Egg-mented Reality - Creme Egg Season is here!

Cadbury's Creme Eggs, and their seasonal partner Mini Eggs, have always had what could be described as advertising with character.

This year, the folks responsible for Creme Egg have taken the seasonal nature of the product and created an actual 'Creme Egg Season'. It combines what appears to be a 3D TV creative with a strong and comprehensive online presence which looks like including everyone's favourite new technology, Augmented Reality.

The first port of call is the excellently named Goo Tube. There have been a number of executions of the egg-centric ads, which were tweaked cleverly for the Twisted bars. The new ad shows the gala premiere of Creme Egg Season.



There's also a counter to the end of the Creme Egg Season on the site. Cadbury's pushed the Wispa Gold as a limited period product and got a lot of buzz around it. Creme Eggs are limited every year, so there's mileage in this.



The theme of the site is 'Your Country Needs Goo', and there's an animated comic strip about a lost batch of Creme Eggs that have to be recovered before April 4th.



There is a hint of an online game where finding eggs with codes unlocks prizes on the Creme Egg site, as can codes on actual eggs if I'm understanding the rules below correctly:



There's a playable Great Eggscape game and a downloadable mobile game, but the most exciting aspects of this are yet to be revealed, but are teased on the Creme Egg Site. The now obligatory Creme Egg iPhone Application, if the games on the site are anything to go by, should be pretty slick.

The intriguing 'Egg-mented Reality' could be a big talking point. I've already talked this week about the Adidas Augmented Reality Trainers and, athough it's not as easy to see how the Creme Egg Augmented Reality might work at this stage, predictions that 2010 would be the year of Augmented Reality are certainly looking a good bet at this stage.

HT to Digital Examples.

Parrot AR.Drone - When video games become reality and my brain explodes

It's only the 6th of January so this is essentially a meaningless statement, but I have yet to see anything this year that has impressed me as much as what you'll see in the video below. If it's real and I get to see one in action, it would rival the most impressive things I've been as an adult.



It's a kick-ass helicopter, or quadricopter to give it its proper name, that is controlled via an iPhone or iPod Touch. Stick that in your Nexus One and smoke it.



The AR stands for Augmented Reality, details of the games involved with the AR.Drone, playable again via the iPhone, are on the Parrot AR.Drone site.

They aren't messing about either. Parrot, who have built a reputation around wireless and bluetooth concepts, have spent four years researching and developing the AR.Drone. They've also released a Software Development Kit so that other games using the frontal camera can be created prior to launch.



This just looks like the most fun. It's my 30th birthday soon and I want one.

HT to recombu.

Choose your Brand Ambassador Carefully

If you have seen any commercial television in the last week, you'll have seen this Thomas Cook Ad featuring the lovely face and hushed tones of Louise Redknapp and her distinctly less silky-voiced husband, footballer turned pundit and all-round-nice-guy Jamie Redknapp.



Fair enough. It's January, everyone's booking a holiday and we should expect to be targeted with advertising. Jamie and Louise Redknapp are a well known couple and make things look a bit glamorous, right? Well, Louise does.

Jamie is popular with the fairer sex and seems like a good bloke, but not necessarily that good a flight companion if you believe this article last June in The Sun.

"Travel with Thomas Cook, especially if you're banned from other airlines"

Is this ideal for a holiday company? Do Thomas Cook not do holidays to the sort of destination, for the sort of people, Redknapp and Gray were allegedly disparaging?

I appreciate this isn't the biggest scandal of all time, but it was something, as a football fan who also manages to inhale a load of useless information, I instantly associated with Redknapp on seeing him reclining in a ludicrously roomy flight seat.

Still, at least he isn't whoring around the whole family connection to several different advertisers.



I don't want to make it seem like the age-old use of a famous face to generate a bit of reflected glory for your brand has suddenly become a bad thing, but the increasing glare of the media has managed to bring controversy to brands associated with big names like Kate Moss (which was always a risk, to be fair), Thierry Henry (perhaps unfairly) and even, and most spectacularly, the most bankable Brand Ambassador Tiger Woods (a good couple of months for the Gillette Marketing Department).

Just don't get me started on Kerry Katona...

Augmented Reality Trainers from Adidas - Right on Trend for 2010

Adidas are launching the next step of Augmented Reality products with a range of Augmented Reality trainers set to debut in the USA next month. This is quite exciting news.

I'd been umming and ahhing over whether to re-introduce trainer-themed content to this blog in an effort to give myself more to write about and create momentum. Adidas Originals have made the decision for me, though, and my first post of 2010 is about trainers, but also about one of the hottest predicted trends of 2010, Augmented Reality.

Basically Adidas have turned the humble sneaker into an Augmented Reality device. A code embedded in the tongue, when used through a webcam on the Adidas site, will create a virtual 3D neighbourhood where your trainer should be.

Adidas Augmented Reality Trainers

Without being able to see what the actual sneaker looks like, which is of course pretty important if you want to spend between $65 and $95 on a pair, this looks quite cool even if it had no functionality, just as a curiosity or a value-add.

Consider that there will be games introduced in the next few months, developed by xForm, that will allow you to use these environments as a gaming platform, and it becomes a different matter.

Un-Augmented Reality - A Pair of Trainers

As if I needed an excuse to collect more different pairs of Adidas Originals (I bought the pair above today while on a trip to buy a gift for my girlfriend), the potential for different Augmented reality environments within different models, allowing for varying gaming experiences, makes for quite a unique sell.

There is a danger that every product will carry an Augmented reality code, that there will be a novelty use, and that we will ultimately tire of it simply being something clever rather than something useful. The pace of development, particularly in it being delivered to the consumer, is strong, however, and I can envisage a lot of posts in 2010 detailing far less 'showy' applications of AR.

The news bit of this was nicked off Net Imperative

If Carlsberg did the World Cup draw...

From today's Metro. Guatemala are a potential banana skin I think.