Mr Invisible

Liu Bolin is a Chinese artist who likes to paint himself to blend into a background and then take a photo…







Liu Bolin sees his work as a protest against the Chinese government, who inspired his first series 'Hiding in the City' after they closed down his art studio. His images take up to 10 hours to create and he works with a (very talented) assistant who paints him to resemble the background.

Ikea Cats

Beautifully shot, lovely idea. Makes me want to buy cats, not Ikea furniture.

Whopper Freakout

Heineken Football Stunt

If you haven't seen this already, CHECK IT OUT.

Durex

AKQA have had this great idea for a Durex iPhone app that you can use to 'impregnate' someone's phone with! You have to look after a baby by rocking your phone and 'feeding' it and you can't get rid of it until you have bought a pack of Durex condoms and scanned the code on the box. Great idea, and definately something that would get passed around.

A Successful Week

Despite having technically finished our Creative Advertising degree, I still seem to have an extensive 'to do' list. The past week has definately had it's ups and downs - the downs being a funeral. On the positive side, YCN announced the winners of this years student awards...


Vicky and I were delighted to find out that we'd been commended for our work on the P&O Ferries brief! Here is one of our ads...


Hopefully we'll feature in the next YCN annual!

The day after the YCN announcements we got our dreaded dissertations back. I had written mine on the subject of Ambient Advertising, how it is defined and why it is increasingly popular. Vicky wrote about cool and what it means to people. We both ended up getting really good marks, which was great news as we'd put so much hard work in!

Sound as a Pound

Got this with my change from the local corner shop, what a great idea. Might work well for Poundland... Well done Vodka Revolution though!

How to con friends and influence people

There was a really interesting article in the Sunday Times Mag on the 4th about new forms of marketing entitled, 'How to con friends and influence people'. It described how advertising agencies are hiring actors to talk about their products in public places. For example, two actors were hired to sit and read the same book on a tube train and then start loudly discussing how great the book was. This sort of stunt is called Stealth Marketing.

Some readers may know that a new film is about to premier called 'The Joneses'. Demi Moore and David Duchovny star in this dark comedy about a seemingly perfect family that turn out to be paid actors, subtly advertising and promoting products to their friends, co-workers and neighbours. I can definately see this sort of situation happening for real in the near future. Its not much a progression from paying people to talk about your product on a train...

Here is a great example from Work Club for the Nokia N-Gage...

n-gage girlfriend from Alasdair Monk on Vimeo.

Drink Driving

Good idea for an anti-drink driving campaign in Brazil (tweeted by Luke Sullivan)