium looks silly in the eyes of the international press. As if We don't have enough political problems. When is this stupid community thing going to stop cause it ridicules us in front of the international community, Belgium is such a small country why can't we all get along ... it seems so simple but apparently it isn't.

You can read the full story on the Yahoo News site there is even a video coverage from ABC.

Paramount will launch Jackass 2.5, Thursday 19 December. Next to the fact that I'm a huge fan of these "Stupidities"; the special thing is that they will launch the entire movie online and with that they will be the first to launch a studio featured film first online.

You can read the full story in the NY Times.

The Official Trailer & Site:

"PICTURE A DAY FOR 39 YEARS." Homer Simpson mimics Noah's photo time lapse. From "The Simpsons," episode 19x09 which aired December 16, 2007.

The original one:

The Simpsons one:

This is a great example of how user generated content changed many things.

Google became yesterday the Site of the year in Belgium followed by kinepolis and ebay. The blog of the year went to http://onnozelheidmag.wordpress.com/, which was I guess the biggest surprise. Less of a surprise was the group blog award which went to http://gent.blogt.be/.

One thing is for sure the site that won't receive this award is the site of the election itself, when I wanted to have a look this morning at the site http://www.sitevanhetjaar.be/, the only thing I saw was this:

I really don't understand such a big errors. When you organize such an election and the day after when everybody wants to see the results .... the site is down. Such a pity, but maybe it's because I was a programmer that I find these errors so important. I sure hope they get it fixed quickly!!!!!

UPDATE 10:14,
I guess they saw the mistake cause the site is back online.

 

This campaign is TV message for the Hungarian television to warn about the dangers of TV. I guess that everybody that has children will clearly understand the message.

Found this great viral campaign to warn the Dutch public about the dangers of firework. They could have done a completely boring campaign but instead they did this, just great. You can have a look at the other movies at http://www.laaf.info/.

Yesterday evening I received this press release from Thomas Bannister of SX Mobile Media. "Europe United, a new music video from Samsung Mobile and SX Media has launched on Youtube and is the first ever truly democratic music video. Samsung and SX traveled to 10 European cities in 10 days -London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Prague, Barcelona, Ibiza, Moscow, Edinburgh and Galway- to get ordinary people to dance in this street. Whoever made it into the final cut won a free Samsung phone." After viewing the Video, I thought it was really worth wile putting it on my blog, it became a nice project and summarizes perfectly the unity in Europe like they intended to, great work guys. SX Media is a ‘new media’ company, which produces shorter entertainment content.

Another one from the fwa! I'm a huge fan from everything that roams the oceans; what you can see on this site  http://www.whalefootage.org is almost like a mystical experience.

The footage on there is the work from one guy Dieter Paulmann, his experiences where so special that they changed his life and he decided to give all this footage for free. The site brings this footage in such a great way and with the right background music that it almost takes you into the Ocean. The agency behind this marvel is Sholz & Volkmer a German agency.

For this message we should all take a little bit of our time and have a look. it really puts you back on both feet and makes you really "Appreciate what you have".

In an add For the Spanish wine company Freixenet; Martin Scorsese remakes 3.5 pages of an "abandoned Hitchcock project". No expense was spared for this advert, and Scorsese does a great job capturing the look and feel of 1950s Hitchcock. If you're a fan of his work you really should have a look at the movie, the end with the crows is just great.

I just received this mail for a campaign from playstation called "This is living", actually the mail looks quite good (a typo in the subject of the mail, OK). But when you click on the links this is far from good the only thing you see is this error message.

"Warning: main(en_US/home/index.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/vhosts/thisisliving.com/httpdocs/detect.php on line 97"

I don't know who has send this out but I surely hope they'll notice their mistake and fix everything for tomorrow morning.

UPDATE 06/12/2007
I guess they could not care less after 2 days you still got the same error message. These are situations I really don't understand nor the client nor the agency sees that there is something terribly wrong .....

The FWA again pointed our a great site, it's created for Sean Kennedy Santos a NY based photographer. It's a really "clean" site and it shows his work on such a nice way. My absolute favorite part is absolutely his cinema work the pieces well created, pure ART.

 

Marketing Charts published an article that "One in four internet users read consumer-generated reviews online, which then have a big impact - affecting not only what they purchase offline but also how much they are willing to pay for it, according to a new study conducted by comScore with The Kelsey Group." The numbers are really impressive and clearly show the importance for brands to have a hand in what the consumers think and write about their brand.

Got to love those sport brands everything they create for the online advertising world is so great. Another of these examples is the new site they created for the new Jordan Melo M4 basketball shoe.

The full screen option is really nice and the  integration of the video's is also impressive. Those sites are real experiences I simply love them. The site is from the hand of Blast Radius a company based in Vancouver (Canada).

Just found this impressive add on Illegal advertising, it's all about the fact that we shouldn't ignore that HIV positive people exist. It was created for the world aids day (1 December).

For the once who don't know what they are looking at here is the explanation in plain English ;-).

Today on the Viral Video Chart I saw a spot for the windows mobile application.

It's not so much the spot that I found really nice it's more the corresponding advergame Freeyourbuddy, Free Your Buddy is an interactive video game based on the old text adventure computer games from the eighties. Using a messenger window people communicate with a Buddy character trapped inside an old computer. The object of the game is to use the messenger window to help Buddy find a way out. In addition to the game play commands there are hidden responses people must discover on their own.

It's all about setting you free with the your windows mobile applications, it includes live search, Outlook, IE, Messenger ...

You IM. We give, is a campaign from Windows Live that's running for a while but apparently doesn't have much success in Belgium I got more  than 200 messenger contacts and none of them has the I'm sign. Now what is this I'm all about well and I quote "The i’m™ Initiative from Windows Live Messenger™ makes helping your favorite cause as easy as sending an instant message. Every time you start a conversation using i’m, we share a portion of our advertising revenue with some of the world's most effective social cause organizations. Each of our partners will get a minimum of $100,000. As for the maximum? There is none. The sky's the limit. It's simple. It's free. You IM, we give." So what can I say for everybody who's reading my blog it's simple so make the difference ...

Some days ago I stumbled upon this video on the Illegal advertising site and I thought damn that's a weird commercial, but now as the video appears about everywhere I didn't want you to miss it so here it is. You'll see Heidi Klum telling what happens when it's cold ...., the spot is made to announce the new Victoria's Secret fashion show, you can also visit their YouTube channel.

UPDATE:

Apparently they removed the YouTube version so here is another one.

The last thing you can say about Adidas is that when they do something they don't do it really good. To promote their basketball shoes they created a site with as theme brotherhood. They created a whole series of webisodes about 6 All Stars that joined a summer basketball camp to teach 12 young players that basketball is all about brotherhood. You can just watch them online or you can download them to your Ipod, you can also download all the tracks, again great stuff from Adidas. You can watch the first one here.

WOW is really inventive with his commercials, after joined commercials with other brands like Toyota and Coke they asked Mr. T do do their latest commercial. I guess that's a really good move cause which boy isn't fan of Mr. T or maybe it's just youth sentiment ;-)

In the series of Mac vs PC commercials some new once came out. The topics are the latest problems with the new Windows Vista operating system.

The blogging was kind of hard lately. First reason is that one of the big loves of my life has been really sick, he has a big

flue and lots of fever so the nights have been really short, and all the attention went to Ewan in the evenings.

The other reason is the work there has been some enormous amounts of work lately and that's good except that instead of having some blogging time I had to bend it to working time.

So here are my first posts since 6 days.

Greg Verdino was so nice to tell me that the actual include of movies now work in firebrand so I had to test it out. If everything is ok you can see here some great commercials I found on firebrand from Adidas in the Impossible is nothing series.

I know a colleague of mine (Big Google fan) was really looking forward to see this demo. So here it is the demo from Android the new open source operating system for mobile phones. It's long but it gives you a clear view on all the possibilities of Android.

I found this ad on a site called Firebrand (it's still in Beta), a site where you can find all kinds of great commercials, the idea is really refreshing and everything is brought really well, they definitely hooked me up. Another thing about firebrand is that it's totally multi device you can have a look on your mobile phone and the show even appears on TV (sorry not in Europe).

On Firebrand I found this commercial, it's for something called the Roy Awards apparently an award for Art directors. (maybe it's an old one but it's really funny.)

http://beta.firebrand.com/watch/ROY-THEBIGIDEA-43/1700
At the moment I can't make their include to see the spot work on my blog so you'll have to click on the link (It's still in beta remember).

In the Netherlands Volkswagen created a site to celebrate their 60 years. The site is really visual and fun it's a kind of a music quiz they propose where you hear some music and must categorize it in a decade. I fear I wasn't very good at it cause I only got to 10, and don't bother filling in your details if you had a good score it's only for residents of the Netherlands. The agency that created the site is the Dutch agency from Amsterdam, Achtung which we already know from some other previous great work.

This morning I heard on the radio a spot from Telenet where they compared the digital TV from Belgacom to the one from Telenet (of course). The spot suggested that it was due to a comparative spot from Belgacom??? Although I never heard or saw the spot from Belgacom this shocked me a little. In Belgium we are not used to such a hard comparative advertising. Anyway they also created a site to clearly state the difference between both products, I guess now we'll just wait for another move from Belgacom.

UPDATE:

For the Dutch speaking audience, today de Standaard dedicated an article to the issue.

The Battle is really a hot topic at the moment:
Telenet dagvaardt Belgacom voor (De Tijd)reclamecampagneTelecomoorlog tussen Belgacom TV en Telenet (De Morgen)
Telenet vindt reclame Belgacom "misleidend" (VRT News)

A colleague of mine mailed me these great ads from Durex.

Of course it's an easy one but sooo funny (maybe not for everybody, but what do you want, I'm a guy).

Yesterday Guinness launched their most expensive commercial in its existence, the commercial costs over 10 million pounds but it's surely very impressive. It all starts with some domino's but goes over cars, suitcases, wardrobes, ... . The agency that created the ad was BBDO. To create it Guinness contacted the Dutch world record holders of domino called Weijers Domino Productions.

You can read the full story on the site of the Guardian.

UPDATE:

A colleague of mine saw my post and pointed me out that he thought that it really wasn't the most impressive Guinness commercial (from his point of view) and I must say I follow his opinion.

This is definitely the most beautifully online store I have ever seen and the concept is really so great that it would be a pity to just call it a store. The agency's that created the site are Dvein from Spain, Neue Digitale from Germany and Wysiwyg from Spain again (the last one has also a site which you should check out). The whole concept for the Diesel store is that you can see all the models in the dept's of the ocean which gives some great effects, also the way the mouse-pointer interacts is nicely found. The full screen flash is really impressive.

  Nevertheless not everything is great for a store it's all too slow. If you want to see 1 product you have to wait 30 seconds and actually I had to try a couple of times to get into the site cause it's all so big and slow.

A colleague of mine pointed me out to this site created for NBC to launch a new sitcom called "Bionic Woman", the agency is Glow Interactive from NY. It's not only nice visually but the series of tests you can do to see what's your bionic grade is really fun to do. I tried them sometimes but did not succeed in getting those needed 75% to see the trailers, maybe you can?? It's also nice that you can include your bionic test into your blog.

See What You're Made Of - Visit The Official Site

Just Hilarious, enjoy.

The Arc of Noah is getting loaded and guess what they don't forget to load.

On Adverblog I found a really original site from Orange created by Poke Londen (another agency to watch closely). The site is totally in line with the campaign as the target line from the campaign is "Good things never end" this site is also totally endless, well at least I gave up after some time. You can go down and down and you'll find all kind of little games and things to do and little games to play. You'll also find everywhere on the site all kinds of little pieces that you can include in your blog or any other social tool again a really original thing to include the blogger's community.

PS. The only strange thing is that I found a whole bunch of French in the site???

On the viral video chart I just stumbled upon a great viral for the new Samsung G800 called "How we met".

It's a pity that the site www.zoomintosee.com can't match the viral at the moment, I like the style of the first page but the problem is that the site only consist of 1 page!!!!!

Achtung a Dutch Interactive agency created a site krezipmusicbox for the Dutch band Krezip to celebrate their 10 years. The concept they used for this campaign is base on their last number "play" and what you need to do is find the correct spin with your mouse to get to the right tempo. You can win free downloads, coupons or a ticket to their concert.

I really liked everything about the action except one thing, when I played I won some free downloads and when I tried to download them I got the message that the site was no longer active so to bad for my downloads!!!

Some days ago I noticed on Adverblog a new campaign for Audi Spain called "It's your turn".I must say the commercial is a funny one and not only that; the game and site are also really nice graphically and the game-play is very addictive. The spot and the game are also integrated they are both centered about the "your turn" gimmick.

Greenpeace launched a site in Belgium called Electrabrol. It's a site that wants to show the public how Electrabel (the main energy company of Belgium) cheats on the Belgian people with their high prizes and they wannabe Green image. I think it's a really a great initiative and it also shows the freedom of the Internet anybody can stand for their opinion. Anyway it maybe a little thing but the campaign definitely made me think and I'll change to another provider. A great site if you want to do the same thing and your living in Flanders is the site from the VREG here you'll find a tool to compare energy providers. There is a nice viral movie on the site but I don't want to embed it cause it's again an auto-play and there isn't any menu to stop the playing, too bad.

 

After Microsoft won the battle for the investment in the social networking site Facebook against Google and Yahoo the first unofficial counterattack from Google already sees the world the name of this attack is "Maka-Maka". Last week Microsoft invested $240 Million dollar for a stake in Facebook now Google counterattacks with the plans to develop their own Social networking tool. The power of this tool will be that it would be integrated in all their applications going from Google reader, Gmail to Google Maps and this could well be their power. Another big thing is that they would open their API from Orkut (the social networking site from Google) to developers to make it easy to build applications around this shell and again attracting more users to their network. Although everything is not official yet it will surely be a topic to watch closely.

You can read the full story on TechCrunch.

As I'm a big fan of the EOS series (I started with a 300 a non digital SLR and now I got the 400D, you can see some examples here of my little family), I went last Friday to the EOS discovery tour a seminar organized by Canon (of course) to do some product promotion on their EOS Series (where the 40D is one of their latest products). Till here nothing special cause normally you would expect this to be a night full of product presentations but not at all! I was really surprised by the quality of the seminar, the product placement was really well done and everything was explained trough some clear examples. The photographer who presented all this was Andy Earl a man who has shot pictures of very known stars like Madona, Any Lenox, Prince, ... and has also some great stories about those pictures. Also the whole event was very interactive as all the pictures appeared immediately on some big screens with the help of the wireless file transmitter on the device. I also really liked that they commented some pictures that where send by the audience. To resume a night very well spend with lots of interesting information and a great presentation.

I found on Cut the Crab the making of the latest Telenet (A Belgian Internet provider) spot. It all seems simple when you look at the commercial but when you look at the making off I guess it was really a big effort.

 

Common Craft know for their plain English series launched a great viral in their known style to celebrate Halloween "Zombies in plain English", just that you recognize one if you have an encounter with them.

On Buzzing Bees I found a funny commercial for Mercator insurances. Well what can I say a man will always be a man I guess!!!

This week 2 big companies specialized each in a different area launched the same product namely Unified communications, these 2 companies are Microsoft and Cisco. Now what is this "Unified communications" well if I quote Microsoft "it bridges the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice and conferencing to the desktop environment". Now if we take the definition of Cisco it says "Unified Communications is helping you integrate communications more closely with business processes, ensuring that information reaches recipients every time and everywhere, no matter what their working environment, through the most appropriate medium". They both look at the product from a totally different point of view, one as a software vendor, one more as a hardware vendor and they say it differently but they actually mean more or less the same thing. Maybe if we look at a little movie that I found on Geert's blog everything will become more clear.

You can also find an explanatory movie and site from Cisco here. I guess in a few months we'll see who wins this fight.

Yesterday I saw on Marketingcharts that Nielsen issued another rating of the top social networking and Blog sites we  see in the rating that MySpace sites still has a comfortable top position with 58.6 million visitors followed by facebook but with on 18 million unique visitors.

In the blogging world Blogger form Google still stands strong with 29 million visitors and followed by Typepad and Wordpress but with only about 10 million visitors. The most impressive move forward was from Wordpress with a jump of 290 % from 2.5 million to 10.

My wife is a teacher for kids from 6 till 7 years now sadly enough one of the kids in her class has cancer which makes her stay quite a lot at home. In Flanders they created a really nice initiative called bednet which is for children that can't attend the lessons for a longer period and have to stay at home due to their illness. Now what do they do concretely for those children; they install a dedicated line in the class room and one at the home of the child. In the classroom they install a laptop, a webcam, a scanner and a special camera to take pictures of the blackboard. At the children's home she also has a webcam and laptop so that the child can follow everything that happens in the classroom. I think it's really great that technology can server a higher purpose and give these kids a better life. This initiative is made possible all kinds of sponsors like the King Baudouin Foundation, Vlaamse Overheid, Belgacom or The Belgian Lottery. Once everything is installed I'll do some more posts to tell how everything works.