DDB are on a roll with a second Gold World Medal for their “State of Chaos” project for State Farm Insurance in the US. The campaign invites you to create your own personalized blockbuster film, starring your house and the surrounding neighborhood.  Go to ChaosInYourTown.com and enter your last name and street address to unleash the chaos!  Through Google Street View, you experience a pretty realistic scene of a giant robot busting up your neighborhood and blowing up your house.

BBDO New York won a Bronze for their project for AT&T. The “Up All Night” fan montage video was a crowdsourced concept featuring punk band Blink 182. To launch their first single in eight years, AT&T helped search YouTube for every instance of fans using their music without permission. Then they rewarded them for it. The film was made out of clips from all those videos.

Take a look at all the other winners and finalists here.

Tweet This Post

Akestam Holst won in the Augmented Reality category for their Sound of Football project for Pepsi Refresh – an initiative with the potential to revolutionize blind football but also change everyday life for the visually impaired community. You can check out the full project here. It’s great to see technology being used for the greater good rather than just to amuse the masses.

In recent years Intel has commissioned a series of amazing projects to showcase their spirit of innovation. This project from Nexus Productions won for best us of online media. Using a dynamic mix of live action and animation the action takes place in a series of software windows which open at full pelt. The result is a fantastically clever dash as we follow the heroine’s journey through a myriad of windows in her bid to outwit the baddies.

In the same category the People’s Choice Winner was Wieden + Kennedy’s Back 4 the Future project with Nike that brought to life the famous shoes from the 2nd installment of my favorite movie. All for a great cause too.

We tend to forget email marketing can be a great creative tool but luckily the Webbys have a category for that. The winner from Grupo Gallegos used the act of forgetting your password as an opportunity to tell people to support the Alzheimer’s Association.

The Webbys has always had a more altruistic edge than many other award festivals. Here is another example with the winner of the best Integrated Campaign by kempertrautmann gmbh. In Germany each year, over 100,000 children and young adults are reported missing. The “Germany will find you” campaign covered social, press, TV, events and more. Very inspiring.

Check out all the other winners and runners up here.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

In the Activism category the top prize went to Slavery Footprint created by Unit 9. Hopefully the pressure of winning won’t result in them running through the streets of London naked.

In the Music category Tribal DDB Amsterdam with Stink Digital walked away with the trophy for their Obsessed with Sound project featuring the Grammy Award-winning Metropolitan Orchestra. I met up with the Stink team recently and was very impressed with their approach to collaboration.

I like the categories at SXSW. For example – the Amusement category where the prize went to Lego’s Life of George by Bilund in Denmark.

Winner of the Experimental category (and Best of Show) was Take this Lollipop by Tool of North American. The best way to experience it is to login yourself with your Facebook ID. So creepy. They did an amazing job seamlessly integrating Facebook content. If you’ve got kids show them this!

Another big winner for Tool was in the Motion Graphics category with their Interactive Video for Ellie Goulding’s song “Lights”. This creative experiment with WebGL is a wholly immersive, musical journey. It presents a stunning visual interpretation with a techno-celestial light show where viewers can soar through the music, and mouse their way through the virtual environment, while real-time Twitter comments integrate into the visuals. Read the “making of” article here.

Digital campaign of the year went to the Tesco HomePlus subway QR code supermarket that I’ve featured here before. I was in Korea recently and found out that it was actually a total scam entry when it first won at Cannes. It was basically a full-scale mockup. They did run it for real later but it just goes to show that you can lie through your teeth and still win a Grand Prix.

Check out all the SXSW interactive winners here.

Tweet This Post

Marvel ReEvolution

The iPad has been a shot in the arm for graphic novels (I won’t say comics) and now we see things going even further as Marvel move into the AR arena. To quote their website, “An industry first, the Marvel ReEvolution seamlessly brings the worlds of print and digital media together for a comics experience like no other. The first two elements of this exciting new initiative were revealed as Marvel Infinite Comics, a new comic book format, and Marvel AR, the first major augmented reality app from a comics company. And fans will not have to wait long to get in on the action as they will both be released with the hotly-anticipated AVENGERS VS. X-MEN #1 on April 4, when the two biggest super heroe teams in the world go to war!”

In this interview Marvel editor in chief Axel Alonso talks to Forbes’ Tomio Geron about the comic book giant’s announcement at SXSW.

Other major brands have been present at the event including Pepsi, Virgin Mobile, American Express with their exclusive Jay Z concert and Kraft. Each one hoping for a bit of SXSW magic to rub onto them as they meet up with the developers and entrepreneurs creating the next digital revolution. You can read more on AdAge Digital here.

HOMELESS HOTSPOTS

Meanwhile BBH were on the cutting edge of good taste with their Homeless Hotspots. They recruited 13 homeless people and gave them 4G wifi hotspots that people could use for a small donation. The feedback has been mixed but it certainly was a talking point.

BEAMATRON

Of course SXSW continues to be a place for experimentation as this project from Steve Clayton shows. Hrvoje Benko and Andy Wilson presented their Beamatron, an augmented reality concept that combines a projector and Kinect sensor on a pan tilt moving head – of the kind you may find in a nightclub. The setup utilizes KinectFusion to build a 3D model of a space and enables projected graphics to react in physically appropriate ways. For example a virtual car can be driven around the floor of the room bumping into actual obstacles and running over real ramps.

No festival is complete without its own awards so check out the finalists for the SXSW Interactive Awards here. I’ll follow up with a post about the winners.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Another interesting project is Holoflector which is a unique, interactive augmented-reality mirror. Graphics are superimposed correctly on your own reflection to enable a novel augmented-reality experience. Presented at Microsoft TechForum 2012, Holoflector leverages the combined abilities of Kinect and Windows Phone to infer the position of your phone and render graphics that seem to hover above it.

It will be interesting to see how these projects develop. Will they become the next Kinect success story or be another Microsoft Surface which never really took off as the technology was far too expensive (and didn’t seem to do more then let people shuffle pictures, shrink and resize them).

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Read the full story on FastCo Design

Tweet This Post