Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

I stumbled across an article in the ZEIT. It talks about how humans were able to take the decisive evolutionary step that sets us apart from apes - through sharing and cooperation. They continue to say that about two million years ago, we were forced by climate change to adapt our behaviour to the new situation. And only the ones sharing and cooperating were able to survive and develop additional skills necessary for survival of the whole group. So this became an intrinsic human behaviour.

Now let’s think a second about the digital space for a second. Web 2.0 is all about sharing, connecting. Communities where you can connect, advise each other on topics and share important experiences - make not only the indivdual but the whole group smarter and stronger. Crowdsourcing and open source comunities where people activley contribute their knowledge to the better of the group and development of new technogical tools are perfect exmaples that Web 2.0 is not a buzz word but a digital expression of basic human behaviour.

So I guess what we are doing is not really something new, but it shows again how important it is to enable human behaviour in everything we are doing digitally - to be able to profit from it in the future.

Easily read out data from your car.

In the 1990s, car mechanics started to say things like “This vehicle needs a driver update”. And they didn’t mean the owner needed additional training. Modern cars are increasingly software controlled and this software also collects drive statistics from miles to malfunctions. These are usually read out by garages and manufacturers and fed back into the product development cycles.

Fiat’s now gone and made (part of) this data available to the people who own and drive the cars. And that’s not just Excel-sheets for the statistically inclined, either … Fiat Eco:drive embeds the data dump into a campaign for efficient, eco-friendly and sustainable driving, complete with visualization, data-interpretation, a learning module and an online community for a worldwide effort to reduce emission. The initiative comes with a pretty neat website that explains the concept and houses the online community: Eco:drive.

There are several ways for brands to connect with people online:

• Seek Proximity: Place your logo next to popular content (or popular content into your brand’s space) - everything from banners to adgames.
• Afford experience: create ways for people to experience your brand or product in the digital realm - 3D panoramas, simulations, blogging customer service representatives, you name it …
• Evolve a digital core: Innovate your brand or individual products to benefit from and give benefit to the digitized, networked part of people’s lives. That’s high art. Fiat’s done it. Sweet.

To us, definitely a product innovation that has people at the center.

If you haven’t seen it, ask your friend with an iPhone.

It blurs the lines between advertising and mobile applications. It is a game that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to slide a pint by various obstacles down a bar and into a patron’s hands. Once you do this, your phone turns into an empty glass which fills with Carling beer, ready for you to drain it, virtually.

The application was created by Beattie McGuinness Bungay, who worked with the Swedish developers Illusion Labs. Incredibly viral (well - OK, it could be more viral if you could easily put it on ANY phone…), and a great bar game to boot.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/comment/claire-beale/claire-beale-on-advertising-872637.html

Pretty funny site for the new Subaru Forester: You can play director of the subaru photo shoot, turn angles and submit your shoots. It’s pretty fun, makes you wanna stay, and isn’t even that elaborate.

The best thing are the stereotypical comments of the irate Director (you), such as “Get me a slim latte, it’s not that hard, is it?”, etc..

Check it out…

http://www.sexysubaru.ca/index2.php?lang=en

(Thanks Philipp)