The Lancia Delta has (apparently) a green but extremly powerful 1.8 litre Biturbo 200 horse power engine. To celebrate this, 200 horses showed up in the city of Amsterdam. Three Lancia Deltas were hidden amongst the horse-brigade and revealed in a central square. Presumably to be greeted with a little disappointment.

See the Lancia Delta site for more details

Demonstrating the benefits of technology in a car that helps you park is a bit of a challenge via direct mail. But Fiat rose to that challenge, creating a card that simulates the sound of its 'Parktronic' feature.

From Leoburnett.de

Take image recognition technology, cross reference it with information available on people's Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the result is the Cloud Mirror project by Eric Gradman.

Attendees at a Mindshare event in San Francisco showed a readable badge to a screen and then a speech bubble appeared along side the person's face with a piece of personal information such as "Facebook says I'm single". The aim of the project is to show how much information about people is readily available to corporate preditors (and simple stalkers).

It would be much more compelling if combined with facial recognition technology like that being trialled by Yahoo in Japan. This case still required organizers to manually search those social media profiles, which is no more worrying than meeting someone on a night out and doing a bit of Facebook snooping.

Nevertheless it is certainly an alarming herald of the future of social media and how it links to the real world. Via PSFK

The Cloud Mirror from eric gradman on Vimeo.

It's not a particularly original visual gag, but it is rather appropriate for Land Rover: placing a car behind bars at the zoo.

It reminds me of this campaign from Jeep

In an attempt to prevent other nations from banning their pork, the US is trying to force a rather wordy re-brand of the swine flu outbreak as the "2009 H1N1 virus outbreak".

Tom Vilsack said: "We want to say to consumers here and abroad that there is no risk to you. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that there is any link between consuming pork, prepared pork products and teh H1N1 virus."

Prices of US agricultural exports dived on Monday after Russia, China and the Philippines suspended pork imports from Mexico and some US states.

I'm not sure it's going to catch on. Why don't they call it mega-flu? Or turbo-flu? It's evolution in action.

Following a similar move by M&Ms, Heineken has launched a service in the Netherlands which allows people to customise their own beer bottle designs and order their own unique 6-pack for EUR15.95. Users can select from a range of pre-designed bottles which can be embellished or can start completely from scratch.

This sort of personalisation / customization is bold move for a brand - paradoxically while getting rid of obvious branding on the packaging, it actually strengthens bonding to the brand. Visit jouwheineken.nl for more information. For the full case study, visit CMDglobal.com

Interesting ad from Taxi Toronto denouncing the evils of antiquing. Well not quite. It's selling Viagra. If you take it, you have more sex and don't need silly hobbies like antiquing (I didn't even realise that was a verb - perhaps it's a euphemism. But what do "those little spoons" mean?), strolling and watching sport. As a Brit, I still find these sorts of prescription-drug ads bizarre. If I happen to like watching sport, does that mean I am not getting enough sex?

Following on from the Liverpool Street Station flashmob we saw in January, T-Mobile is building interest in its next ad, due to be filmed on Thursday in Trafalgar Square in London.

I can only hope the event and ad live up to the teaser, which builds suspense of X-Factor proportions.