The UK press has taken much delight in reporting the story of Roland Bunce. To bring you up to speed, Bunce is one of the contestants who took part in an online modelling competition with UK clothing retailer Next.

Next is a mid-price high street fashion name, present in most town centres across the UK. As part of its latest ‘Make me the Next Model’ competition, potential models can post photographs to a website for public vote. The highest scoring entries are shortlisted for final adjudication by jury and the winner gets to appear in a Next photo shoot and receives £2,000 for being good looking and popular enough to win the competition.

As marketing ideas go, this is a nice idea but fairly unremarkable. That is until 24-year-old Roland Bunce decided to take part. In modelling terms, Bunce is not what one might term ‘classically good looking’, but then since this is a competition open to the public, Bunce gave it a go and submitted his picture.

Next presumably wanted to encourage submissions from people of all shapes and sizes, but what they might not have counted on is the astonishing popularity of Bunce in the competition. His unlikely appearance in a competition of tall, dark and handsome men has struck a chord with the online audience, who have voted him into the top 10. To date his profile page on Next has been "liked" an astounding 32,000 times.

The UK press has reacted very strangely, with the Daily Mail claiming the competition has been sabotaged. The insinuation being that the competition is a mockery if Bunce wins. If the rumours surrounding the controversy surrounding Britain’s Got Talent are true, it’s nice to know that we can still have an honest competition in the UK.

Next were no doubt surprised – but since the final decision rests with a judging panel they can obviously pick a winner to suit their purposes, but I can’t help but feel that if Next had the guts to go with what seems to be the public favourite, there is massive PR potential in turning the Roland Bunce into a stylish man about town, kitted out in Next clobber.

I wonder if the people in charge are up to the challenge.

WHY IS THIS ON CREAM? Getting the public involved in a campaign is always going to be risky, but even the most unexpected result has potential – provided the brand involved has the vision to deal with and the backbone to see it through.

By Mark St. Andrew

In our digital age, we constantly hear about how engagement is the new way forward. Some brands still struggle with this, but Magnum is one that has taken this notion to a brilliant new level. Reminscent of a thrilling video by Intel, Magnum's new interactive campaign to promote the new ice-cream flavour features a woman controlled by the user with the arrows and spacebar, as she runs through the internet to catch chocolates. Taking the notion that the internet is a treasure trove of pleasure, we, the woman controlled by the user, see the internet in a whole new light, as she jumps from one website to the other, including Spotify, Youtube, Tiger of Sweden, jumps through banner ads, drives a car, swings on necklaces, and even flies a plane! Not only are we engaged with Magnum, but with the internet as a whole. The internet truly becomes our playground.

 

It's no surprise that this campaign was born in the hotbed of digital creativity that is in Sweden. Indeed, a recent campaign dubbed  "The Fuck Tree" is another example of bringing digital creativity to life in media, and has been shortlisted in the Festival of Media Awards 2011 in two categories. In fact the country appears in the complete shortlist no less than five times: The Swedes clearly have an eye on where media is headed.

 

 

Since 2008 Posterscope have been lucky enough to have had a Near Field Communications enabled mobile phone and a selection of posters with NFC chips embedded in them.  This technology allows the user to do three things:

1) access content : touch the phone against a spot on the poster to immediately trigger the viewing or downloading of a piece of content from the web.

2) share : touch the phone against another NFC phone to share the above content.

3) pay : touch the phone on the poster to purchase the advertised product with the phone acting in the same way as today’s contactless payment cards.

In our tests the concept proved remarkably robust and we’ve been suggesting ever since that this will help create a very exciting future for the out-of-home medium.  Over the last few weeks a couple of significant developments have made this more of a reality :

• Nokia are issuing a software upgrade to their C7 phone to activate the NFC technology inside.
• Google’s Nexus S handset supports NFC as does the latest Android software upgrade.
• The ‘Recommended by Google’ stickers for placement in the windows of business premises have NFC chips integrated into them.

So we now have publicly available NFC phones and NFC enabled posters out on the streets.  Admittedly the latter is only for businesses in the test town of Portland, Oregon, USA but these poster chips are cheap and widely available.  As such NFC OOH ad campaigns will start to be seen outside of Japan where the technology is already prolific.

Ikea can always be relied upon for some clever advertising (check out some examples here, here, and here!). The recent "cat-alogue" activity generated lots of buzz in the marketing trade press, but not being much of a cat person myself, I wasn't entirely won over with the idea of an Ikea store over-run  by some furniture-fancying moggies. 

Yes, it made for some engaging creative, but for the next few months I shall be carefully checking all my Ikea purchases for wayward cat hairs (and have they manage to round all the animals up? Or is there now a band of feral cats living under the sofas in Brent Park, surviving on meatballs and gravalax purloined from the Ikea canteen?)

The recent "Party Kitchens" activity is, in my opinion, much more entertaining. I love a house party as much as the next raver, and the best house party experience can be guaranteed by following these two simple rules:

1. Make sure the party is in somebody else's house. Cleaning up is not cool, and no matter how hard you clean, an old half-empty can of lager will always appear behind the sofa/behind the TV/in a plant pot etc. 

2. The kitchen is ALWAYS the best place. The kitchen is where you can find the food, the drink, and as any house party veteran knows - the glasses! Drinking vodka and coke out of a mug never tastes right. 

Ikea, in their canny Swedish wisdom have chosen to focus on the kitchen's role in the house party as part of its recent campaign. 

Anyone in their late thirties might remember the early 80s track, "You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties" by Jona Lewie - a quirky bit of late 70s synth pop celebrating the plight of the lonely man in the kitchen at parties. Well thirty years on, kitchens are cool, and Ikea has enlisted upcoming band "Man Like Me" and their modern take on the classic hit for its latest video and TV spot. 

The TV spot is, well just a TV spot, but the video is brilliant. Not only can viewers enjoy the slinky modern electro version of "Kitchen", but they can also use the video as a dynamic online catalogue. Moving the mouse across various items in the clip allows users to click through to product information about various items. 

 

Although Ikea aren't the first to produce an interactive video catalogue, they are one of the first to air a TV spot using the same creative. I for one was driven to to search for the clip online as I wanted to hear more of the song! 

“We know from insight that people spend most of their time at home in the kitchen - using it as a social, living space as well as a place to cook. And it’s widely accepted that the best place to be at a party is in the kitchen,” says ad agency Mother, who masterminded the ad. “Because of the functional aspects of its design and durability, the best party kitchen to be in is naturally an IKEA kitchen.”

The Ikea version of the "Kitchen" has been made available on Amazon and iTunes. Pop boffins will also be pleased to spot Mr Lewie himself as one of the party guests. 

Verdict? Brilliant execution, amazing soundtrack. Well done Ikea, we expect to see some awards heading Mother's way...

One of my new favourite blogs is Japan Trends, which has provided this blog with many fascinating products and curios from the Land of the Rising Sun. (check out Love & Horses in your lunch break)

Business cards are very important in Japan. Used by professionals and businessmen as status symbols, this is a country where you can order business cards covered in gold. Business cards (or meishi) are at the centre of a complete sub-culture that is a far cry from the UK, where you can get cards printed by a machine in a motorway service station. 

And it isn't all "Hello Kitty" cards either, although they do of course exist. This enterprising model firm, Tamiya - kind of like the Japanese version of Airfix - has developed a series of meishi model kits, where the letters and numbers on the card can be detached and and turned into miniature racing cars and things. 

 

My own business cards look particularly naff in comparison, especially when AR cards are starting to appear on the scene. 

See also: Grass seed business cards and Meaty business cards

For anyone who doesn’t use the internet or uses the Bing search engine [laughs] they will have missed out on Google’s latest ‘Google Doodle’ - pastel coloured balls that roll around when you try and click on them. Oddly addictive, apparently this makes users spend an extra 45 seconds more on the homepage.

Google Doodlers have been a core part of the Google team since 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the sites founders, went to Burning Man (SO Google) and left a calling card for users in case the site went down in their absence. Probably the most famous of its recent Google doodles is the Pac-Man game that allowed visitors to the site an opportunity to play a full featured version of the seminal video game with the game maze spelling out using the Google logo. Brands will never tire of using Arcade games to promote themselves. 

For the celebration of Earth Hour, the white background was transformed to symbolise "the turning off of lights" and local disasters, such as the BP oil spill, are often acknowledged. So it's interesting to see a doodle for doodle's sake, with no meaning or cause attached to it.  The Telegraph newspaper investigates the meaning behind the new design, and, comes up with nothing.

 

Most people view the logo, on average, 89 times a day, yet no one really knows anything about it. Well, the current official Google logo was designed by Ruth Keda, and is wordmark based on the Catull typeface. The exclamation mark was added, mimicking the Yahoo! logo.

  Note, burning man doodle.
 

"There were a lot of different color iterations", says Ruth Kedar. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules." Edgy.

  

Meet the team, "I really loved drawing ponies and unicorns. So I decided to do it for a job". Only at Google. But it's these crazies and their unswerving quest to make us love HTLM5 as much as they do, that brought us beautiful program innovations like this.

 

Although one angry blogger has voiced his distaste for having HTML5 "shoved down his throat" by changing his homepage to this...

Sad man. 

 Dancing is the new cool. Ballroom dancing, street dance, tap, tango and ballet - doesn't matter what it is, but right now dancing is where it's at - you only have to look at the explosion of dance themed TV shows and movies that have surfaced in the last few years. So it was only a matter of time before brands popped on their dancing shoes and cut a few shapes on the dance floor.

The States have had the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD) for a while - and I have to admit, when the press release arrived in my inbox I was a little sceptical. LXD was described to me as "Heroes" meets "Step Up" - and frankly after 12 years in PR and journalism, I was too cynical to give it the time of day.

However, sometimes I am proven wrong. At the end of the day I was the guy who said Facebook would never take off, so I decided to give LXD a shot and head along to the premier screening at BAFTA last night. 

I don't want to give too much away at this point, apart from to say the description of "Heroes meets Step Up" is about as accurate a description as anyone having seen LXD is ever likely to give. More importantly for Cream is what the LXD series represents in what is possible in the realms of branded content. 

In terms of production values, this is a significant step forward for the BC medium. Other brands have produced slick movie-style works before - remember that BMW movie with Madonna? Or (my personal favourite bit of BC ever) the Mercedes thriller with Dannii Minogue? More recently, Cream reported on a stunning piece of work from Ararat cognac, but these were all "adult brands" aimed at the higher end of the market. The production budget for LXD must have been huge, and every single penny has been put on screen. 

The series is soon to be launched in the UK and Europe acoss the Joost network by Adconion, so soon fans will be able to enjoy the series of 10-minute episodes and track the story of the dancers as they begin their quest. Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, and yesterday morning I would have agreed with you!

Of course it remains to be seen if an online video series (there are 10 episodes in the first series) can not only sustain interest for the complete individual episodes, but also if it can continue to keep it's audience interested over the duration of the series. Current completion stats from the US suggest that it stands a good chance. Paramount (who make the show) have finished the second series already, and a third is in the planning stages. 

Cream will be covering more of this exciting project, and the implications for the brands involved very soon. In the meantime, there's more interesting examples of online video (here) and branded content (here) on the Cream site.

One of the perks of being a journalist is that exciting things land on your desk from time to time. Yesterday, afternoon, a mysterious black parcel arrived on my desk with a letter, from Courvoisier cognac. . .

"Orville and Wilbur opened new horizons, before Richard and Stelios clogged them up. Louis sang of this world's wonders and Neil's giant leap took Mankind well beyond it. Television brought us Liz's coronation but had its crowning moment in a Paris underpass. Napoleon had his hat and Che his wispy beard. Karl and Adolf had their books, which few read but millions came to fear. Woodstock gave us flower power and Altamont plucked its petals. The wall came tumbling down as Gates opened the door, only for China to slam it in Google's face. And Gil said it wouldn't be televised, but we watched it all the same. 

Revolution comes in many guises and forms. Momentus, grandiose gestures get noticed the world over, but perhaps gone are the days of storming the palace? Perhaps the most potent revolutions are more subjective ones - albeit still rooted in personal choice and freedom?"

 Inside my parcel was a light bulb (pictured). . . which as revolutions go took a while to catch on. Sir Humphrey Davy is the man to thank. His first experiments back in the early 1800s led directly to the first incandescent light bulb. As with any scientific revolution, there are always detractors, and no doubt when the first electric lights were switched on at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, I bet there were people in the crowd complaining that electric light was all well and good, but you were never going to beat a really large candle. 

Perhaps the fundamental success of the light bulb lies in the fact that it's design, both aesthetically and technically has in principle remained untouched. Aside from a few tweaks here and there for efficiency and safety purposes, today's children would still recognise those early "Jablotchkoff candle" arc lamps as light bulbs. 

It would take 200 years, but technology finally caught up with the light bulb, and as successive governments phase out their manufacture and sale, to be replaced with greener more efficient devices - again voices of protest are complaining that that you can't beat the warm glow of a traditional bulb. I should probably close with a gag about the light bulb revolution being quiet, but illuminating, but that wouldn't do it justice.