BMW 1-Series Apeals to Younger Target Online

Close to half of the campaign spending for the BMW 1-Series is being dedicated to online media. According to the recent New York Times article about the campaign, executives at the BMW of North America have said that online ad spending for other models ranges from 1-15% of the total ad budgets.

BMW 1-Series, compact and less expensive sports coupe and convertibles, is meant to appeal to younger drivers with its price starting at around $28,000. With usual microsite devoted to the 1-Series, a Facebook fan page was created hosting a graffiti car contest as well as a blog for users to create, vote and comment.

Also a mocumentary about a colossal ramp in the tiny fictional(?) town of Oberpfaffelbachen, Bavaria is also part of the campaign. This mocumentary called The Ramp is supposedly the work of an American videographer named Jeff Schultz whose YouTube page centers around this nearly 1490 ft. ramp. Below is the trailer of the work.



This Rampenfest has its dedicated website and also a Facebook fan site.

Sony Foam City

Downtown Miami was drenched in loads of foam in March. After dropping 250,000 bouncing balls down a San Francisco street, exploded 17,000 liters of paint in Glascow, and 2 1/2 tons of Play Doh bunnies raiding New York City, Fallon London has literally flooded a few blocks in downtown Miami with 460 million liters of foam by a machine that can generate 2 million liters of foam per minute for Sony's new commercial for its latest Handycam and Cybershot products.

For more photos, click here.

What's really interesting with this production is that Fallon London once again managed to create a lot of buzz for this commercial. With the previous Bunnies commercial, Fallon had released a high-quality trailers months before the commercial actually aired, and by the time the spot actually aired people had been talking about it and the anticipation built up was great.

With the foam shot, another interesting thing is that the power of blogs and viral marketing was used to drive the hype and anticipation. Bloggers from all parts of the country were also invited to Miami. Invitations were sent with only cryptic clues to something amazing they were about to witness and participate. Including the locals, 200 people were provided with the products and asked to record their amusement through the sea of suds. Their footage is being combined for the campaign with the professional shots taken will be introduced to the public in stages and will reach televisions in Europe on May 1st.

Click here to read an Adland blogger's experience.

Pepsi's New Brand Talks to Its Target Online

Tava, Pepsi's new line of fruit-flavored, caffeine-free, zero calorie, carbonated beverage is taking an unconventional approach to launch the brand. Instead of Pepsi's usual flashy TV or print ads featuring celebs, Tava is embracing the new media to introduce the brand focusing its efforts into website and banner ads to reach the target. Interestingly, Pepsi's not targeting younger audience but targeting men and women between the ages of 35-49. It also has promotions like having a presence in various arts/music events in 8 of their major markets, as well as delivering free sample to companies like google, apple and bliss spa.

Choosing internet over main stream media for the target demographic is unusual, but the target is a group of people that is "reborn digital." Tava's strategy is word of mouth, "talking to the right few who could fuel the many." They may not spend their time online i.m.ing or facebooking but they spend significant amount of time online looking up information on travel, food or music. So the content of Tava's website is consist of downloadable songs from emerging musicians, feature the works of a few different artists, info about arts events, etc. Tava's banner ads are to appear on sites like AOL, CitiSearch, dailycandy, discovery, Oprah, Evite and weather.com.

McDonald's Big Coffee Ad

I like this ad a lot. At first glance, I thought it was just blank pages. It took me moments to finally notice the coffee ring at the corners of the pages. Incredibly simple execution done by DDB Stockholm for McDonald's extra large coffee. This ad ran in Swedish papers.

I also love the TV commercials. Again, at first I was a bit confused but soon they totally start making sense. Out of the three, blob is my favorite as it whimsically illustrates my own wandering mind right after I wake up needing a serious caffeine whack on the back of my head. Click here to watch bird and here to watch nose.

I haven't found any postings about OOH or interactive executions yet, but I'll keep on clicking for further updates. Please check back...

Samsung Juke Campaign

I'd like to start off this blog by introducing our own work. Juke campaign is by far the most successful integrated campaign we've done, a true collaboration between the interactive and the traditional creative teams. A 2GB music phone with unique switchblade swivel display to expose the MP3 player gave the team the inspiration: turntable arm and old vinyl records. With that, the Juke Box Hero campaign was born - print, posters, series of OOH, teaser and :30 TV commercials, microsite and music video contest on YouTube.