'Hello Boys' Billboard Voted Most Iconic Ad

The Wonderbra's 'Hello Boys' billboard was voted most iconic ad image ever in a poll carried out by the Outdoor Media Centre, the British trade body for outdoor advertising. After Wonderbra had unveiled the campaign with Eva Herzigowa in 1994 it was acclaimed  a taraffic-stopper and I can imagine how much aditional buzz marketing it produced! It mast have been brilliant and effective campaing!
The Outdoor Media Centre has teamed up with Campaign magazine to identify the best 100 posters of all time. Over 10, 700 Brits voted for their favourite billboards and here are the selected:

The Top Ten British Ads Ever
1. Hello Boys/Eva Herzigova (Wonderbra, 1994)
2. Labour Isn't Working (Conservative Party, 1978)
3. Lord Kitchener Wants You (Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1914)
4. His Master's Voice (The Gramophone Company, 1901)
5. Management trainee aged 42 (The Economist, 1991)
6. Pregnant Man (The Health Education Council, 1969)
7. Araldite (Ciba Geigy, 1983)
8. Think Different (Apple, 2003)
9. Beanz Meanz Heinz (Heinz, 1966)
10. Dumb Animals (Greenpeace)

Click here if you'd like to see the winning ads.

Source: Daily Mail

Baby Carrots - New Junk Food

Would it be possible to sell  baby carrots as a fun, extreme and even sexy snack? - Definitely. „Bunch of Carrot Farmers” - group of almost 50 American carrot producers - adopted advertising techniques usually used by junk food brands to encourage people to eat more carrots. The campaign entitled “Eat ‘Em Like Junk Food”  was created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky . The tactic was based on  belief that ”instead of scrapping fast food ads, health food companies should attempt to play them at their own game, creating exciting, humorous brands with strong youth appeal”. The carrots packed in bright chip-sized bags are sold in school vending machines. Slogans, such as "The original orange doodles" and "Crunchier than chips, orange-ier than cheese puffs" has been incorporated. Advertising includes vibrant billboards and flashy TV spots. The campaign even featured a carrot-crunch-powered iPhone and iPod Touch game, “Xtreme Xrunch Kart,” available as a free download at the iTunes store.

So far, the campaign has been extremely successful.  For Halloween, carrot producers lounched “Scarrots” - single-serve bags of baby carrots, offered in a master bag containing 25 servings in 3 unique designs and 25 temporary glow-in-the-dark tattoos!

http://www.babycarrots.com/

The 2010 Social Networking Map

EURO 2012 Tournament Identity

Euro 2012, the European Football Championship, will be hosted by Poland and Ukraine from 8 June to 1 July 2012. Obviously, as Polish I’m enthusiastic about such a big event being co-organised in my country. However I’m also very emotional about the tournament’s logo design and its brand identification.
Official logo and brand identity were created by Portuguese agency Brandia Central.

The following is excerpted from the UEFA website.
Visual identity
The purpose of the logo is to give UEFA EURO 2012™ a personality of its own, with the visual identity to be applied across a range of promotional applications from tickets to web banners. The objective is to help promote the tournament – one of the world’s biggest sporting events – by providing an easily recognisable identity with a flavour of the host nations. The logo takes its visual lead from ‘wycinanka’, the traditional art of paper cutting practised in rural areas of Poland and Ukraine, as a tribute to the fauna and flora of the region.

EURO bloom
The ‘bloom’ logo has a flower representing each of the co-host nations and a central ball symbolising the emotion and passion of the competition, while the stem denotes the structural aspect of the competition, UEFA and European football. Nature has inspired other features of the visual identity, with woodland green, sun yellow, aqua blue, sky blue and blackberry purple being the crucial tones of the palette of colours to figure in official tournament branding.

Uniting ethos
The event slogan, meanwhile, is ‘Creating History Together’. The staging of the UEFA European Championship finals in Poland and Ukraine, a first for Central and Eastern Europe, will have a place in the history books, with everyone involved in UEFA EURO 2012™ – organisers, host countries, host cities, players and fans – contributing to another exciting chapter of European football.

On a Cannes Lions International site I found this project’s applications for this year Cannes Lion Award . We read there:

Description of how you arrived at the final design:
The starting point was blending Wycinanki, a common art form in both hosting countries, and football. The result is an identity which is original, genuine and has a powerful message: Make football grow in every way.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market:
Success in the market: - The work that was developed so far for the logo and visual identity of the UEFA EURO 2012 is very bold and represents a major breakthrough in these type of events. Many top design publications and personalities have shown an interest in what we did and gave us praise for it. Both host countries and UEFA are very excited about the brand and people around the world, football fans and others, have embraced it.

In the host countries though, the logo design has got lots of criticism. In Ukraine they say, it brings up an association with the “chupa-chups” lollipops. Polish fans are complaining about the colours of the “Polish flower”. They say it is necessary to swap the colours on it, because on the Polish flag white goes first and red is after it. It is also not enough Polish as this form of Wycinanki incorporated into logo has Ukrainian origins.

To me, incorporating Wycinanki (Papercuts) into logo design was a good direction and really great idea. But its interpretation is too much literal. It could look much more sophisticated. In present form the logo looks more like an illustration and it’s too detailed.

Polyvore - playing paper dolls or Vogue's fashion editor?

Last week I had a paper dolls story. Today - Polyvore, internet fashion and shopping platform, IS a lot like playing paper dolls but with pictures of real clothes. Or better, playing Vogue's fashion editor with so much more fun! You can spend hours working on your unique fashion collage, flicking through images of millions of clothing items, shoes, bags and accessories. You drag and drop items until you decide your set is ready, than you can e-mail it to a friend, post it on your Facebook, Twitter, blog or share it with the Polyvore fashion community and let them judge your personal style and taste. Feel free to judge mine. My set is here beneath:

Walking on a beach by Cashewnut featuring JLo accessories

Within 3 years, the site grew from 0 to 1.4 million registered users. Over 6 million unique visitors makes Polyvore the largest fashion community site consisting of trendsetters, shoppers and amateur stylists who put together thirty thousand sets a day and post them on all sorts of social networking sites. That buzz helps to score 140 million page views per month.
So what is Polyvore? It’s an innovating online shopping experience that facilitates mixing and matching products from any online store to create fashion collections. In fact it’s an outstanding e-commerce, merchandising and marketing tool that inspires millions of enthusiastic people like me:) It opens new ways of communicating with global fashion-oriented and fashion-forward consumers. It’s an excellent tool for monitoring fashion trends and spotting new talents. As a prove, in 2009 Polyvore entered partnerships with brands including Calvin Klein, Marc by Marc Jacobs,Gap, Lancome and Nike among others. Nike, for example, frequently host fashion contests for best fashion sets that include one particular Nike clothing item. It usually generates 2000 - 6000 contest entries. The prizes are worth $100 gift card.
Here I posted few rndom communty members' sets. Check them out:

Head over heels by Jozefien featuring Balenciaga bags

Silk charmeuse top, $767
Knotted suede trench coat, $3,995
Stella mccartney skirts KHAKI, 345 GBP
Buckle Slingback Sandal, $695
Arena Giant Covered Velo - Sahara, $1,795
BVLGARI Chains & Leather Cords | Chains & Leather Cords | Yellow Gold..., $1,150
Limited-Edition Spring Look Palette, $65
Morning Beauty | Lily Donaldson by Sølve Sundsbø | Fashion Gone Rogue

this is so me by Anquetta featuring Gucci shoes

chic and effortless by lisaLockhart featuring French Connection shoes

The Earth Hour - Turn on Green Marketing Communication

Earth Hour - the annual turn-off-the-light event from the World Wildlife Fund was celebrated last Saturday 27th March. Today consumers not only become more conscious of environmental issues but also are willing to pay more for green products. In respond to that, more and more marketing messages contain green references and themes. The Earth Hour it's another opportunity for companies to demonstrate their eco-friendliness, sustainability and dedication to the environment. Below, some of the Earth Hour actions:

• In 2009 Leo Burnett Malaysia picked up a Gold Effie at the Malaysia Effie Awards for its Earth Hour effort on behalf of the WWF. The campaign launched during political and social turmoil in Malaysia, brought awareness to global warming carried an appropriate theme: “Who Says Malaysians Are Not United?” By urging all citizens to put aside differences and stand up together as “One Malaysia,” the effort inspired more than six million people to pledge support and switch off their lights this past March. The campaign included such media as TV, radio, print, OOH and digital, as well as a Facebook group that became the largest country-specific Earth Hour group in the world.  

 

• The Scandinavian dairy brand Arla Foods supports WWF by selling specially designed milk black packaging with on-pack information about Earth Hour. Design by the Swedish agency Milk.

• Kiehl’s, a premium American cosmetics brand retailer, has collaborated with Jeff Koons, Pharrell Williams, Julianne Moore and professional surfer Malia Jones to present a new design dedicated to Earth Day 2010. They worked on limited edition bottles for the Acai Damage-Protecting Mist. Each of the well-known personalities developed his or her own design for the product’s label. $200,000 from selling the bottles will be donated to the Rainforest Alliance.
  
  

• In Starbucks you could get a complimentary tall size (12oz) beverage of your choice when you purchased any Starbucks tumbler during Earth Hour (27th March 2010 from 8.30pm till 9.30pm).

• Houndreds of Starwood hotels including Westin, Le Méridien and Sheraton turned off their lights and took other energy-saving measures for one full hour. In more than 90,000 hotel rooms, hotel guests were encouraged to turn off the lights. The other actions included switching off exterior signage lighting, dimming or turning off non-essential interior lighting, using candlelight in appropriate public areas such as restaurants and bars; and informing guests about the hotel’s observation of Earth Hour through in-room voicemail messages and guest room television messages. Additionally, hotel lobbies were serving signature green cocktails, hotel restaurants were serving candlelight dinner.

• The Millennium Hilton Bangkok held “Rooftop Earth Hour Picnic”
• At Fairmont Hotel in Hamburg offered a candlelight dinner experience for diners. Guests of The Fairmont Orchid, Hawaii celebrated Earth Hour with complimentary hot chocolate and s'mores roasted over an oceanside fire pit under the stars.
• Corporations all over the world the day before the Earth Hour on 26th March sent out emails to their clients and suppliers to inform them about this global event, encourage them to participate, join the action and switch off light. Some examples include Polish Airlines LOT and Coca Cola.

• Others were simply inspired...

The Fun Theory by Volkswagen

Volkswagen believes that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for better. It's about surprising people, creating something inconvenient, something that increases people's curiosity and creativity. Doing something good too. The Piano Staircase, The world's deepest bin and Bottle Bank Archade Machine are only few examples... The agency DDB Stockholm turned subway stairs into a real life piano and thus encuraged people to use them. The number of people using stairs increased by 66%. It was a brilliant brand campaign for VW as milions of people watch a movie clip from this experiment on Youtube. It was also very well planed, well-thought-out, consistent social campain.