Skinny Blonde gets brave
Australia’s boutique beer market is booming, sales of the big brand stalwarts are slowing, and new advertising/marketing tactics are being tried by everyone. Enter Sydney-based Brothers Ink with Skinny Blonde and it’s pack of six attractive (you guessed it) skinny blondes.
Now raunchiness is nothing new to alcohol marketers who have used it successfully over the years, but the idea of a beer label featuring a skinny blonde that slowly strips as the beer gets drunk is pretty neat. Check out the website as well which attempts to mimic the bottle tricks.
It’s winter now, just wait till summer!
Nike Air Troupe Design Battle
Once again, another fantastically concepted and executed site by Nike.
The Air Troupe Design Battle website has been created to launch a new range of Hip-Hop dance shoes that took over 2 years to develop.
Alongside the dance inspired developments of the shoe (more durable for multi-surface wear and 360-degree dragging/sliding) comes the ability to fully customise its look - everything from the colour of the laces through to the colour of the under-sole tread.
Once designed, you can purchase your shoe, send it into battle against other designers and judge other people’s creations.
Like all Nike sites, the Flash work is excellent and I particularly like the judging section - two opponents (shoes) are shown, and the user has three seconds to click on their favourite before the next challengers are displayed.
Ikea tries something different…
Checkout Ikea Sweden’s new storytelling site for their PS range of eco-friendly solutions (thanks to Adverblog for the heads-up). The site mixes, beautiful cutout-style animation with video and audio in a really successful manner.
Through a rather bizarre setting of flying objects, the user is encouraged to make a selection and watch a short video about the object through its designer’s eyes. Each of the settings is different and appropriate to the ’story’ being told.
Not being fluent in Swedish makes certain elements within the navigation difficult, but you do get the general gist of what’s going on. Upon a second viewing, I discovered the slide-up navigation on the bottom which stopped me from returning to the ‘weird flying objects’ scene each time - much easier!
Product / Apple iPhone
The amazing new Apple iPhone has been previewed at MacWorld. The new Wi-Fi phone is a portable version of OS X with features that include music and video (iPod), Internet (Safari), impressive phone characteristics, widget integration, mail, calendering and so forth. Apple has also partnered with Yahoo! and Google to incorporate Maps, email and search functionality.
The interface (3.5 inch screen) has redefined usability on handheld devices using clever hand actions such as ‘finger pinching’ and ‘flicking’ to navigate through a visually rich menu system. iTunes users will be familiar with the music interface pulling largely from iTunes 7 (not suprisingly).
Unfortunately the phone will only be available in Australia from 2008 and at present is scheduled to come in 2 sizes, 4 and 8 gigabyte.
The interesting thing for us as advertisers will be the opportunity new rich-media devices will offer.