Not the most creative site in history... but... This site explains how the Australian coal industry is taking action to help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions while providing secure energy for Australia and the world.

I like the website launched by Samsung to promote its latest Jet mobile phone model. Ready, Set, Jet is an interactive test that makes you discover the phone features.

Good sound design, good pace, nice visuals. You click, go and find out everything you need to know about the device in less than a minute.

I guess the agency is Lean Mean Fighting Machine but I'm not 100% sure.

Let's be honest. How many times when we work on an integrated or even on a purely digital campaign we think about online media executions since the very beginning? What's your answer? I would say never, but ok, let's go for a "very seldom". Weird but true (in 2009), banners always come at the end of the creative process. Usually we are out of time and out of money to produce them and we end up with executions that even when they are good, they could surely have been better, and in particular they could have been more integrated with the campaign idea.

This is why I loved the Tiger Woods rich media by Freestyle Interactive that was shared last #interactivemonday.

Pioneers in many things as they are, a couple of years ago spanish agency DoubleYou came out with a new website in which they claimed that their website was not a website anymore, as a sign of the fact that each agency and its projects generates so many information that it's quite hard making it all inside a single place. So they are not in their website anymore but anywhere else on the Internet, where their projects live, and their old website works as a traffic distribution core, just a functional place.

If you have contacts from advertising world in your Twitter account maybe have noticed that for the last three or four days the amount of similar avatars featuring some familiar characters has grown from a few to many, thanks to this app in which you can create your own Mad Men series character. Here you can see me waiting to get into Mr. Draper's office. Beautiful.

It looks like brands and agencies have been starting to get the best out of Facebook Connect.
After Prototype or Frenzied Waters, here comes Doritos with its ID3 advergame.

This campaign is to support the launch of Doritos new product innovation: a limited edition mystery flavour, "ID3", that consumers have to guess .

Once again, when the tortilla chips brand owned by PepsiCo plays with technology, it does it in a consistent and relevant way, not just as a pretext.
As you will see in this case, it does not do things half.
I must say I am quite impressed by the level of production of this campaign. I like the way it mixes interactive first person video as well as 3D tools. Adding the integration of personal content, thanks to Facebook Connect, Doritos delivers a successful immersive experience.

Wrangler Europe is online with a new website to promote its Fall/Winter collection. Having worked on denim websites myself, I know I have a very critic approach to these kind of projects. To be honest, I like the idea of a video (catwalk style) presentation, but I miss a deeper level of content to find out more about the product.

I believe the use of video for denim presentation should be considered mandatory from now on. It should really represent the starting point, not the end of a street/fashion project.The Wrangler website looks nice, but also rather flat if you think about some other denim brands digital experiences launched in the last year or so.

I think this is the very first time I see and I blog about a website built to promote a weapon. To be honest I'm not even sure if I like the idea of giving space to such a "product" on my blog... Anyway, now that I've started, I need to keep going. This is the link to Taser, a "triple-shot ECD".

Regardless of my ethical concerns, I think Her Majesty did a very nice job, especially in the "experience" section. You feel like it's the explanation of a videogame gun. But it's not. It's a weapon for the police I think.

A lot of submissions today for #interactivemonday. I love to see creative ideas coming in from all around the world, here a quick post with some of today's entries.

The Lech Beer website from Poland, submitted by @Ftrevino.

When i first saw "Sony Bravia's Play-doh" the first thing i though was "it could be done in 3D but it's much cooler doing it by hand".

This is not new, but i wanted you to know this game just in case you don't know it yet because i think it's absolutely awesome because of a someway similar thinking. Patapon is a PSP game in which you play God for the Patapons, little lovely tribal creatures searching for a new life and new lands at the end of the Earth. Your mission is to recruit them and make them facing some dangers and bizarre creatures.

Not a hell of a plot, but which is remarkable to me is the way of interacting with the game, Patapons march to the sound of some drums controlled by little key-combos that you have to type in the right time and in the right order. So when the second part was about to be released, what's better to advertise it than giving people a little taste of what the game's about doing a Flash mini-version?

This one is a one of us and is a good excuse for talking about something else, so we're pretty happy that could release it in the end. The new product from Rexona in Mexico is called Rexona Energizing, it's supposed to energize you every time you use it, being this the teaser used for the beginning of the campaign:

So we got in an energetic mood and decided to team with Carlos Ulloa and his new company to create EnergyLab, a brief story about how so much energy was contained inside that bottle.

As you might have noticed (!? :-) I'm a big fan of Japanese interactive works. I like their visual style, I like the attention to details and I also like the fact that in order to (try to) review them I need to do some research and investigation. The latest website that came under my radar was created back in May by Business Architects for MEXT the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan.

The challenge to understand the project seems to be particularly hard this time... so if a Japanese friend feels like helping it would be great, even if in a way I'm just happy looking at the lovely illustrations and admiring the fresh approach a governmental organ has to online communication.

Casual Sunday surfing through my Asian bookmarks... Just discovered Sony meets Cinema Kabuki, an online art project by Sony which rediscovers a classical Japanese dance-drama.

Very nice interface, and the content looks pretty interesting too. Too bad there is no English version, because it would have been nice to understand more about Kabuki.

How much tap water do you drink? Not much, I suppose, like in my case. I always have an excuse... It's too "hard" in my area, a bottle is more handy etc... We find a lot of excuses not to drink tap water, and we apparently seem to trust a lot of things the bottled water industry tell us.

Start A Lie is a very simple and viral website that encourages users to start their own lie about the bottled water industry. If they can lie, why can't we?

This is Nike SB's (newest 3 years old commercial feating Paul Rodriguez. It's pretty sweet, check it out.

Super brilliant website launched by the MoMA in New York to help visitors planning their visits at the museum.

Your preferences, your lifestyle, your tastes, it's all written in your Facebook, right? Summer at MoMA connects to your Facebook profile, scans it, analyses it and matches your preferences in the social network with the experiences currently offered at the museum.

4320 concept is happening right now... http://www.4320la.com

In the UK for the release of the latest Harry Potter movie, Warner Bros has decided to "use" Twitter. On a dedicated website Twitter users get the chance to send potions and cast spells on the people following them.

Revolution has the details of the campaign. But I'm actually more interested in testing it and asking a lot of questions...

Released earlier this month in Canada, here is a very nice film from Ogilvy Toronto and Crush for Unilever Mayo Hellmann's.

Although the phenomenon of data visualization is far from new, this is a very well executed application for a branded purpose. It shows it is not only limited to IT, artistic, or research fields but can also perfectly illustrate a message in a FMCG environment. In this case urge people to take into consideration where the food they eat comes from, and the impact it possibly has, from an economic, environmental and social point of view.

I'm very pleased to share with you one of Nike's latest work in Sportswear. The Air Max 1 Journey across five European cities to discover unusual urban spaces through the eyes of of designers, artists, musicians and media creatives. Enjoy the trailer below to get the feeling of the project.

After their absolutely hilarious Swear Word Dictionary, brazilian agency Gringo strikes back with this self-promotion site called "Campanha Instantanea" (Instant Campaign), mocking at the increasing amount of social media gurus (as their character Pai Pop Up -Father Pop Up-) and some other digital cliches in the latest times.

My $10k budget makes for Twitter and some Augmented Reality thing, what about yours?

From South Korea, a website with a nice interface to talk about a topic that is not so nice: acne. Cleocint is an antibiotic used to treat the problem, and as you can easily imagine, it is not an easy product to promote.

Usually to talk about pimples agencies either come up with something extremely funny (and disgusting) or extremely serious. In Cleocint's case we see a different approach, probably more childish, but surely interesing and definitely not disgusting.

Paul Rodriguez Jr. is one of the world's most famous skateboarders. Although he's not Tony Hawk, he's famous enough as to appear really often in series and videogames and as to have his own line of Nike shoes. To promote the third version of them Nike SB launched a new commercial called "Today was a good day" with an extended version to be premiered online the last day of July.

Funny Ice Cube appearing in some Boyz n the Hood style.

It really took so long having an app to configure and order your pizza from a mobile phone, which is kind of weird because in the US you even can order a pizza from TiVo. But last week, Pizza Hut launched this fantastic app developed by IMC2 in which you can also play games while you wait for the pizza to arrive:

As a suggestion, wouldn't be funny (and useful) that we could track where the pizza is through one of these maps applications too?

(thx Heber!)

Please tune in to the a new Volkswagen campaign, and witness some true real life interactive online television. It's part of the Pak De Polo (Get That Polo) campaign, which is currently running in the Netherlands to promote the latest Polo model.

Jung von Matt and FIDO did an impressive work to tell the story about building the sustainable future for RWE. As explained on Motiongrapher, the project was originally conceived as an in-house corporate video, but the clip will premier in German cinemas to mark the launch of the new Harry Potter film.

I really enjoy the work from a creative standpoint, but I can't help thinking companies like RWE (or ENEL in Italy) are quite hypocrite when they launch self promotions like this.

Relive the experience of the landing on the moon forty years ago with a dedicated interactive project launched in the Martin Agency and Domani Studios. Step by step, minute after minute you can watch and listen every single moment of one of the most memorable moments in history.

The Apollo 11 is expected to land on the moon on Monday 20 at 4:17 EST. If you visit the website now (Friday 17) there is no way you can speed up the story. It is happening again, live, at the same pace (obviously!) of the first time, and you can even follow the astronauts on Twitter (!!), but this time you already know how the story is going to end.

From Japan, a new fashion website I like for the good mix of brand and ecommerce experience. X-girl is teenagers brand with a pretty wide and colorful collection which cannot afford to communicate in a boring way to its consumers and, at the same time, needs to think about ROI.

The Xgirl website first of all features a great interface, which really shows you the effort they put in making the experience entertaining, interesting and last but not least usable. Even if everything is in Flash you never feel lost in the navigation which is, weird but true, quite uncommon in ecommerce enabled Flash websites.

We've talked about "Heineken's walking fridge", its sequels and its spoofs, several times before, but this new one is worth mentioning too. Snoop Dogg is touring this summer and this is a video announcing it to the world (is that Ziggy Marley?)

Funny thing that happened, i got sent this Palm Pre video, which is... creepy to say the least.

While i was watching it I spent the whole time waiting for something to happen, in a Scary Maze style or the monster from Cloverfield killing people or something like that, which would have been less creepy than the original video, in my opinion (the "ping ping ping" part really freaked me out)

So if you read the comments no one is bitching about Palm nor about the product, they just complain about the quality of the commercial, the girl or the general tone. Then, some spoofs from YouTube came to the rescue.

Stockholm Pride is a gay pride festival held since 1998 yearly in Stockholm (Sweden) that has grown to be one of Stockholm's largest events.

In the latest couple of days i saw many friends at Twitter publishing posts about how much hetero they were so although it looked kind of weird it was also funny to me and different from that awful Spygames or Mafia or WTF games that are filling the platform right now. I clicked the link and came into this little app called How hetero? in which my % of hetero was defined because of my tweets and some words i used in past messages as "disco", "dildo", "musical" or "wow" (now i'm curious about when and where i used them, haha)

Then you're told about the misjudging someone because of the words he uses and relates to how heteronorms affects and determines gay people behavior. I liked the way in which they used Twitter to reach people and make us think about this. You can also check another actions from this campaign here: Hetronormality stinks.

(thx Arturo and Armando!)

Boondoggle is the agency behind the extraordinary Axion Concerts banners campaign that have been awarded in every single competition this year. And they came up with this funny video to celebrate the Lions they've won...

The tiny little green line at the end of many emails "Do you really need to print this email?" is no longer enough to prevent us from printing tons of stuffs. It was time for a new viral message to be spread, and BBH Asia Pac came up with a smart idea to drive attention back: the USB chainsaw (see video here).

It was actually an amusing hoax. The idea is that everytime we hit the "CTRL + P" button on our keyboard we are actually activating the digital chainsaw to destroy trees. We print too much, and save too little. Make sure to download the chainsaw app on your computer which will play the horrible chainsaw sound effects whenever you press "CTRL + P" on our keyboard. Just a little gnetle reminder the next time we print out those one-liner emails.

I cannot call myself a skateboard fan. There is to much action in action sports for me. I'm not that brave. But I love the communication style of that world. I love the indie/low profile approach of the latest websites launched by Converse and Nike SB. No frills, it's all about the content, beautiful images that tell authentic stories: either you can or you cannot play that trick.

Converse is now online with Skate Like a Punk, the blog and the story of Rune Glifberg.

Art & Copy is a new documentary about advertising directed by Doug Pray and that will be screened at next Sundance Film Festival, go check their Twitter to see if they're screening near where you are, it would be nice if they'd be using it for more than just inform of an updated link but actually using it to say how's it going with the screenings and how's the response from the public.

(thx Kevin!)

Help the digital creative community starting the week with a boost of inspiration. Every Monday share the best piece of digital creativity you've seen the week before. Tweet #interactivemonday, the project URL and the agency name. And please, no self promotion, let the others judge your work.

In France you can experience the drive of a Fiat 500 with a virtual trick using Google Street View. On the Happy Drive website you just have to type in your starting point, and then the trip begins. "Driving" is easy, as you use the keyboard to turn or move forward.

I think someone already tried to do something similar a few months ago in Australia, but the Fiat 500 is better executed, even if still it doesn't result neither smooth nor engaging.

In Belgium, Coca-Cola has launched an unusual initiative: it closed its website for summer vacation. If you visit the site you will just see a cheesy animation of the website itself leaving for the sea.

I bet you have never seen a cool University website. I don't mean usable, useful and interesting, I really mean "cool". Well, in Japan Zokei University has recently launched a website and a recruitment campaign that are terribly cool and engaging.

The website looks exactly like a 8-bit videogame, and I can't imagine a better way to drive recruitment for an art and design school. If the website is so fresh and "brave", you can definitely expect their approach to education to be as fresh and open.

It happens to me really often that following some interesting people in Twitter leads me to other people also interesting as well. So, if you read the post about Tour de France you could see that i found some links coming from Ana Andjelic's site, where i also found some interesting posts about the need of the "big idea" as the core of digital marketing campaigns, written as an exchange of opinions with other people. Maybe the subject is totally debatable but also really interesting, take a look at it here and there.

What do you think? It's also depending on which country the campaigns are run? (because this kind of utilities are based on people "decoding" the brand themselves instead of the brand telling them what they have to think, and i think that this decoding needs some online use habits)

Or even is it related to talk about consistent stories instead of the benefits of the "advertised" product? or are there no specific products anymore but brands instead?

This is the first time in which the Tour de France is happening in the middle of social media tools being so mainstream, so there has been some interesting tools built, besides Lance Armstrong twittering from inside the race.

First of all, one of the most talked about and probably one of the projects that will be highlighted in next year's festivals, the famous Nike Chalkbot. If you've ever been a fan of these races, it's pretty common that fans cheer up the participants writing messages on the floor. Chalkbot follows the same principle, send your 40 characters message and it will be drawn on the road by a machine.

Also, it's weird (or different) enough as to be noticed by normal people even if they're not frequent Twitter users, so it's pretty common that press covering the event talks about the machine.

Very cool use of webcams and of interaction with consumers/fans. For the Sour's 'Hibi no Neiro" the cast was selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.

On Facebook, a few months ago you sacrified your friends for a burger. Now it's time to get them back by offering them an icecream. Through the social network Starbucks is giving away 20,000 coupons for a free pint of icecream everyday.

A good example of coupon marketing 2.0 that might become pretty annoying if the things gets too popular among the wrong brands. I like the idea because I think it will work pretty well as a recruitment campaign for the Starbucks Fan page, and you know how important it is getting to be able to engage with consumers (in the right way) on their own pitch.

One of the most representative cases of succesful online brand building in Spain is Atrapalo.com, an online travel agency that also promotes leisure activities. Their campaigns, run by DoubleYou, always have an interesting twist about how engaging people, from tv contests not appearing on tv to creating mysterious creatures that need to be captured by the so-called "Atrapantes".

Their new one, "El trato de Atrapalo" ("Atrapalo's deal"), is so simple and yet so brilliant, in a Radiohead's "In rainbows" style, you go on vacation and when returning back, you pay what you think is the fair price for that travel you did.

After the 'Walk-in Fridge', the supposed user generated 'Walk-in Fridge' and the 'Walking Fridge', Heineken is back with a new episode in the Walking Fridge soap. This time it's a real 'user generated' version. Heineken teamed up with Brandfighters, a Dutch company that connects brands with young filmmakers. They hosted a viral video contest and called for a sequel using the little fridge for a new adventure. Today, out of 33 entries, the winner is announced which you can see below.

Not properly advertising, but it's really interesting how the dying of Michael Jackson spread like fire in Twitter and all the subsequent tributes that have been released during the last two weeks:

- this print tribute done by GolpeAvisa
- Billie Tweets (done by 9Astronauts)
- Eternal Moonwalk (my favorite so far, by Group94 and Mortierbrigade for Studio Brussel)

I'm fascinated about the storytelling, involving our day-by-day tools adding some interactive flavor to MJ's stuff. Do you know any other tributes to be mentioned?

V Australia has created a competition where users can win a weekend in LA. The idea is based on showing how much you can pack into an exciting 3 days. The catch is to win the major prize of a full round-the-world trip you must tweet the full 72 hours, every minute, all 4320 of them!! I guess we will see more of this campaign as it fully rolls out.

Agency is Droga5 Sydney

Here in Italy Coca-Cola Light has launched a karaoke website which invites women to sing a Duffy song in front of a webcam in order to share it with the world.

Even if my very first reaction was pretty negative, I think the project is based on a good idea which simply doesn't fit Coke. What I mean is that while I was watching the videos my mind went to more epical tracks like for example We Are The World or Bohemian Rapsody. So the website makes you want to sing (or at least try to) in front of a webcam and has a good viral potential, but Duffy's song doesn't fit. Imagine the same karaoke idea applied to the promotion of a new album by Madonna, Robbie Williams or, even better, to drive some energy back to a record label.

The agency is Scholz & Volkmer.

...read the bumper sticker on my parents camper van. A stomach churning thought but a positive message i think we'd all agree. For a more contemporary adornment for your 'ride' look no further than Tweet My Bumper. A simple way to get more followers and a brilliant offline/online idea.

Are looking for more cool interactive ideas? Check the archives