Have you ever wondered what a Chlamydia looks like? Curiosity. That is the basis of the campaign orchestrated for the Ministry of Health by Cartier Communication and their media partners: Vizéum and Espresso Media. Yannick Manuri from Espresso Media shares his insights on this daring campaign developed with Eyeblaster and ALT Productions.

Based on the theme ‘Quite often, there is nothing to see’ overall campaign efforts included posters, bus shelters, Internet, stands in several colleges, as well as tactical and viral events. As ‘nine people out of 10 don’t know that they have an STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease)’ the campaign wanted to remind youth that ‘because you look safe’ is not a valid argument for not using a condom.


The first part of the campaign execution was a video that is circulating on You Tube and various social media sites. The video stars an opera-theatre piece created and presented just before Valentine’s Day throughout eight colleges in Quebec. At the peak of lunch time, in the cafeteria, what seems to be the beginning of a couple’s fight regarding a STD becomes an entertaining musical comedy.





The viral scattering of this video just started and has already generated over 11 000 views on You Tube. The video segment was also integrated in the content portion of several popular sites such as: 33mag.ca, Bombe.tv, Ckoi.com, Cinoche.com, etc.


THE TARGET AND STRATEGY

Espresso Media handled the online portion of this campaign. To reach this highly coveted target audience (15-24 year olds), we needed to be creative in order to surprise them and captivate their attention.
We strongly believed that a standard ad banner would not effectively reach this audience. Actually, we think that one is very disconnected from today’s reality if they believe that a simple bigbox campaign on sites such as musiqueplus.com is efficient to reach the target.


The campaign was based on:
- Innovation in the choice of ad formats, betting on the ‘newness’ factor
- Creation of a new and impactful ad format
- Investment in interactive and engaging ad pieces
- Favour video utilization


The development process of the online portion of the campaign was one of the most intricate that we have done here at the agency. Actually it’s probably the most complex project of my career! As far as I know, you can count on a single hand the number of times that this type of ad format has been executed in Canada.


This took over 50 hours of work by our media team, without counting all the hours of development and programming done by our technological partners ALT Productions and Eyeblaster.


The execution was so elaborate for the team that at one point we even questioned the feasibility of the entire project. On several occasions we thought that our ideas were too ambitious, and that we would be better off finding a plan B. It is with a huge sigh of relief that we proudly share the details of this new execution that will, without a doubt, surprise more than one!


EXECUTION DETAILS

In order to attract the target’s attention, we opted for a wallpaper format, with a rather surprising creative, across several popular sites reaching the youth target. With the agreement of the sites’ editorial teams, we replaced the usual backgrounds of each site with a picture of a young man/woman wearing nothing but underwear. Once we had grabbed the user’s attention, it was hard to not be intrigued by the banner where the message was ‘Touch me and I will show you what a Chlamydia looks like’.


Once the banner was clicked, the entire site folded towards the bottom. The underwear of the young man/woman was also pulled down in synch with the content of the site. This made room for the message ‘Quite often, you can’t see Chlamydia. Condoms, 100% OK. Youhaveonelife.com.”
In order to make this execution believable, we had to reproduce a constantly updated replicate of the homepage (content and layout) and overlay it on the wallpaper background. We personalized this for each site, each homepage.

The reactions to this campaign are numerous in news & information media and daily talk TV shows.

Touch and see the results for yourself….

Chocapic, the chocolate cereal from Nestlé, is promoting its sponsorship of the new movie “Arthur and the revenge of Maltazard” with an Augmented Reality application that turns the cereal package into a game console. The online portion of the campaign, recently featured on the Creative Zone, has a teaser game that can be played with or without a webcam.

A great post was written originally on Jawbone.TV about the Chocapic Augmented Reality campaign and we would like to thank its author, Todd Denis, for letting us re-post the blog for our readers. Enjoy.

At first glance, the cereal box game for Nestle’s Chocapic (promoting ‘Arthur the Revenge of Maltazard’) seems to be yet another ill-conceived augmented reality (AR) marketing experiment (see ‘40 Augmented Reality Projects Sure To Blow Your Mind … Or Just Blow’). However, when you look at the fundamental interactivity at play, it’s not difficult to see the real possibilities of AR as a legitimate story, game and entertainment tool.

In this case, we’re dealing with what equates to a stand-alone hand-held maze game. Doesn’t get much simpler than that, but the impact on engagement is huge. Comparative to the cool yet fleeting ‘display and rotate’ variety of most AR (see GE Smart Grid or Star Trek Enterprise), the Chocapic game has more in common with outstanding AR spatial memory game levelHead.

But, whereas levelHead is believed to be locked in a vault somewhere being commercially developed, the Chocapic game is using primitive yet massive marketing reach (the backs of kid’s cereal boxes) to introduce similar game play, albeit on a more limited scale.

This is the way it’s supposed to work. New technology marries with existing distribution to create a whole new experience. Certainly, the Nestle undertaking is bone-simple, but imagine if certain addictive AR games or puzzles were mass-distributed as part of a transmedia campaign, where unlocking the games released key story information that pushed participants to channels otherwise hidden, like special blogs or subversive web narratives.

Suddenly, the back of a cereal box goes from an AR trinket used by perhaps .001 percent of the recipients (still happy with those results Best Buy?), to a valuable and re-playable piece of a larger story puzzle. That’ll get some people leaning forward.

And as a closing thought, why not make the entire box package something that can be used as part of the story? Half to create a playing surface, and the other half to create a wearable set of AR goggles (like the crude ones you can build following the video instructions at recomblu.com – see video below).

I wouldn’t want to walk the streets with a Chocapic branded gear box on my face, but I’ll bet there are thousands of kids who would steal daddy’s iphone to make it happen.

Jawbone Lab is a consultancy and management company that operates Jawbone.tv, the Web’s most relevant destination for narrative in the digital age. The Lab provides digital strategy services for unconventional marketing, communication and entertainment, combining access to a global network of talent from across all media with more than a decade of experience creating digital and interactive projects.

Does mobile display advertising need third-party ad serving? The answer is definitely yes!

Third-party ad serving is commonly used in online advertising. In the first years of online display advertising, ads were served directly by publishers. However, it became quickly evident that agencies needed a central campaign management system to serve, manage, track and analyze the media bought from multiple publishers. Atlas, Eyeblaster or DoubleClick are examples of providers of such capabilities. Similarly to how online display advertising evolved, mobile display advertising has now reached the point where it needs third-party ad serving.

During the experimental stage of mobile advertising, agencies used to run small campaigns on a specific mobile publisher or ad network. Running such campaigns was coordinated with one mobile vendor, such as Quattro Wireless or Nokia Media Network (Enpocket). Nowadays, a mobile campaign can span across many publishers, sometimes even more than twenty. Setting-up, managing and analyzing such a campaign are daunting tasks. Agencies need to send the media plan, the creative for ads and subsequent changes to each publisher. Sometimes this is done via email while other times the agency has access to an interface within the publisher’s system. Agencies also need to get the reports from each publisher and consolidate these reports. Using a third-party ad serving system gives agencies the opportunity to escape such painful processes by easily setting-up the campaign only once in a central system. They are also able to effortlessly pull out reports and analyze the campaign across publishers. Moreover, agencies can check the delivery, instead of relying solely on publishers’ self-reported numbers.

On a broader scheme, third-party ad serving can help solve two of the main problems that are holding back mobile advertising from booming: difficulty of execution and lack of analytics.

So, just as agencies use third party ad serving for online display advertising, they now need third-party ad serving for mobile display advertising. Does it make sense for agencies to use a different system for mobile from the one they use for online? Clearly not. Nowadays, agencies run cross-channel campaigns and they want to be able to set-up, manage, serve and analyze all channels from a central place.

If the benefits are so great then why isn’t third-party ad serving already the norm in the mobile industry? The reason is implementing third-party ad serving in mobile is very complex and difficult. In order to serve ads on various mobile publishers, a third-party ad server needs to be integrated and work with the ad server of the mobile publisher or ad network. In online advertising this is less difficult given the relatively small number of ad servers (such as DFP or AdManager) and more than a decade of advancements in technology and standardization. However, mobile ad serving technology is very fragmented, still in development and lacking in standards. The integration needs to be done with each of the many mobile ad servers for publishers that are out there and that use various proprietary technologies: Millennial Media, Quattro Wireless, Ringleader, AdMob, AdInfuse, 4th Screen, Amobee, MADS, Smaato, Mojiva to name just a few from a very long list.

Eyeblaster is a leader in taking on the challenge of mobile campaign management, with Channel Connect for Mobile, a comprehensive third-party mobile ad server for agencies with capabilities of integrating online and mobile.



Georgiana Mirea | Senior Manager of Product Planning, Mobile

This little “i” surrounded by a circle on a blue background, is the advertising industry’s answer to privacy concerns. It could be summed up as ‘interest’ based ads.

As behavioural targeting gains prominence with advertisers to increase their effectiveness online, the reactions and criticism’s from privacy advocacy groups is undoubtedly becoming louder. In an effort to self-regulate, the US industry has agreed on a standard icon that will seek to be implemented by any ad that use demographics and behavioral data in an effort to tell consumers what is happening.

Jules Polonetsky, the co-chairman and director of the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), an advocacy group that helped create the symbol, is hoping the symbol will become as widely recognized and accepted as the little green arrows of the recycling symbol, as reported by the New York Times.
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Forget the Cupertino keynote, if you have missed GQ’s Men of the Year in the Christmas rush, then I recommend everyone download Condé Nast’s new GQ January 2010 app for the iPhone. Why? Because it’s a great example of the future of interactive design.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again; the future for magazines is not in creating browser-based web pages. We’re hopefully past the days of newsletters formatted in MS Word, or experiencing websites with terrible typography, microscopic little pictures and business-card sized videos, not to mention, those tiny little ads embarrassingly hidden in the corners, jumping up and down saying ‘click me, click me!’ It’s all more annoying than the donkey in Shrek.

Despite the amazing advances in functionality on the Internet over the last few years, design in digital channels is a long way from the offline aesthetic renaissance spurred on by desktop design programs like Quark Xpress. One only needs to browse a newsstand and marvel at the freedom of design, where bold, beautiful, creative typography are sensually entwined with stunning imagery. Even the Wall Street Journal runs color photos now! In contrast, type in the URLs of these same publications and prepare yourself for a walk through a design desert.

Yes, templates hold consistency, but like themes variations in classical music, they’re supposed to be deliberately broken to add interest or context. Good design adds value to the communication; it doesn’t just deliver information. It’s exciting and part of entertainment and we all know HTML just can’t do that. Connection speeds wouldn’t even let you send it if you could. Also, Flash is not the saviour and only a mere gimmick that doesn’t even rise to the level of commercial art.

So why am I now as excited as teenage boy who has just discovered a discarded copy of Playboy in a country lane? Well, starters being able to ‘pinch’ and ‘squeeze’ Rhianna… Ok, no that’s not it (lie, lie!).

Consider the fact newspapers close down on a daily basis as they struggle to make ends meet as advertisers abandon them. The ratio of ads to editorial in the print world is 60:40 or higher and online is shamefully a long, long way from anything like that.

Stop and observe the newsstand and notice the ever-shrinking physical magazines to pocketsize away from A4, and that many newspapers have now moved away from broadsheet formats. Next, hold up an Amazon Kindle next to one of those little mags – not too dissimilar is it? Watch how you flick through a magazine, getting to the article you want, taking in the visual fluff from all the pretty pictures including those ads that get you salivating over that latest hot hatch. Ah, so this is what all those rumors of the impending full-colour, networkable 10’ Apple iPad being launched on Joe public was all about.

Look back at the GQ app on your iPhone.

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