Ramble by Sunil Bahl
15Mar/120

Electronic Arts “SSX Shakes”

Gaming giant EA has recently released SSX extreme snowboarding for the Playstation and Xbox360. But before SSX officially hit the slopes in Belgium, EA wanted to generate extra buzz and free press. So their ad agency Duval Guillaume Modem from Antwerp created an exclusive "SSX Shakes" event for a limited audience of popular bloggers and journalists. During the event, they brought the audience in the right mood with booze, snowboarding, music, chicks, tricks… and game play.

The slope had a cocktail bar where the invitees got to choose 1 of the cocktails that were named after a typical snowboard trick. The cocktails however, were not shaken by bartenders but by pro-riders who performed the corresponding snowboard trick and handed it over freshly shaken. Afterwards every blogger and journalist received a personalized movie with the making of his SSX shake to share with friends, fans & followers. 8-)

The movies and photos are now available at www.ssxshakes.be

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14Mar/120

American Express “Twitter Sync”

In July last year American Express launched a first of its kind application on Facebook called "Link, Like, Love" that allowed their card members to link their cards to the app and receive deals based on the likes, interests and social connections of the card members and their Facebook friends.

Members who used this service did not have to print coupons to redeem at a store. Instead, they just loaded deals onto their AmEx account by hitting an online button (in the app) and the reward would be given to them when they swiped the card at the time of purchase.

Now in their latest social venture, they are allowing card members to sync their cards with their Twitter account at sync.americanexpress.com/twitter. After the sync, card members have to follow @AmericanExpress and re-tweet its "special offers" that come with exclusive hashtags. The re-tweet would in turn load their card with a couponless reward e.g. On tweeting #AmexWholeFoods the card member would get a $20 statement credit which would get adjusted when a purchase of $75 or more at Whole Foods was made.

Pretty cool, but the Facebook and Twitter sync work only for US card holders.

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13Mar/121

Ikea Beröra

To launch the iPad version of the Ikea-catalogue in Norway, ad agency SMFB created a brand new Ikea product called "Beröra".

"Beröra" was a sewing kit with a special conductive thread to sew into say the index finger of your favorite gloves. Once the operation was done the gloves would work on a touch-screen.

The promotion generated a lot of interest and 12,000 of Ikea's sewing kits were distributed for free in just two weeks.

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12Mar/120

Share a Coke

Despite healthy brand tracking data, 50% of the teens and young adults in Australia hadn't enjoyed 'Coke' in the previous month alone. So to increase product consumption amongst the masses Coca-Cola jump started some real conversations with people they had lost touch with.

After 125 years of putting the same name on every bottle of 'Coke', they decide to do the unthinkable. They printed 150 of the most popular Australian names on their bottles and then invited all the Australians to 'Share a Coke' with one another...

The result…

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9Mar/120

The Creative Ransom

In May 2010 an aspiring creative from USA used Google to play upon the vanity of some top American creatives and land himself interviews and eventually a job.

Then in July 2011 a Dutch creative team created "The Twitter Hustle" to land a job with a big agency in Netherlands.

Now an Aussie creative team consisting of Andrew Grinter and Lee Spencer-Michaelsen have taken the job hunt to the next level. Their approach was to stand out from the crowd by hijacking the domain names of top creative directors in Melbourne.

The duo went on a URL buying spree, after which they sent ransom notes to their targeted creative directors. The daring move got them their interviews. They wore ski-masks to the interviews and still managed to get a job. The duo are now reportedly working for DTDigital, a division of Ogilvy Melbourne.

Stay tuned for more creative job hunts. ;-)

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