AKQA Animates Your Data for Nike

Here’s one we missed from earlier in the week: an animated spot from Nike’s digital agency AKQA based on…data drawn from the client’s wearable tech device.

As the agency explained to Mike Shields of The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today blog, Nike collected data from the “most active users” of its Nike Fuelband product throughout 2014. Agency and client then “visualized” the data in order to create customized animated films depicting each customer’s “year in exercise.”

Each of those individualized videos also includes geographic personalization based on the cities in which users exercised during 2014; Nike emailed the clips to Fuelband’s top 100,000 users.

Here’s the “national” version of the video:

As AKQA Creative Director Whitney Jenkins told WSJ, the hope is that these users will share their videos so as to lightly brag about 2014 accomplishments, thereby inspiring more workout fanatics to buy the Fuelband.

If you actually exercise and use the app, here’s the page to visit for that personalized clip.

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Cigarettes and Bodily Waste: The Ugly Truth

Lately, there’s a lot of content to cover on the bathroom humor beat. Yesterday, we reviewed some poop comedy for the new Clorox campaign. Today, we have a 30-second spot titled “Poop vs. Pee” from Arnold Worldwide and truth, the anti-smoking organization. This ad takes a radical shift in tone from meaningless poop jokes. There may be some uncomfortable chuckling here, but the point is to make the viewer aware of two facts: methane, a chemical in dog poop, can be found in cigarette smoke; urea, a chemical in cat pee, is also used in cigarettes. As you’ll see in the clip, there are some silly sound effects and visual representations to make it obvious that bodily excrement is gross, and in turn, chemicals found in our waste shouldn’t be voluntarily inhaled.

On truth’s website, you can read about their strategy for raising awareness, which is echoed in the commercial. They don’t tell people to stop smoking, because that sort of pitch doesn’t work on little children, let alone addicted smokers. So, to get the point across, they appeal to their target audience with alternative methods, such as disgusting facts. Stripping away moralistic lecturing in favor of poop jokes might just be bizarre enough to catch someone’s attention. Credits after the jump.

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