Digital Stuffing

The Idea

This is an ad for a camera – a tough, take it anywhere, simple to use camera from Oregon Scientific. They’ve tied up with sport of Bearded Ladyboarding to promote their ATC3K Action Camera, shooting the athletes doing their runs downhill.

Apparently this extreme sport has its origins over a millennium ago, “when Vikings in isolated parts of Northern Europe would competitively race rudimentary wooden boards down steep hills as part of an annual festival to celebrate their masculinity.” The sport came back to popularity in the early 70′s, along with the traditional dress and beard, The sport got popular with rock bands, where beards were common and continued to grow, although today there are some who dare to try it clean-shaven. There’s now even an attempt to get it involved in the 2012 Olympics.

The site itself has a pretty good game that kept me involved – nothing too complex, just a racing game. It’s worth playing to see the videos at the end of it, where you can link out to the main site for information about the product. You can play the game to win a camera, grab some images or watch the video.

What I think

Of course, the sport of Bearded Ladyboarding is completely made up, but I guess they had fun in the process. I’ll admit that Oregon Scientific is not a company I’d heard of but they’re trying some cool marketing to promote their goods. I like this, it’s completely silly whilst demonstrating the product well.

According to the email I got :This game was fashioned by Rubber Republic for Oregon Scientific to promote the ATC3K Action Camera to blokes in UK, France, Germany and Italy in the run up to Christmas.” I like the fact they do not seem to be releasing this and leaving it up there, they’re going to be testing the links out and refining them as appropriate, to track what works best and to do more of it. I also like that they’ve brought the language and tone to the main site, which is so often missed when a brand develops a game; leaving it as a standalone just looks like it’s an add-on and not one they are paying attention to. That’s not the case here, everything seems to tie together well.

The Idea

Dell and Vodafone have teamed up to provide you a new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, which has wifi AND embedded mobile broadband, which I think is a pretty cool idea, even if it ties you to a supplier, but the deal is about the same price as some of their dongles

To help promote this, they’ve equipped LiveGuy with one of the netbooks and, from tomorrow, they’ve set him off round the UK to test out the service. He’s going to be giving away up to 4 of the Inspirons every day, if you can find him – 3 in person and 1 online. They’ve even got Lewis Hamilton in on the act

Liveguy is on a complete social media binge, with his Facebook, Twitter Feed, YouTube and Picassa images. You can follow him throughout his two week trip that takes him through most of major UK cities. Through all these channels plus the blog, he’ll be giving enough clues so you can track him down. They’re also linking with bloggers in each of the cities they’re going through, to drive up some local interest.

Liveguy from Vodafone (screenshot from site)

What I think

This is a pretty slick campaign, with all the right buttons pressed. They’ve got live action combined with digital with plenty of opportunities to win things, a good combination. The product itself looks like a good deal, assuming the connection speed works well and the netbook is useful enough. I like what they are plannign to do, now to watch the execution.

The Idea

Mitsubishi are currently running a pan-European contest to promote the launch of their new Lancer Sportback and Colt cars. On their site On Your Mark, you have to choose a place in your country, placing your mark on the interactive map. To get a chance to win the sporty car, you have to upload an image or video to express yourself. A jury of 3 will choose the best entries, who will then get cars delivered in the ‘most spectacular way’ – the intro video has the car being flown n by helicopter, so expect something like this. I’m not sure how it all works as interestingly I can’t find any rules! (If you want to see it in English, choose Nederlands, which has an English language option)

As well as the contest, they’ve also got some really silly games, all in the Japanese style, hosted by Koichi Koga. Here’s the Lancer Loop

Elsewhere on the site, you can book a test drive or download some pretty nice images.

Mitsubishi On Your Mark Host (image courtesy Mitsubishi/SocialMedia8)

What I think

It’s completely mad and completely fun. For some reason, car marketing always comes up with the wilder ideas and this is one of them. The game show host is way over the top and brilliant to watch. The mechanic of the contest is a bit different from the norm and they’re going to get a lot of PR if they come up with enough mad ways to deliver the cars.