The Chip Shop Awards were held in London last week. The awards pride themselves on ‘creativity with no limits’ and this certainly rang true again this year.

From a light-hearted event set up as a humorous alternative to D&AD, the Chips have become an international event with entrants from around the world. There were Chip finalists from Australia, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, Kuwait, Amsterdam, and Poland.

The event was live online (I didn’t see it as I was watching A Single Man on DVD, definitely not as much fun.) Not only that, while Colin Firth was failing to get an Oscar, we picked up a ‘finalist nomination’ for our ‘Squeeze Bus’ ad. We did it as a piece of intro/spec work for Macari’s Musical Instruments in London.

Creative by John Peacock and Alastair Scully

You can see the rest  of the entries here. Well worth a look!

John.

It sounds like a genuinely simple and brilliant idea. I hope it is. Pavegen are a company that have developed paving slabs that convert the kinetic energy from footfall into electricity. So it lets people ’save energy without realising it’. Unless it is unfeasibly exhaustive on the environment to produce, then it sounds like a winner. Maybe they could come up with roads that convert the movement of vehicles into electricity also? And tube tracks?

We went to a talk the other week  on how the concept of ‘Play’ is integral to moving away from a persuasive form of marketing to a rewarding inclusive and interactive approach. Some key thoughts we took away were to look for ways to help people to ‘let go’ and get them to participate in something enjoyable (be it online or in the real world) with a relevant tie back to what your brand stands for.

The Fun Theory initiative from VW does exactly this, by inviting people to adopt a healthier and greener life by changing behaviour through ‘fun’.  With over 3.5m views in a week, the piano staircase video is doing a hell of a job to seed the idea and elevate the VW brand. Quite nice.

Webcams can be used for nicer things than just ads for price comparison websites. Here’s a music video from Sour. The cast were selected from their actual fan base, from many countries around the world.

There are lots of spontaneous experiences popping up at the moment, ‘flash mob’ seems to be an overused word in many a brainstorm.

That being said you still can’t deny that random, fun experiences have the ability to take you by suprise and brighten up your day. Take for example the ‘Play me I’m yours’ pianos, which after a world-wide tour now find themselves outside our offices on Carnaby Street. It’s brought a real buzz to the corner (with hundreds of renditions of Hey Jude), and will be missed when it moves on.

Pop along for a song - why not play ‘disco inferno’ and give us a wave?

Skip past the first 10 seconds to the absolutely beautiful animated intro to the rock band game.

Heres the link to the hi res version http://www.thebeatlesrockband.com/cinematic.php

Here’s a video we pulled together in a fun filled afternoon to promote our  golf day. When it hits 1m YouTube views we’ll buy everyone a drink at the clubhouse.

(Malcolm’s long put at the end was his second try. I won’t be playing against him that’s for sure!)

The credit crunch friendly

Sainsbury Annual Report - nice, cost effective and interactive approach to put an annual report into market. Long live trees.

The not so credit crunch friendly

Sketch - the chic London bar’s site is quite nice to move around. 

The fun and addictive

VW GTI - enter the GTI lab and race a model around a giant scalextric track. My best time is 21:00. Beat that!

Last weekend saw the return of the annual 48 Hour YouTube Cannes Young Lions competition.

This year’s brief for Oxfam was to create a video that will inspire millions of people around the world to join the global movement for action on climate change.

Check out the YouTube channel and vote for your favorite entry before the deadline at Midnight on May 31st. This is a great example of how a project; brief, entry, voting and results can be managed exclusively online.

It’s pretty hard to deny the usefulness of Google maps. Not only can you play with a global map of infinite detail in seconds, but with the addition of Street View you can also view and explore places in first-person.

If you had to, one of the few holes you could poke in the platform is that it doesn’t really integrate the first person street view, into the bigger picture map.

The Here & There projection of Manhattan does just this, giving an enhanced first-person and brids-eye view of a city.  It puts the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking directly around them.

So far it’s been developed to a 2D representation of New York. However with location based technologies racing out of their infancy, how long until we start seeing this distorted but very handy view of our surroundings developed into a 3D interactive world? Could be very useful in digital city guides, games (GTA 8?), and mobile map apps.  

What better way to Spark things off than by taking a look at some inspiring and ridiculously clever future technologies which have the potential to enhance the way we live our lives.

First off is a paradigm challenger. Why do all computer desktops work in pretty much the same way? Website navigation is adapting to how we use the internet (check out the experimental ‘Don’t click it’), however desktops have remained pretty constant.

‘Bumptop’ is an ingenious approach to desktop management built for the way we organise our real work spaces (i.e. desks) in real life.

Moving through the digital world, mobile especially is inspiring radical new ideas, opening up ways to access information wherever we need it. ‘Nru’ (pronounced near you) is the latest mobile innovation from lastminute.com’s labs team. Using GPS the application (available on the G1 Andriod device) can show you things to do near you on a radar, and also send information directly to you when you point the camera at a place or object.

Taking a glimpse further ahead, we find Pattie Maes, developer of the Sixth Sense mobile. We challenge you to not utter ‘no way’ to yourself when you watch the demonstration.

Excellent animation + great track + funny ending = FUN!

A new Visa flow ad?

David after dentist

Chad after dentist