Kookmeyer Institute

Cadbury recently used three tonnes of chocolate to send a giant ‘thumbs up’ to fans. A nice touch. But they probably didn’t anticipate the negative feedback posted on YouTube. I see the main Cadbury fan page has 465,214 likes today – it couldn’t have lost half a million fans already could it?

Introducing the first microwave to play music when food is ready. For me, the opportunity to come up with a product innovation would be far more exciting than most run-of-the-mill digital briefs, especially when there’s nothing new to say. BGN did an initial run of 1,000 units which sold quickly and plans to increase production next year. I wonder how long songs play. And do they rotate? It could end up being just as annoying as the beeps!

Here’s a nice simple idea from Asics. To leverage their sponsorship of the New York City Marathon, they installed a 60-foot wall in a subway and challenged people passing by to race one of the top US marathon runners. Someone could easily have done something similar for the Rugby World Cup – maybe at Auckland International Airport where all those 95,000 tourists came through.

Neat idea for Heinz fans in the UK – send friends suffering from the autumn chills a personalised can of soup (£1.99 including delivery!). This certainly has novelty value and it’s bound to put a smile on the faces of recipients. The company says: “Because Facebook is a place people choose to engage with our brand, we want to be there…  Our use of these channels doesn’t replace TV, but it is a great compliment to it because it allows the consumer to spread the word and they engage more than they would with traditional channels such as TV or Radio.” Good stuff.

Okay so not the best campaign thought (on a par with ‘That man deserves a DB’) and not really digital but I still like this idea for Carlsberg, particularly as the basis of a TVC. Kind of like a poor man’s version of what Heineken did for the Real v Milan game last March.

I wish I had a client like Burberry. Everything it does is slick, from the behind the scenes content and tryvertising on Facebook to the 178 videos on its You Tube channel. Here’s the Burberry bigwigs’s take on social enterprise, courtesy of a promo video for one of its suppliers.

You can pirate music all you like but if you really love a band – really – wouldn’t it be kind of cool to produce their album, design your own artwork in a few easy steps and take a royalty from each subsequent sale? This is essentially what the Kaiser Chiefs, with a little help from W+K London, is allowing fans to do with the launch of their latest album, The Future Is Medieval. I can’t think of a much better way for fans to take ‘ownership’ of their favourite band’s work. Big idea. Will it catch on though? The most popular album has sold 95 copies so far.

This isn’t ‘digital’ but it’s so good I had to put it in. Reminds me of the spoof of Guinness’ epic ‘White Horses’ TVC by a rival UK beer maker that had guys running round in the surf on lilos.

Friskies has launched a series of iPad games for cats which I was going to say is ‘new’ but, as Aden Hepburn points out in his blog, looks remarkably similar to this one. It would be pretty cheeky if Friskies simply re-skinned what the other crowd had created. But they’ve actually taken it a step further, developing the games in HTML 5 rather than as an app. Some people like to shoot down campaigns on the basis that they’ve been done before but so what? It doesn’t mean you can’t do it better or simply leverage ideas (via sponsorship etc) that are already popular. That’s not to say you should ever steal ideas though. There is a difference.

Dutch airline KLM is fast becoming one of my favourite brands for the way it listens and responds to customers using social media. The short story is that KLM put on an extra flight following one tweet. Play the case study to find out what made it so special.

You don’t think the event was staged, do you? Seems convenient that the initial tweet stemmed from a hip DJ and film maker.