This year charity and human rights organization Amnesty International France has turned its signatures petition drive at www.marathondessignatures.com into a musical 'hymn to freedom' with Paris based agency La Chose.

The campaign was like any other petition drive, but with a slight difference. Every digital signature received released the next note of an exclusively written song called the Sound Of Amnesty. To push the boundaries, they even got music recognition service Shazam to promote their petition in their smartphone app.

When the Shazam app did not recognize a song, the usual error message along with a special message "Valentina Rosendo Cantu could not make herself heard either. Assaulted by soldiers, she asked for justice but the authorities refused to investigate" was displayed. As a result 150,000 signatures were collected, a 500% increase from the previous year! The song was also made into a CD and sent to Amnesty's targeted authorities.

AlmapBBDO Brazil has developed a very unique and innovative iAd for the new Brazilian Audi magazine app. The ad seen in the video below appeared in various publications on the iPad and used a nice play on Apple's "Slide to Unlock" feature to engage the users.

Users who saw the ad instantly recognized the swipe gesture used to unlock Apple devices. So after racing their finger around the track, they were rewarded with a free download of the first Audi Magazine copy from the app store.

Before I could publish this post I came across another "Slide to Unlock" iAd! It seems this iOS feature is becoming a popular creative feature for iAds. In the below example, Amnesty International has created an iAd in Sweden's largest newspaper, DN, where readers were presented with an image of a prison cell and prisoner inside. "Slide to Unlock" was used to open the prison cell and reveal a strong call to action to join Amnesty International as an activist.

Conselho Nacional Do Sesi, the national council of social services in Brazil, ran the world's biggest hug campaign in October 2010 using the 'Christ the Redeemer' statue in Rio de Janeiro.

For over two nights the statue's spotlights were turned off, allowing projections and 3D imagery to create the illusion that Christ was closing his arms around the city. The symbolic 3D hug was linked to the Carinho de Verdade (True Affection) campaign site. This event helped raise public awareness on the impact of sexual abuse on children / teenagers, and encouraged the development of healthy relationships of trust.

Visualfarm Brazil created this projection using Coolux Germany's proprietary technology called 'Pandoras Box'. Here is the recorded footage of the actual projection…

Billions of business envelopes are used every day. Imagine how much paper can be saved if we just halved their size.

So while posting a letter, ask, 'Can it be folded once more?'
If it can: Fold more.

Use a smaller envelope. Save trees. It's that simple. Its called, iFOLD.

On December 1st, Hollywood died a digital death. The world's top celebrity tweeters sacrificed their digital lives to give real life to millions of people affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. Here is their full last tweet and testaments until $1,000,000 is raised to buy their lives back via www.buylife.org.

UPDATE:
Celebrity Twitter Ban Campaign a Bust, Can't Raise $1 Million; Stars Freak Out
December 07, 2010 | New York Post

Celebrities were so frustrated with the time it took to raise $1 million for Keep a Child Alive's "Digital Death" campaign, they persuaded a wealthy savior to give them $500,000 so they could get back on Twitter.

.hiv is a global idea to fight HIV and AIDS. By the end of 2010, the number of people diagnosed with HIV would have reached 150 million.

AIDS continues to be a deadly diagnosis and to help stop it nonprofit organization Dot-HIV and Hamburg based agency Kemper Trautmann have launched a Facebook campaign, whose goal is to use the power of the Internet and establish a new top-level domain (such as .com or .org): .hiv.

Every website in the world could soon have the domain name ending .hiv – and while the content of the sites remain the same, you would do some good by using the .hiv-version of the website as every time someone visits such a website, the owner would donate a small amount of money to the Dot-HIV charity – or pay a monthly rate for the use of the domain name ending.

For more details visit www.dothiv.org/info.

Everybody has an opinion on Nature. But what about Nature’s opinion? EOS magazine decided to give Nature the means to talk. A 100 year old tree, living on the edge of Brussels, was hooked up to a fine dust meter, ozone meter, light meter, weatherstation, webcam and microphone. This equipment constantly measures the tree’s living circumstances. And translates this information into human language. Then, the tree lets the world know how he feels.

Visit www.talking-tree.com and follow the life of the talking tree via YouTube, Flickr and Soundcloud.

Marking the back to school term, Preventable together with BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation and the District of West Vancouver have launched an optical illusion geared to making drivers slow down at high-risk intersections.

The optical illusion is of an illustrated girl chasing a ball with signs leading up to it saying "you're probably not expecting kids to run out on the road" to prepare drivers.

The installation is meant to draw attention to the risk of children running into the street and was carefully tested before being put in place. It has been in place for a few days only and is being monitored as a pilot to ensure pedestrian and driver safety are not risked.

For more details visit www.preventable.ca

This social experiment was carried out using hidden cameras in a townhouse complex in Johannesburg. The message is pretty clear..."Don't condone violence by doing nothing".

The cool thing about Digital is that you can create almost anything, anywhere. So for this Polish Breast Cancer awareness campaign, Change Integrated devised something different around an insight into making breast cancer detection methods fun to learn.

So in the adult section of one of the most popular polish websites, they placed a very smart piece of digital creativity that allowed men to touch the items at hand and learn the correct techniques of breast cancer detection in a very interactive way.

The campaign was live for just one week and remarkably, managed to train over 175,000 men!