how to build brands with a mindset other than advertising

Product Placement on Farmville

FarmVille will introduce its first ever sponsored crop- Peanuts!


As a sponsored FarmVille crop, Peanuts will feature a popular Israeli candy brand of  ”Elite Taami Nutz” which is a chocolate bar filled with peanuts.


We recently featured Peanuts on FarmVille Freak as an Unreleased item. The Elite candy company’s website displays a countdown showing farmers will have the opportunity to grow Peanuts as early as next week, with a projected debut date of April 14th. Their advertising company, Saatchi & Saatchi , also confirms this release date. In addition to the Peanut seeds, there will also be a farm competition where farmers are asked to use the crop creatively in the design of their farms.


The Peanuts are rumored to cost “20 credits to buy, sell for 78 credits and can be harvested in 16 hours”. We are assuming, they are referring to credits as FarmVille coins. (Source: Mashable)

With an audience of over 82 million users, FarmVille has the potential to reach an enormous audience. In-game advertising may not be new to gaming, but it will be interesting to see what Zynga’s FarmVille can do with partnerships or sponsoring of commercial marketing campaigns!

Kleenex| for Good Times and Bad

Kimberly-Clark has commissioned three posters by illustrator Gail Armstrong used to promote their internal staff awards. 


Each poster shows two images reflecting the potential positive and negative aspects of the same scenario – YES/NO for love, GLORY/FAILURE for footballer and KING/FOOL for the rockstar. The campaign is associated with the Kleenex “Let It All Out’ drive, assuring staff that Kleenex is there for the good and the bad.







Because Kleenex promises to mop up your tears, and the success of this brand is actually based on the tears of people like you.


You pretend that you are in love. But actually your have been ditched by your lover. You put on a brave face in front of the whole world, but you are really a shattered individual who inwardly drinks the bitter medicine of grief and failure. But, don’t worry, no you can worry, just let your tears out. The rest will be done by Kleenex.


This print campaign for Kleenex remorselessly urges you to express the real you and shed tears. So that the products can be sold.


CREDITS
Advertising Agency: JWT, London, United Kingdom
Creative Directors: Russell Ramsey, Dominick Lynch-Robinson
Art Director: Christiano Neves
Copywriter: Christiano Neves
Illustrator: Gail Armstrong
Photographer: Jonny Thompson.
Art Buyer: Coco Weir
Project Manager: Kevin Noble 

Al Rahma’s Mercy campaign

Advertising Agency: Full Stop, Saudi Arabia

Creative Director: Kamel Al Zahiry

Art Director and Photographer: Amr Al Masri

Copywriter: Kamel Al Zahiry

Adorama: “Life doesn’t stop for pictures.”

Riot

Fire

Streaker 

DDB, New York.

Apple switches to Verdana

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The California-based computer and electronics company, best known for their Macintosh computers and iPods, announced today the company will be adopting Verdana as their corporate typeface. The typographic change, Apple’s first since 2001, was spotted on several of the company’s international websites Thursday morning, and will soon be visible on all new packaging and marketing materials.

The news comes only months after Swedish furniture giant IKEA similarly adopted the Verdana typeface. “Verdana is a simple, cost-effective font which works well in all media and languages,” praised IKEA spokeswoman Camilla Meiby. After IKEA’s change, designers and IKEA fans alike were initally shocked to see the company drop Futura (their corporate typeface for 50 years) for the screen optimized Verdana. However, as time passed, people began to embrace the typeface in ways like never before.

One of the biggest reasons for Verdana’s resurgence is its wide multilingual support, which is increasingly becoming important as global companies like Apple enter foreign markets. Apple’s recently announced iPad will soon be available for order in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland. “This is largely due to Verdana,” said CEO Steve Jobs.

Verdana visible on Apple’s website, April 2010

Verdana was designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft in the mid-90s, specifically to improve on-screen readability. The font first shipped with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 in 1996. Being one of the ‘Core fonts for the web’—a set of fonts which also includes Arial, Comic Sans, and Times New Roman—Verdana has become one of the most widely used fonts on the web.

In 2010, it appears Verdana may also become one of the most widely used fonts offline as well. “It’s true,” says Apple’s Senior VP of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, “when something [like Verdana] exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.”

Bill Davis of Ascender Corporation (the font’s publisher) predicts many more companies will follow the trend, recently announcing some improvements to the typeface. “We are busy working on creating condensed weights, and also extending the family from light to black (with italics). We are also working on small caps, additional figure styles, and programming these additional glyphs as OpenType features…”

Prior to the first Macintosh, Apple used a typeface called Motter Tektura, designed by Othmar Motterof Austria’s Vorarlberger Graphik in 1975. With the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple adopted a narrow variation of the classic Garamond typeface. The typeface became synonymous with Apple for almost two decades, used memorably in the 1997 “Think different” campaign. In 2001, as the company launched the first iPod, Apple slowly began to implement a variation of Adobe’s Myriad typeface in all new packaging and marketing materials.

Apple’s most recent product, the highly anticipated iPad, is one of the company’s first products to use the new corporate typeface. Coincidently, the iPad will be released April 3rd, only days after this announcement.

Burger King} Chucky, Freddy, Jason, Scream

We were asked to communicate that Burger King stays open until the wee hours of the morning. Thomas and Kris came up with the following campaign showing the villains of the night that we know all to well, enjoying their favourite meal after a umm night out. The ads were shot in South Africa and Dubai by French photographer Ben Dauchez and retouched by Thomas himself. A job well done! The series comprises of four ads which will run in press and outdoor.


“Open late. Now open until 4AM every night. Burger King. Have it your way.”




Advertising Agency: Tonic, Dubai, UAE
Creative Director: Vincent Raffray
Art Director: Thomas Derouault
Copywriter: Kris Richardson