For the last few years, street art collective Mosstika have been producing “green graffiti” by shaping and crafting images with moss and grass as the medium. When I read this article on psfk it reminded me of the bacteria billboard that I wrote about last year for Warner Brothers. It is quite incredible to use a natural product to create a living image that has a natural life span and am surprised that more brands haven’t taken this on as a method of advertising.

Other interesting and unconventional types of graffiti are forming, such as the sound graffiti in New York by French record label Kitsuné to create a sensory experience on the streets, (similar to the sound posters created by FOAM- here)

“The small boxes, which look like the old fashioned listening stations you might find in music stores, have been attached to lamp posts across the city. When a passerby comes across one, they can plug their own headphones into it and then listen to some of the label’s latest releases. There’s also a map, which has been cleverly integrated into social media, that lets people find the locations of the devices beforehand.” (via proteinfeed)

So what does this graffiti trend mean for brands? Billboards and posters fall under the traditional marketing category, but suddenly if they are interactive, growing and developing over a period of time, this is suddenly creates content to be recorded, shared and allows the people to engage with the subject in a new way, thus becoming online, digital content.

However, as always, whenever a trend emerges it is up to the brand to be clever with how they decide to apply it to their campaign in order to work with the culture from which it originates.

Earlier this year, Coca-Cola controversially took over a wall in Hackney Wick in East London, known and loved by locals for it’s street artwork. Coke created their own graffiti style wall for the Olympics for their ‘Move to the beat’ campaign running for summer 2012. Not surprisingly, the brash decision by Coke didn’t go down well with locals and all street art lovers, as one poster put it-
‘Hackney Wick is NOT sponsored by Coca-Cola’.
The wall was soon to be defaced, however Coca-Cola have attempted to keep it maintained for the Olympics. (read more about it here)

It really shows that for a brand to successfully adopt a trend like this, they must truly understand the culture and work with it rather then simply buying and slapping their logo on it. It will be interesting to see if and how brands take on this responsibility, particularly with the Olympics soon approaching in the east end of London- an area known for its creativity and emerging artists.

Havana Club rum are allowing consumers to experience the brand with a series of pop up bars around the world that will encourage people to get involved and make their own mojito cocktails with the fresh ingredients available in the ‘Mohito Market’

“The décor will represent a ‘Mohito Market,’ with authentic stalls set out to create a real unique atmosphere.
Lucy Bonnetier, Brand Manager for Havana Club International, explained: ‘We wanted to restore the value of the authentic Cuban Mojito, demonstrating its superiority to ready to serve variants, or those made using rum from elsewhere. The Havana Club Mojito Embassy gives consumers the experience of making their own authentic Cuban Mojito set against the stunning backdrop of the Cuba of today.” ” (drink-brands.com 2012)

I think that these branded events that allow people to interact and enjoy the brand are really positive types of campaigns that create memorable experiences for the consumers to enjoy and share. I’ll be looking for the London bar.

A few weeks ago, Heineken opened it’s concept club as part of the Open Design Explorations, held at design fair Salone del mobile. I blogged about this just before it opened and was intrigued to see what innovative ideas they came up with to give us an insight into the future of the club.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve delayed writing this post several times as I have been rather disappointed, not necessarily with the concepts themselves, but the documentation and sharing of the event. I’ve dipped into articles on the event by wallpaper magazine, vogue, cool hunting etc, and have even seen their slideshow and the nightlife journey (which I had seen before the club had opened). Other than the odd hashtag on twitter, there seems to be little consumer feedback on the night. I’ll get back to this point later in the post, for now let’s see what they did do.

There were six main focus points on improving the club experience; Connecting, Discovering, Getting a drink, Dancing, Cooling down and Ending the night.

Their around the world research indicated that these six factors were the most important. So what did they do? See here, I would love to have one coherent list of all of the design elements but alas, I’ve had to search for the features so may have missed some out but here goes;

- A graffiti wall for clubbers to write illuminated messages.
- A video bottle wall that reacts to sounds and shows images of the clubbers.
- Instant pictures taken for people to take home with them.
- Viedo mapping that measures the energy of the dancers in the room so that the DJ can adjust accordingly
- An interactive bar allowing people to order beers and show who is next in line- an image of a bottle appears on the bar when you order a beer, filling up then explodes to show that your order has been placed - I’m pretty sure the novelty would wear off on that one pretty quickly.

There was also a concierge service at the end of the night, helping people to arrange their travel home and bar staff serving throughout the night in origami styled uniforms, carrying a tray designed to carry the Heineken bottles and cooling down areas.

I would have absolutely loved to have attended this opening, to experience the event myself and gauge the atmosphere and success of the night. For me, this event is missing one crucial thing and that is Post-event online presence. As many of my blog posts show, I am fascinated by the relationship between offline and online experiences, how the real life moment can be just a few hours, but once translated online, it can be talked about and shared for months to come. A great example of this was the 24 hour museum where let’s face it, it was over before anyone really got to know what it was about. But before I knew it I was scrolling through the images of Kate Moss dancing in the DJ booth along with the rest of the fashion gang.

What is a shame about this project is the lack of reactions and hype around the night. Even on wallpaper magazine’s feature of the project, there are little details on the event itself, bearing in mind the project has been running for a year. The night journey was a great way to display research and the areas in which they were focusing on yet there doesn’t seem to be the equivalent post-party. For me, I was hoping to see a real connection to the live activity in the club and the online presence…maybe uploads of the photos and graffiti messages, people’s reactions when entering the club. Without these personal comments, it’s really hard to tell if the project truly an innovative and exciting place to be or simply style over substance.

This post is a little off topic as it is not related to advertising per se or tech however it did touch on a topic that has crept into many of my blog posts and that is creating experiences for people.

Last week I went to the Damien Hirst exhibition in London at the Tate Modern. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this retrospective having only really seen a few of his pieces before and not knowing much about his career as a whole. First of all, the audio guide is an absolute must; the insight that the art critics give as well as Hirst himself giving additional information it really makes the whole exhibition coherent and far more enjoyable. Following main themes of life and death, I was extremely impressed with the experiential element to the exhibition, with the art literally surrounding you from room to room whether it be from the butterfly room or the stench from the rotting cow’s head in his ‘A Thousand Years’. I’m always interested in the sensory qualities of an experience, and this definitely fulfilled, even surpassed my expectations. The lingering smell that some of his pieces created made people ahve a physical reaction to his art- really quite extraordinary. Even when I think back to the exhibition now, four days on, I can still distinctively remember what the smell was like, how I reacted to it and then how that made me feel about the piece of art. Powerful stuff.

This is a segment of an enormous stained glass window effect made from butterflies which, was really impressive and again followed on beautifully from the living butterfly room as a contemporary art piece to dead butterflies being presented as art on a wall in a traditional, biblical way- it made a really nice juxtaposition.

…I’ve started to use words like juxtaposition, so I’ll call it a day. Great exhibition, definitely recommend a visit.

I always find it fascinating when a brand manages to revolutionise the way that people do everyday, normal things. Apple is the best example I could possibly give- they created solutions to problems that you didn’t even know existed. By the time we registered what it was that Apple was doing, we suddenly couldn’t imagine a world without iPods, iPhones, iPads etc and we could barely remember the days when technology wasn’t so damn cool, accessible and easy to use.

This idea of changing peoples habits, their norms and expectations of what given cultures and experiences have to offer really interests me and is what caught my attention of the ‘Heineken Open Design Explorations’ project.
For the last year, whilst we have been plodding along with our day-to-day lives, Heineken have put together a creative team, across five different design disciplines- fashion, product design, motion/interactive, graphic design and interiors to “create the vision of the perfect nightclub of the future”.

Heineken are trying to create the ultimate context for their product and create a memorable experience for the consumer. This project is not only ambitious as it must be entirely innovative and original for the project to have purpose and meaning. By creating a new concept for a nightclub, there must be the right balance of allowing guests to be surprised and inspired, but equally they also need to feel some familiarity for them to feel comfortable in the environment to relax and enjoy the experience.

Their research goal over the last year has been to explore the behaviours of people at nightclubs and to look options of how to develop the current model of a club to reach the ultimate night out. But, when people are out, especially under the influence of alcohol and with friends I can imagine it could be tricky to try to establish what is missing, how to improve on what already exists. What Heineken need to do is think like Apple and offer solutions to problems that these night clubbers don’t know exist. As seen in the video, the designers are from 4 different cities around the world- Milan, Tokyo, New York and Sao Paulo. I am intrigued to see how such different cultures come together to create one united experience. Are the same issues/opportunities appearing cross-cultures?

The club will be open later this month at Salone del Mobile and I for one am really excited to see the results.

via Wallpaper Magazine

I have just seen this sequel by Tipp-Ex ‘The Hunter and the Bear are back’, and it is moments like this that make me excited about the online digital advertising industry. It has been a little while since I last blogged about an online ad campaign like this, the phrase ‘nothing to write home about’ has come to mind recently when I’ve seen new attempts to capture users online attention.

Yesterday I saw the new ‘viral’ for TNT- (if you haven’t seen it yet click here) The video is only a day old and has already reached 3.5million views on YouTube. I watched the video from start to finish and hated every bit of it….particularly the end. The whole concept is based around a dated idea of soemone pushes a button and something happens..that’s it. Don’t get me wrong, this idea has done wonders in the past such as DDB creating the Escape Machine for travel company SNCF which I blogged about here but, that was a year ago and things have moved on. The part that I dislike most about the TNT video was that the whole point of these virals is to capture people’s joyous reactions to the live happenings…these people barely seem entertained by the goings on around them. There was no round of applause, leaving the online viewers (or maybe just me) slightly bewildered. I think this is a classic example of the late majority catching onto a trend just as it is on its way out.

What I am interested in is what the early adoptors and innovators of online content are up to. How are they capturing people attention and retaining it and I think the Tipp-Ex ad is a great example of an insight of what is to come. Interactive content, personalised by the user to make it relevant, fun and enteraining.

Yes, this is a sequel so it is not entirely original, but the concept and it’s delivery is so impressive and entertaining, I don’t even care. The brilliance of applying a different video clip to each chosen year is genius- though god knows how long this has taken to do. It allows people to linger on the branded content for minutes on end, unfolding new content all the time making it such a valuable campaign.

‘Close the tap’ is a campaign launched by NGO FLOW (for the love of water), a South African water conservation organisation. On the website, a running tap is shown to indicate the amount of water constantly being wasted. Once 10,000 tweets are made with the hashtag #closethetap, the tap will stop running. Water related facts and suggestions of how to reduce your water footprint are given to encourage people to spread the word.

I think this is a really lovely campaign, with a live ‘FLOWcam’ on the running tap alongside the running tweets, it is a great way to spread the word. However, World Water Day was three weeks ago now (22nd March 2012) and I was surprised to see that there are a mere 4,680 (approx) tweets carrying the campaign hashtag..that’s less than halfway to their goal. With water being such a vital part of everyone’s day to day life, why is it that some online campaigns are successful and others aren’t? Perhaps it is as simple as the PR behind the campaign haven’t done as much as they could have to get the word out there by making sure that the most influential bloggers and tweeters are in the know.

I really hope this campaign picks up and they come up with some creative ways of getting their campaign talked about.

http://closethetap.com/

This video describing Heston Blumenthal’s new pre-dining experience is really quite phenomenal. Engagaing the customer from the moment they book their table at the Fat Duck by providing an online link to showcase an animated journey, created by Neighbourhood called ‘Like a Kid in a Sweet Shop’. It expresses the excitment involved in the dining experience provided at the restaurant. This is very cleverly taking a negative aspect of the experience- having to wait 2 months for a table reservation, and turning it into something fun and interactive that you can enjoy at home.

Similarly to my previous post on ‘The Blocks’, this project is a clever mixture of creatives working together from all different fields to create something really extraordinary- food, smell, sound, animation all designed to work together. Genius.

via protein feed.

London designers Studio Toogood have created a temporary multisensory experience for wine producers ‘Penfolds’ in Sydney, called The Blocks.

“Designed to demystify the process of vinification, THE BLOCKS encourages visitors to discover and awaken their palate using sight, touch, smell and taste.
Upon entering THE BLOCKS, visitors will be greeted by trained sommeliers – ʻThe Nosesʼ – who will take guests on a journey through five imperious wooden totems.

Inspired in form by the five groups of grapes available for tasting – and impregnated with different bespoke scents produced in conjunction with a perfumer for the event – the totems have been designed to guide guests to select the appropriate wines to suit their personal palate.

Not content with stimulating the nose, Studio Toogood asks guests to drink with their eyes by revealing glass cabinets filled with highly visual, poetic interpretations of the terminology normally associated with describing wine by five emerging Australian artists and designers.

To complete this gastronomic experience, guests will be seated under canopies of illuminated glass grapes on Faye Toogoodʼs iconic ʻSpadeʼ chairs. Hand-cast from raw aluminium specifically for the event, the ʻSpade Chair / Naked Aluminiumʼ is cold to the touch, reminding guests of their cellar-like experience. ” Studio Toogood, via dezeen

I am always excited whenever I read about new projects and ventures described as ‘experiences’ along with words that I have so frequently used to describe projects of my own such as ‘mulitsensory’ and ‘conceptual design’. This pop-up experience has the brilliant combination of culinary and artistic design to make a really dynamic space.

Shame it’s not in London!

To me, this promotional campaign for (@drytheriver) Dry The River’s debut album ‘Shallow Bed’ is so, so exciting.
FOAM, a creative agency based in London have gone for a multi-sensory experience to help promote this band’s new album. As seen in the video displayed, the posters allow people to see, feel and listen to the provided content.

Dotted around East London, allowing people to interact with their music through the poster is a rather simple way of engaging potential fans.

Last year, FOAM created a poster Dry The River with a 3D horse leaping out of the page. Taking onboard the paper craft trend that was everywhere in 2011, these posters really stood out (quite literally) amongst the rest and scooped up The Gold award from Ads Of The World: ‘Best Outdoor’ July 2011.

Really lovely concept and beautifully executed.

via Creative Review