Last year the Road Safety Authority teamed up with Setanta Insurance to start a campaign to raise awareness to the dangers of speeding. They set up a creative competition to write an ad highlighting the topic, set out a brief and offered the chance to win 3000 euro plus the opportunity to have your ad made by a team of young professionals. This is a great approach by RSA as not only does it give a leg up to fledgling writers and youthful production companies but through the public involvement in the competition it spreads the ads message in a new way.

Richard Lahart came up with the winning concept and it was directed by Stevie Russell with sound design by Gareth Averill. Good job all round.

Source: syntheastwood.com

Viral marketing campaigns are an amazing way to generate a huge amount of buzz and brand awareness. . Upload an amazing video and once the video goes viral millions of viewers will see your viral movie and they will become advocates of your movie. Viral have an end too. Would it be possible to relaunch it, give it a second life? Of course, since your viral video is in the collective memory you can make funny or exiting variations on it. This Charlie bit me remix is a beautiful example of such a video. In it’s first viral cycle it had 345+ million viewers and still rising. The Remix version just passes 35 million viewers!

If you’ve ever laughed a bit too hard and experienced some uncomfortable results, the Emergency Underwear Dispenser will keep you covered.

There’s a good chance that you have never seen a mobile phone quite like the one in Amid Moradganjeh’s Project Rimino. Project Rimino is a touchscreen, e-paper device that displays information in the form of print posters.

The last edition of Cannes has passed by … and it was good again ! Cannes 2011 edition brought a new category : ‘creative effectiveness lions’. And the winner is an amazing cross-media campaign that proofs the effectiveness of combining different media from advertising, over events to new media.

Concept display at ACEA “Our Future Mobility Now” exhibition

Imagine when a journey from A to B is no longer routine as your car in the near-future encourages a sense of play, exploration and learning. This is the image engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) had of Toyota’s “Window to the World” vehicle concept.

The concept re-defines the relationship between passengers in a vehicle and the world around it by transforming the vehicle’s windows into an interactive interface. Using augmented reality, what used to be a pane of glass, begins to provide passengers with information about landmarks and other objects as they go past. The window can also be used as a canvas for drawings, which then interacts with the passing environment.

Very often customers feel like they have very little time for shopping.  Tesco created virtual stores with QR codes. Korean customers could scan the codes and the products into their online carts.   After the transaction was finished the ordered goods were delivered right at the front door.  This campaign resulted for Teco to concer the pole position in online shopping in Korea.

Tech gadgets are always nice.  And when they succeed in combining crisp design with clever energy saving, they’re even better.  The following two concepts are some great examples we recently stumbled upon (thanks to Link Drop Today).

In search of new online talent, Adobe Italy organized a competition inviting graphic designers, video makers, photographers, web designers and developers to create a project with Adobe technologies. To participate in the Adobe YouGC Contest, competitors had to submit their work within nine weeks, after choosing one of six categories: tutorials, desktop applications, demos, white papers, flash websites or inspirational mood.

When you’re offered the possibility to attend a lecture by Ji Lee, you don’t hesitate. You grab it, you go and you scribble away to take in as much as possible from what he has to tell!  So here’s a little resume of his first lecture in Belgium, held at Design at Work in Kortrijk last month.