Street Advertising Services: A greener, cleaner approach to guerrilla branding
“We wanted to apply a technique that was not just eye-catching and effective but also friendly to the environment. What could be more natural than water?”
—Kristian Jeffrey, SAS Founder
Profit from Filth
Street Advertising Services (SAS) of Britain offers a greener, cleaner approach to guerrilla branding. Using water, stencils and pressure washers, SAS cleans pavement in the dead of night, creating street art advertisements for companies like British Petroleum and K2r (see above).
Simple, direct and probably a great deal of fun on the installation side, it’s word-of-mouth (WOM) via foot. Remarkable.
Easing the effects of fossil fuel emissions with personal locomotion
In a cardiovascular culture shift, the Vélib’ public transportation service benefits the Parisian environment, and the point of view and health of its populace.
Green, Affordable, Healthy, Scenic
Available since July, the Vélib’ bicycling system is an environmentally-friendly, inexpensive and healthy alternative to traditional Parisian public transportation. Vélib’—a neologism created from the French words vélo’ and liberté (bike and freedom)—allows you to traverse the beautiful streets of Paris for only five euros a week or 29 euros a year (approximately $7 and $42US).
The first 30 minutes of any journey are free and after that a time-based fee structure is in place, but it’s still an affordable price compared to most fitness club fees.
Paris boasts over 230 miles of cycling lanes. Riders can pick up a bike at one of 750 kiosks and drop it off at the nearest station when they are finished.
A Real Movement
Bicing, Barcelona’s bike rental system, hoped to have 15,000 participants when it launched this spring. At last count, there were 80,000 people signed up, 100 rental stations and 1500 bikes in the system, with another 1500 bikes expected to be introduced by years’ end.
What better way to canvass the streets of Paris or Barcelona than at a bicycle pace? You’ll see more scenery in less time than walking, and miss far less than if you were dashing around in an oil-guzzling automobile.
A Graphic Appeal
If you’re going to ride a bike through some of the most beautiful cities in the world, why not look good doing it? Vélib’ sports a fun, friendly logo mark and bicycles with sweeping design lines. Tasteful, street-level branding.
image: Lajouz
A quote from a VentureBeat Q&A interview with Blake Commagere—a top third-party Facebook developer:
“Naturally I’m going to try out OpenSocial. It certainly has the potential to turn into a gold rush. And as a developer, I love that I only have to learn one new set of APIs.”
As the interview went on, Commagere left the door open to embrace both Facebook and Google’s OpenSocial. Read the rest of his insights in the Venture Beat piece.
Is Google’s OpenSocial the new Microsoft Windows of Social Networking?
Campy but Good
Google announced the launch of OpenSocial—their set of standardized application programming interfaces (APIs)—at “Campfire One” last Thursday.
Thrilled Social Network developers attending the event laud the benefits in the highlight video above (4:15). See the full event here (57:23).
S’More of a Good Thing
And why not be happy? Those developers are now aligned with Google and Google’s next big thing, and they also join a growing list of prominent OpenSocial online networks and supporters with whom to collaborate, including:
Their combined reach equates to over 200 million subscribers.
Roasting Distribution
Most importantly, OpenSocial promises developers a way to optimize development costs through the creation of a common platform available (thus far) only to OpenSocial affiliates.
A single source development platform means more rapid distribution and greater reach since developers can now build one app for multiple social networks, eliminating the need to create multiple network-specific applications.
Passing on the Hot Dogs
Conspicuously missing from the list of Google OpenSocial faithful was social media darling, Facebook. Facebook passed up a $1 billion offer from Yahoo last year, then a week ago sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 million, inflating Facebook’s value to an estimated $15 billion.
Google’s OpenSocial countermeasure is expected to significantly reduce that estimate.
If OpenSocial delivers as promised and becomes the global de facto standard for social network development, Facebook may one day need to face compliance just to remain relative and viable. Probably not what Microsoft or Facebook had in mind when they inked the deal late last month.
Branded Just Right
All of which bodes well for for brand marketers, advertisers, developers and users. OpenSocial’s standards and conventions should drive streamlined creation, processing, access and distribution of messaging, bringing deeper reach and measurably greater returns for marketers.
Of course, sometimes standardization translates to stifling and stale—we’ll see. But the commercial benefits of ubiquitous and proprietary standardization are hard to deny.
Colts owner Jim Irsay’s news this week had nothing to do with the upcoming Colts vs. Pats game. That didn’t stop us from a little Top 20 Tom Foolery.
Top 20 Guesses at what Jim Irsay’s announcement is, er, was…
Some Good News
Jim Irsay, owner of the Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts was slated to make an important announcement here in Indianapolis earlier this week. So we used the looming local news as an excuse to start a new Top 20 topic on our office white board.
Irsay has since divulged his secret but with the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots squaring off this weekend in what’s being touted as an early Super Bowl, we’ve continued to hypothesize, surmise and add to our list.
And with that, here’s 10 of our favorites from the board.
Issuing a reward for fans who catch the Pats cheating this Sunday.
He’s so confident he’s spotting the Pats 10 points
I live in Brown’s country, and no one here knows about the Colts, Irsay, or the Patriots. We are just fortunate to have a full team on the field at any given time.
Got an entry of your own?
Leave a comment and we’ll add them to the list above up until game time on Sunday (4:15 pm, EST).
Because? It’s a Good Cause
Yes, we’re a little off-topic here but as Mr. Irsay’s news reveals, it’s for a good cause and hey, there’s a Super Bowl ring at stake here. That’s our brand rationale and we’re sticking to it. But thanks (particularly to our overseas readers) for indulging us all the same.
under Branding. Grouped by topic, Alltop aggregates stories from “all the top” sites across the web (that’s their story and we’re sticking to it). View our .think listing, here: branding.alltop.
Here’s a free Mac app allowing you to call up, via customized abbreviations, any text string you copy and paste frequently. Best of all the text is placed pre-formatted - returns, bullets and all. It’s become a staple here at Brainstorm. You can download your own at app4mac.
If you can get past the vapid brand identity and UI, PimpMyNews, the talking social news site, is an interesting concept. The site will read your RSS feeds to you over your mp3 player, iPhone, etc. or computer.
[via: PR-Squared]
NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet, a holiday product parody, promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.”
Robert Scoble explores the notion in this BusinessWeek piece re: the running debate over where we’re headed with aging, albeit ubiquitous, email paradigms versus spam-free Tweets.
[via: Scobleizer]
Track the Hive’s Buzz
Aggregate the aggregators at Popurls.com—simultaneously follow the most current posts from all the top sites like Digg, Newsvine, YouTube and Flickr. Or, “find your favorite thing,” over at Buzzfeed.
Peter Bruhn’s Swedish type foundry is preparing a new freshet of fonts to flow forth and flourish among us—according to Typographi and Bruhn himself.
[via: Sheer Brick]
Can’t see how your two soda bottles a day are impacting the environment? Chris Jordan’s images will help you visualize it. View his amazing statistical depictions at Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.
Okay this would just be a goofy flash-based Spirograph-esque toy if it didn’t generate downloadable .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) files—which it does. Pattern enthusiasts, meet Qbesq.
Enter at your own risk. A proof of concept that design does matter. Havenworks.com hailed on Digg recently as perhaps, “…the most poorly designed website in the world!”
