Author Archives: Ana

The role of creatives in Sharing Economy

The role of advertising creatives may change quite a lot, and quite soon. With sharing economy churning out success stories like AirBnB, Uber, Rent My Ride or Asos Marketplace, the creative challenge is going to revolve less around the needs and habits of individual consumer and more around creating something for groups that create new value out of existing resources. The new creative tasks can be coming up with an infrastucture, motivation, and reward for sharing, collaborating or contributing. The interesting part? Designing for the social dynamics revolving around abundant supply, unmet demand and the possible links between the two.

Source: The Sharing Economy: Where Creatives Should Be

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This store shelf is stalking you.

The rumor has it that shelves can now track age and gender of passing customers. That is, in the global supermarket Mondelez they can, thanks to Microsoft Kinect. Sensors placed on the shelves stacked with groceries will track who’s looking at the goods, how old they are, and what’s their gender. The data is intended for marketing purposes, like tailoring specific messages to the target demographic or offering real-time utility as Hellmann’s mayo did in Brazil. Hellman’s used data to assemble recipes on the fly for the customers who put Hellmann’s mayo in their cart. The utility of data doesn’t have to stop there, though: it can potentially be a really good source of research on human decision-making and the influence of the context on the way we choose, making marketing both more efficient for the brands and more useful to consumers.

Further reading: Future of Retail by FactCo Labs

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Your next grocery shopping destination: subway car

If you live in South Korea, than you’ve already used to finishing your grocery shopping at the subway platform. Now, take your shopping up a notch, or better yet, further down your commuter route: grocery shops are being set up in subway cars. Best part? A complete fresh meat refrigerator squeezed in for the evening rush hour.

Source: Rocket News 24

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Follow the Penguin

Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo is a lovely place. The problem is, not a lot of people know this. Distracted by their everyday lives, they all but forgotten about the aquarium.

This is where the Japanese ad & PR agency called Hakuhodo comes in. Hakuhodo’s creative team took human distractibility as the starting point in coming up with their solution. The aquarium is only 1km (0.62miles) from the closes public transit station. Read more…

Forever Bycicles

I love Ai WeiWei. This time around, he brought his installation, called Forever Bicycles, to the streets of downtown Toronto. Lit with pink and blue lights, the labyrinth-like installation is made up of bicycles stacked upon each other. Weiwei used 3,144 steel bikes to create the effect of blurred motion.

Source: Ai WeiWei Like this story? You can follow Ana here @andjelicaaa

Welcome to Tokyo

Enjoy this slow-mo dance by the notorious Japanese group World Order. To celebrate 2020 Tokyo Olympics, they employed their signature dancing style, singing about love, peace and hope and everything else Olympics is built on. Best part of the video, aside of dancing, is the unique tour of Tokyo landmarks.

Source: The Awesomer

Like this story? You can follow Ana at @andjelicaaa

Barklays Wants You Bike Ready to Roam

It looks like tomorrow’s going to be the last day of Barklays Bike Clinics, pop-up bike repair stores strategically placed around busy roads of London. Sponsored by Barklay’s bank, these temporary repair shops offer free check-ups, tune-ups and safety info to bikers. Apparently, after running a survey and crunching some numbers, Barklays discovered that 57% of Londoners are riding bikes unfit to be on the road and that 18% cycle in dark without bike lights (um, guilty as charged). Behind the entire Bike Clinics initiative is the idea to get more people to cycle, and to do so safely. Where you at, Citibank?

Source: Barklays and Bikeworks Team Up

Complex Magazine goes Sky High with Danny Brown, displays one of the best uses of parallax so far

For its recent interview with Danny Brown, Complex magazine broke out of the article mold and crated something truly fun. In its Sky High feature, Complex invites us to scroll down the memory lane of Danny’s life, from his childhood, fall and consequent rise, his love for Adderall, and finally to his famous on-stage fellatio. (As for that, Danny says “People get their d%^&s sucked every day, B. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”).

Source: Complex

Hermes keep pushing for brand utility

Coming right at the heels of their “how to tie your scarf” iPhone app, Hermes recently launched its new pop-up store, themed as a retro diner called “Silk Bar,” where you can check out the daily “menu” and see the “daily silk specials.” The pop-up is located in the Time Warner shopping center at the Columbus Circle, so if you’re in New York, check it out!

Source: Silk Pop-Up Diner

Out with the ads, in with the content

Denny’s and Percolate created something extraordinary. Denny’s is better known as the America’s Diner for the past half of the century. Percolate is better knowns as the content publishing platform for brands. Combine the two and you get an impressive 680% increase of consumer social engagement with 55% less time invested. Read more…