The 60 second commercial begins with acrobatic engineers providing real time human pixel animation, creating the car and the driving environment. As the acrobats’ cards flip faster and faster the Audi Q5 image becomes more and more the real thing.

Marco Spier and Eben Mears from Psyop explain the creative process behind the advertisement…

“First we explored many different ways of creating dimension. We talked to our choreographer to find ways to throw people in the air, to create human pyramids and synchronous summersaults. It was important that everything could actually be created by people. The scene had to feel human. We wanted to shoot as much as we could in order to blur the line between real and CG.

The idea of acrobatic engineers fit nicely with the perfect synchronization of the Audi Q5 and for us illustrated the concept of thinking outside the box. It explored new ways to demonstrate Audi’s incredible performance capabilities. These are engineers who literally do the impossible by working together to form the shapes, images, and finally the Q5.

This spot pushes the idea of people working in synchronicity to the next level, surprising the viewer with methods that are on the edge of impossible, or in moments even beyond.

To further support the idea, we thought it was important to understand, that this is an actual show set on a very big theatrical stage. We wanted to create the illusion, that this is something that was created and performed through huge effort and scale. So the design became a process of landscapes that could be created in a real theater space.”

Source: The Inspiration Room

Sexy sumo carwash commercial featuring music by Electric Six. Japanese SUVs just got a little sexier.

The Sexy Subaru site was developed at Tribal DDB, Toronto by creative director Dré Labre, copywriter Travis Sellar, agency art director Ryan Semeniuk, production manager Cathy Kim.

Filming was shot by directors Cy Hogg and Joel Grenier via Fuel Industries, Ottawa. Sound was designed by Rob Plowman.

The Sexy Subaru site was recognized with a Gold at the London International Awards this month.

Google continued to increase its U.S. search share dominance in October, widening its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft. In October, Google’s share of Web searches by people in the U.S. rose to 71.7 percent, up from 71.2 percent in September and 64.5 percent in October of 2007, according to market research company Hitwise.

At the same time, Yahoo’s share slipped to 17.7 percent, from 18.1 percent a month earlier and 21.7 percent a year ago. Microsoft’s share rose slightly in October to 5.4 percent from 5.36 percent in September, but the down from 7.4 percent in October of last year. Internet searches at Ask.com fell to 3.5 percent from 3.6 percent a month ago, and from 4.8 percent last year.

Hitwise bases its data on a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users over four week rolling periods. The Microsoft figures include Live.com and MSN Search but does not include Club.Live.com.

The remaining 43 search engines Hitwise tracks accounted for 1.6 percent of U.S. searches in October.

Source: Macworld

The ad was created for Toshiba’s new low-definition to high-definition upscaling tech built into its LCD TVs, DVD machines and laptops. But it’s amazing all by itself: whereas the Wachowski-brothers’ technique used static images in Bullet-Time, this new style uses looped video clips, digitally compiled together for the final result. Apparently the 200-cam 14-meter diameter filming rig used “the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence” and took three days to just focus up and align. All 200 cameras were triggered by a single remote, and it took four weeks to process the image data. Four weeks! The $4.7million ad’s showing in Europe currently.

Nike is winning a new game that other corporations, from Coca-Cola to Verizon to General Motors, have tried unsuccessfully to play: building brand loyalty via online social networking.

In the two years since it launched Nike+, a technology that tracks data of every run and connects runners around the world at a Web site, nikeplus.com, Nike has built a legion of fans. In August, for instance, 800,000 runners logged on and signed up to run a 10K race sponsored by Nike simultaneously in 25 cities, from Chicago to São Paulo. Now the company is testing a social network to promote its basketball shoes.

How Nike+ benefits the company’s bottom line is harder to gauge. Some analysts back up Nike’s claims that the site is renewing the popularity of its running shoes. SportsOneSource, a Princeton (N.J.) market research firm, says Nike accounted for 48% of all running-shoe sales in the U.S in 2006. Today, its share is 61%. “A significant amount of the growth comes from Nike+,” says Matt Powell, a SportsOneSource analyst.

Nike now hopes to score with another group of jocks: basketballers. The company is beta-testing Ballers Network, a Facebook application that lets players organize real-world games and manage their teams online.

Rivals are joining the race. Next year, adidas intends to introduce in the U.S. a sensor called miCoach that allows runners to upload heart rate and running data to a Web site via mobile phone. But an American miCoach will have a long way to go to catch up with Nike+. About 93 million miles, in fact.

Source: BusinessWeek

I have to share this submission for a booze-related non-gadgety Weird Combo of the Day, which we get more often than not. What are these people thinking? Are the people in charge of product synergy more than occasionally enjoying the products they’re synergizing? Perhaps. Or it could be that in Shanghai reader Charles’ neighborhood, they’re just making loose associations between these two types of creams. No matter; the Nivea probably tastes rich going down too.

Source: Gizmodo

I recently discovered the below image from Deborah Schultz’s blog where she wrote about the importance of relationships and its impact on branding. I agree with her position that it’s not necessarily about marketing but how you relate to your customers.

To me, this is a clear representation of how social media differs from that of traditional media; direct marketing, advertising, public relations and its overall impact on branding.

As I mentioned many times before, consumers are tired of being marketed to. They are fed up with the millions and millions of marketing messages that are thrown in their faces and computer monitors everyday. And, even when these messages are coming from a third party (Cnet, Techrunch, NYTimes), there is still no guarantee as to the authenticity of the message.

Source: Britopian

It’s new logo presented Pepsi, a part of the big plan of repositioning its brand, with a cost of $1,2 billions.

The circle with the blue and red smile created in 50’s but PepsiCo wants to create a different logo for the three major sodas. PepsiCo created different smiles for Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max!

Some people tend to connect the Pepsi logo with the one of Korean Airlines. Who knows…?

The 8th Red Bull SoapBox Race took place in San Francisco yesterday. Red Bull began this event in 1997 and since then and every year Red Bull SoapBox Race takes place in many cities around the world. Yesterday San in Francisco, there were more than 75,000 people to see the 34 teams that participated in the event. The race took place at the Dolores Park, San Francisco.

The judges decided according to speed, creativity and performance…

Marketer of the year is Barack Obama according to the Advertising Age. At the annual conference of Marketers and Agencies of US, Obama became the Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008. The second place was for Apple and the third place for the online store Zappos.com.

Obama had 36,1% , Apple 27.3%, Zappos14.1% and Nike 9.4%.