I’ve seen great videos produced by boutique agencies last year in 2011, including two of my favorites both by John St.’s Catvertising and Pink Ponies.
Buzzman, a French interactive agency just created an amazing piece, a case study styled video highlighting Mayans versus Egyptians as 2 competing brands and their tactics to dominate the market by launching the “end of the world” campaign.

From their Vimeo post:

The DMC Initiative (DMCI) developed this piece as a response to the 2011 A/NZ PromaxBDA Conference title of Future Proof.

Our approach was to focus not on futuristic notions but to consider that which is timeless. People, the expression of self and the interactions between each other are timeless qualities relevant to creativity, no matter what the future holds.

The concept started quite fluidly, by briefing a variety of dancers, with individual performance styles, to develop choreography based on the concepts of growth, sharing, sending and receiving.

Directed by Nathan Drabsch, the performances were shot over one day using two RED Epic cameras, capturing the action at high speed. All design, editing and post production was done in-house by The DMCI team. We worked closely with composers and audio designers Mark Brandis & Jeff Black from ism studios, to create a unique score that perfectly compliments the performances.

As a whole, the focus is on the dancers as they create and interact with abstract forms in a vast unknown world. Their own movements determine the creation and final destruction of these elements. Their own paths of communication and creative expression have come full circle, and all that remains is the individual.

CREDITS

Created by The DMC Initiative (DMCI)

Contact: hello@thedmci.com.au

Creative Director / Director: Nathan Drabsch

Producer: Amy Nguyen

Editing, Design, 3D & Compositing: The DMCI – Brecon Littleford, Bernard Tan, Nathan Drabsch

AUDIO

Composition & Sound Design: Mark Brandis and Jeff Black @ ism studios

Contact: mark@ismstudios.com.au

CREW

Director: Nathan Drabsch

DOP: Simon Chapman

Camera Operators: Aaron Haberfield & Glen Cogan (Enigma)

Producer: Amy Nguyen

Talent Co-Ordinator/Production: Briony Luschwitz (Motion Picture Company)

Gaffa/Lighting: Steve Scholfield

Best Boy: Andrew Ward

Hair Stylist: Elizabeth Vo

Make Up Artist: Angela Vien-Debetaz

Cameras supplied by Lemac and Enigma

DANCERS

Sarah Seville

Natasha Marconi

William Sanchez

Christopher Van Doren

Amy Campbell

Charles Bartley

Thi Nguyen

Contact:

Belinda Mayne (Executive Producer)

belinda@thedmci.com.au

+61 2 9439 4111

thedmci.com.au

Youtube is often seen as a channel for hosting videos, and what clients like to call – “viral videos”. Most brands, however, have underestimated the power of putting creativity to branded Youtube channel. Perrier’s new campaign is a perfect example of a great use of Youtube channel.

Perrier has been positioning themselves as sexy, edgy, playful, and fun. After the interactive Dita von Teese Perrier mansion campaign they built last year, Ogilvy Paris recently launched another interesting campaign for Perrier again, and this time, they use video content to tease for actions. Below is the channel journey for this campaign.

1) You will see the video below shared by your friends or blogs, with annotation button on video that takes you to Perrier’s Youtube page.

2) You land on Perrier’s branded Youtube page, showing you the amount of people who have viewed the first video.

3) “Sexier” videos will be unlocked for certain number of views, therefore, the more you share it, the faster you will see the content.

4) Your friends will see you sharing it, and they will do the same from step 1.

This is a very clever mechanism connected to their Facebook fanpage, it’s quite obvious that they’ve been working quite closely with Youtube to develop the page.

Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Paris

No surprise there are always great ads for the Christmas seasons, I’ve put together 10 ads that I really enjoyed watching for this Christmas. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and all the best for 2010!

Apple

Johnny Walker

Coca Cola

Tiffany & Co

Mercedes Benz

UPS

BMW

La Senza

Pepsi

Amazon

Often times when people talk about location based services, there is always a crowd at the corner that goes, “I still don’t get why people would want to check in!” Ask these Brooklyn developers, they recently coded a hack for Foursquare that basically allows user the unlock doors with a Foursquare checkin.
They will host a party on New Year’s Eve when anyone can check-in there to open that door themselves.

This innovation will open up location based services to become other even more useful utilities, for both personal and business promotion. (e.g. foursquare as car key, foursquare check-in for hotels)
I imagine this apartment door is connected to certain Foursquare usernames so the door only opens when these users check-in, but when this technology becomes more common, there could be a huge security risk.

[Show as slideshow]

A smart experiential campaign was recently created by Creative Agency Owen & Stork. Simular to Ogilvy & Mather’s $73,000 bill from a bar campaign, the key to this is to attract instant attention by reproducing something that does not happen in everyday’s life. If you’ve read Seth Godin‘s book Purple Cow, you must know how powerful it can be to be “memorable”.

Not that hiring hot girls to give out free samples wouldn’t work, but this is taking free sampling tactics to it’s fullest because this piece of content can be leveraged online afterwards if the whole process was filmed.

If you like data visualization, you probably don’t want to miss this one.

I just discovered this interactive dashboard IBM has developed earlier this year. Google has put together a visualization tool with the same sets of data by World Bank, but World Factbook Dashboard presents the data in a way more stylish and advanced way.

Great tool to be bookmarked for future country research as it can give you quick understanding of basic information like population and GDP. I would love to have some social media data in this Dashboard!!

Here’s a video of live demo of the tool:

Try this tool now!

GlobalWebIndex has recently launched a free tool that allows users to quickly get a snapshot of their data on social media insights, this free tool was built based around the data they have gathered from Wave 2 database from January 2010. The latest data, Wave 3 from July 2009 is only available for GlobalWebIndex clients.

This tool comes very handy when you are looking to create quick slides with valuable data that gives brief understanding of online behavior for specific group of people from different regions.

I tried to embed the tool to this blog post but I failed to adjust the size of it.

Start playing with the tool now

Dansk Port Teknik (DPT), garage door company recently worked with agency JWT Copenhagen this creative advertisement that really takes the most out of Toyota’s recall. This ad promotes 20% off on all garage doors, for Toyota owners only along with the broken garage door.

Marketing/ advertising industry is often cruel. It’s been only a week, Toyota loses more than $20 billion in market share and recalls couple million cars, companies have already published ads making laughs of their mistakes to generate sales.

Dolce&Gabbana has always been the leader in technology among other fashion brands. In 2005, D&G broadcasted their fashion shows live on it’s official website. In 2008, they started to get into the mobile market, established dolcegabbana.mobi to create a more interactive way to communicate with fans, then a free iphone app was developed after.

They just announced few hours ago (Feb/19/2010 12:46 PM Milan Time CET) that they are going to offer fans the opportunity to watch the upcoming Fall/Winter 2010/11 season fashion show live on iPhone and Android Mobile Devices. The live show will be available at live.dolcegabbana.mobi on February 25th 3:00PM (GMT+1).

It’s another case showing how important smartphone users are for businesses these days, can’t wait to see how they will execute it to create the buzz, I’m sure many social media elements will be included.