From Japan, by Wieden + Kennedy Tokio, the latest Nike ad for Nike+. Ideal for runners looking for inspiration in spring.

In Holland, New York Pizza launched a series of commercials to promote their quality pizza's. Responsible agency Selmore came up with some fun spoofs on Italian Mafia movies like Scarface. Great timewasters on this lazy friday.

I guess this Fanta website is out in the UK since quite some time, but I found it out only today, after reading on NMA about a mobile on-pack promotion the soft drink brand is about to begin.

I'm not very familiar with the Fanta brand (I don't even drink it to be totally sincere) but I must say I really like the new characters they are using in their communication in Europe. Todd, Marv, Winnie and their friends are really cute and the experience designed around them is simple yet consistent and effective.

Dear agency...

If you feel frustrated, and you can't find the right words to say goodbye, give it a try!

via

From Canada, test your breath using the mike of your PC or just typing in what you just ate. Silly. But viral!

Explore the world of Sony Walkman from a completely different perspective. In Poland they just launched a great website that illustrates the past and the present of portable music with illustrations and animations.

It's a must see even if you know from the beginning you aren't going to understand a word :-)
The characters are lovely designed and animated, and even if almost everything is just black & white nothing results boring nor gloomy.

I know from experience how difficult it is to always come up with new visual ideas to present a denim collection. Levi's did an interesting job with its latest Cut to reveal you website developed to present female Spring Summer Collection.

The innovative navigation system allows you to see the denim from four different points of view (front/back/left/right), plus you can see the fitting on the model while she walks. You can move around the screen using either the mouse or the keyboard and access a special area to zoom into the product details.

I don't know much about ARG. At first sight, maybe because I'm kind of lazy as a user or too pragmatic as a marketer, I see them complicated, requiring too much of an effort to be really engaging. But I don't want to bias you, nor to pan a new trend in interactive marketing that I still haven't explored in full.

I assume you are as ignorant as me about ARGs, so I start from the beginning, with the definition, and Wikipedia has the answer: an alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

And now let's go into two recent examples. The first one launched last week in the UK, it's called We tell stories, and it's run by publishing giant Penguin. As explained on NMA, for six weeks, a story a week will be added to wetellstories.co.uk. Each of the stories, written by top authors including Mohsin Hamid and Nicci French, will contain clues that will push readers to a real world location.

If you're looking for a new job, and you can speak Japanese, you should definitely have a look at the 100 Cheer Girl project launched by Soft Bank Human Capital in Japan. The idea is quite simple, 100 girls share with you tips to to succeed in your career. The interface in Flash is bright and amusing, while the videos are weird and quite sexy... well, the sex sells idea applies also to recruitment companies...

A web project coming from Norway, a celebration of a chocolate brand with a visual interpretation that reminds of Get the Glass (but the interactivity is definitely not that advanced).

You have to answer a series of questions about the chocolate brand and about Norway in order to proceed in the game and explore the island. While you advance in the game you face a series of additional mini-games. The whole thing in itself results quite boring (if you don't understand the language, I think), but one appreciates the effort of creating a quiz that doesn't look like all the quiz you usually find online.

The lovely illustration definitely makes the difference in the website launched by Nintendo to promote the videogame for DS "Professor Layton and the Curious Village". Developed by Pop the offers an immersive experience for kids who want to discover the game and adults that still enjoy cartoon animations.

I didn't know honey bees are in danger. I found it out today through a nice website created by Unit 9 and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for Haagen-Dazs.

Honey bee populations are disappearing, endangering the all-natural foods they help pollinate which represents an amazing one-third of all the food we eat. Haagen-Dazs ice cream has decided to spread around awareness about the honey bee issue with a site full of information and very nicely designed.

A mobile phone that can keep track of the calories you burn when you do sports is original (and weird). What is even more weird is the mini-site Casio has launched to support his cutting edge W61CA model.

In this lovely advergame you are a "piggy trainer". You have to help a young Miss Piggy finding a boyfriend. She has to run and loose weight with your support. Can you make it? Don't worry if everything is in Japanese, you can find your way through the game.

via The FWA.

Fans of Marianne Satrapi drawing style and stories (like myself :-) will surely enjoy the site recently launched to support the movie.

The site has everything you would expect from a movie site (nothing less, nothing more), but this also the strength of this piece of work: an easy navigation and a lovely design inspired to Satrapi's style and characters manage to create a pleasant experience. Keep it simple. And beautiful.

Lynx have made male soap use a crime in Australia and created a squad of beautiful women charged with reducing male soap use and turning guys on to Lynx Shower Gel.
The website launches with a contest where guys can dob in mates who use soap, posting their friends on the wall of shame. It also features a 2 minute web film showing the squad in action.

I really like the website Motorola has launched in the US to present its government and public safety solutions. It's quite rare to find a B2B online marketing project in general, and it's even more rare to find a B2B website that is so well done.

The site launched last month, but there hasn't been much buzz around it in the creative/marketing community, which is a pity because the work is beautiful and inspiring.

I've never heard of Nomis before, but they did a great job to start getting noticed. Have a look at the video below, it's a lovely piece of work by Johannes Leonardo directed by Woof Wan-Bau (no, it's not his real name ;-)

Johannes Leonardo is a new agency fouded towards the end of 2007 by Jan Jacobs and Leo Premutico, two former Saatchi & Saatchi Executive Creative Directors. Nomis is a new brand of soccer boots.

How does your Absolut world look like? Whatever your vision is, there is room for it in an Absolut World. The vodka brand loves visions so much that it turned them into reality, creating a curious website with the help of Great Works and freelance interactive designer Carlos Ulloa.

The online experience begins with a series of visions Absolut has collected getting in touch with artists, writers and actors from around the world. Then, of course, you can submit your own vision and become part of the Absolut world yourself.

Farfar is behind a new weird initiative launched by Nokia to promote its new N82 model. The concept is based on "position art", which consists in creating works of art, by physically walking them, and then transferring it on to a satellite image. Basically it's an art form that tracks your position using GPS.

At www.theworldismycanvas.com visitors can meet Stavros, the self-proclaimed Position Art "Genius" who uses the Nokia N82 Sports Tracker application as his tool while he walks around anywhere in the world to "draw" his motif.

Last Friday, on the website Nokia has broadcasted a live art performance by Stavros, who has been walking around Rome for the whole day creating his "greatest work of art ever".

A nice timewaster if you feel lazy on a Sunday morning like this... Photoshop Disasters a new, original blog collecting Photoshop errors from around the world.

For example, I'm sure you will appreciate this great work of cloning coming from the Spanish sports magazine AS.

Of course if you have some masterpieces to share, you can submit your work to the blog.

via

Very nice work by 180 Amsterdam.

I would like to participate in Cafe Ping Pong... and you?

Following the successful and multi award winning Nissan Qashqai 'skateboard' commercial, the car manufacturer just released the sequel. In this new ad the city literally comes to live with urban titans testing the Urban Proof statement. Pretty cool, if you ask me. There are also a making off and some interviews available. Agency is TBWA\London.

Fila has produced a cool short online film, featuring its ambassadors Danny Dyer and Tamer Hassan. The film starts as a typical British gangster film, but turns out to be a promotion for Fila's Centre Court pre-distressed trainers. The film is produced by Red Bee Media.

via

Last Friday the Australian Interactive Awards were held and HOST won the Best of the Best. It was a great site that allowed users to message friends/siblings in Oz to go home for a visit. The site integrated with outdoor billboards where New Zealander's live in Oz.

To celebrate its 100th anniversary Converse has launched in Japan a "Thank you" project, to thanks its loyal customers and to involve them in a collaborative project to further promote its famous shoe model.

But let's go into the details of the campaign, thanks to David's post on Culture Buzz... Basically Converse asks the users to become their advertising agency, and to carry out a series of actions to promote the brand. The better (and the more) they promote Converse, the more points they earn, points that can later be exchanged with products.

After Stella McCartney and Yohji Yamamoto, Adidas signed a new agreement with another big name in fashion: Diesel. For now it regards the Originals collection, and it's going to last four years. With such iconic lifestyle brands connecting expectations are definitely high, for the product and for the communication around it.

Of course there is a dedicated site to look at... http://diesel.adidas.com suggests 83 original ways to successfully waste your time, and you are invited to participate by uploading your pictures and videos, to testify on each one.

Let's go straight to the point: the site is beautiful, the pictures to illustrate the suggestions are great and are a good mix of Diesel and Originals universes, the layout is clean, ergonomy ok if you have a big screen, but ...it took me ages to access to it, waiting for the 83 sections to upload!

BuzzingBees points at an interesting hearing test, issued by the Norwegian Red Cross. It's something to experience, rather then describe, so please put up your volume and give it a try.

Sorry, this one is one of us, but I have to talk about it as we've spent so much time working on this lately... :)

Last year, One Show asked us to develop the image for their Interactive competition in 2008.

As you may know, fighters have replaced Mariachis as the new mexican cliche and we tried to create a game with some mexican flavor, a bit nasty and that served as a place of reunion for designers, developers, creatives, art directors, etc. trying to have some fun and blood.

Once upon a time in the West... Toke Nygaard from K10K got his laptop broken, and so it was that the entrance to the portal became a page with a picture of that broken laptop and asking people to collaborate so that he could buy a new one... and he got it!

And then there's the story of the guy who, exchanging things, turned a red clip into a house. Last year, John Grden from Rock On Flash and core member of the Papervision 3D team asked something similar so that he could work on improving the performance of the famous 3D engine on a Mac, and it only took a couple of weeks to get the money through Paypal.

In the end, these situations follow the same pattern, some kind of "together we can", that now has been blended with these viral times of us.

Are looking for more cool interactive ideas? Check the archives