Hasta La Creative!

In honor of Presidents Day, the folks behind LasVegas.com/Vegas tourism are offering full presidential pardons for your long weekend debauchery. To get your Twitter-based absolution, just confess your sins and tweet #VegasPardon. Or if you just so happen to be at the Las Vegas airport today, you can get pardoned in person and start your shortened work week anew tomorrow.

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Damjan Pita, the guy responsible for the Hashtag Generator and collaborator on the #StealBanksyNY project, has returned, along with cohorts Leif Abraham and Andronicus Riyono, with a new project called ReTweet.ly.

ReTweet.ly is based on a pretty simple idea; in its creators’ words: “We all want to promote our projects, our latest blog post or just ourselves on social media. ReTweet.ly helps people to help each other to achieve that, by simply retweeting each other’s tweets.” In other words, it’s a retweet exchange program. The more you retweet others, the more likely it is that your tweet will get retweeted. You can decide for yourself which tweets you do and don’t want to retweet and you’re not mandated to follow those you retweet. The big benefit, according to Pita, is “people that retweet you on retweet.ly are most likely people outside of your own follower base and with that brand new exposure you would not get otherwise.” So if you’re feeling like you’re in a bit of a Twitter rut, you may want to give ReTweet.ly a try.

So how does it work? Just go to the ReTweet.ly site, sign in with Twitter, choose a tweet that you would like retweeted and a category that you tweet about the most. Then choose a tweet you like, and get retweeted in exchange. Suggested tweets will pop up with the options “Retweet” or “Not this one.” You can retweet as many of these as you’d like, the idea being that the more you retweet, the more likely you are to be retweeted.

ReTweet.ly is one in a series of projects from Do Something Good, which its creators are referring to as an “incubation collective.” Give it a go, and tell us what you think about the service in the comments section.

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And so, the hashtag-related adventures continue for Damjan Pita, the AKQA senior art director who recently co-created the #StealBanksyNY project that coincided with said artist’s month-long New York City outdoor takeover dubbed “Better Out Than In.” With Banksy’s residency now in the books, Pita, joined this time by West creative director/product experience Leif Abraham and web designer Roman Opalko, has turned his focus to the Hashtag Generator, which the parties involved describe as “the most stupid genius tool.” It’s good Pita and crew covered both the “stupid” and “genius” bases in the tagline as folks could perceive this as either or (or just “meh” as one of our own did).  Whatever you feel, it’s quick and easy to fiddle with as you just type a sentence and watch the # generator go to work and show you if the hashtag is in use, and on which social channels they appear. From what we’ve gathered, this is just one of several efforts that Pita & Co. refer to as an #awkwardhashtag project. Consider yourselves warned.

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They take their baseball pretty seriously in St. Louis and Boston, and that includes at each city’s respective ad agencies. The ad agencies for each team –Boston based CTP and St. Louis based HLK — have thrown down for the Beards vs. Birds challenge, which includes some unique betting terms that you can read below.

1. The losing team donates to the winning team’s charity. CTP would donate to Cardinals Care a “non-profit foundation providing assistance to children’s agencies through efforts such as building baseball fields and supporting youth baseball teams,” while HLK would donate to Red Sox Scholars, a program providing “mentoring, enrichment activities and college scholarships to 220 Boston Public School students.”

2. The losing agency’s CEO will intern for a day at the winning agency. 

3. The losing agency serves the winning agency dinner. If the Red Sox lose, CTP will bring Harpoon ale, Fenway franks and clam chowder to HLK. If the Cardinals lose, HLK will bring Budweiser, toasted ravioli and pork steaks to CTP.

4. The losing agency will turn over their website and social media sites to the winning agency the day of the victory parade. The winning agency will also get to re-write the email signatures of the losing agency. Plus the losing agency’s receptionist must answer the phone, “Congratulations to the World Series Champion (Boston/St. Louis), you have reached (HLK/CTP).”

5. The losing agency will rename their softball team in honor of the winning team.

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Carmichael Lynch and the Denver Museum of Science are testing the myth that talking to a plant helps it to grow healthier and stronger to support Mythbusters: the Explosive Exhibition, and they need want your help.

Mythbusters: The Explosive Exhibtion, which runs from October 10th-January 6t, offers exciting ways for visitors to interact with the mythbusting process. “We wanted to extend that experience online for people who can’t get to the Museum in person, or who just can’t enough,” explained Marty Senn, executive creative director at Carmichael Lynch. To do so they’ve enlisted the help of an online audience to help debunk (or not debunk) the myth that talking to plants helps them grow healthier and stronger.

The Denver Museum of Science is asking people to help by going to talktoaplant.com and tweeting what you’d like to say to the plant. Tweet about whatever you want, from the government shutdown to the MLB playoffs to this incredibly depressing news about West Coast starfish. Custom tweet-to-speech technology developed by Carmichael Lynch will then read the tweet to one of the two plants in the experiment. The other plant just sits in silence, the control plant. Poor control plant.

Both plants run on 12-hour light cycles and are watered by an in-house technician, in case you’re worried about all that. Water showings occur every Wednesday over the lunch hour. You can tune in to the live stream over the next couple of months to see if the myth is busted. Will the myth be debunked? Tell us what you think in the comments section. Credits after the jump. continued…

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Glaceau has a new product, fruitwater, that is most likely 0-calorie sparkling fruit-flavored water. I can’t tell from this spot, but that’s my guess. Sounds like just the thing a rich  woman would use to cut her vodka, doesn’t it? It’s great that there’s definitely a customer base for this new product.

To push fruitwater onto said rich women is one of their own, Christina Applegate, best known for playing Kelly Bundy on Married… with Children and jumping ship before her NBC show, Up All Night, was canceled. According to Wikipedia, her mom also used to have a thing with Stephen Stills, so that’s something.

In order to grow fruitwater’s 4,000 or so Twitter followers to a substantial enough number to convince some brand reps that their social media is “working,” consumers are being encouraged to confess crimes and say mean things via the #sparklingtruth hashtag for a campaign from L.A.-based agency Zambezi. If your truth is good enough, fruitwater will give you a personal assistant for a week. But, of course, the only way you could know that is if you start following the account or, like me, you were sent a press release describing the contest. You gotta work for information on the incentive, you know? Credits after the jump.

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This column has been pinballing around my head for the past few months. I’m curious about hashtags. I’m under the impression that although everyone knows what a hashtag looks like, not many people pay attention to Twitter statistics beyond Follower counts. And now that every commercial – online or televised – comes with a hashtag, many of which seem perfunctory, I want to make an inexact science a bit more exact by evaluating basic Internet data and applying it to our coverage for the previous week.

Twitter clearly has value. Celebrities of varying degrees get paid silly amounts of money for sponsored tweets (sidebar: did you know that Melissa Joan Hart makes $9,100 for some of her tweets? That’s more obnoxious than silly). With money and brand equity to be had in the Twitter economy, every company can now slap a hashtag onto a visual ad and pretend to know what it’s doing. Remember when Newsweek ran with #MuslimRage? Or McDonald’s unintentionally eviscerating itself with #McDStories? Twitter can be tricky for the lazy and oblivious.

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Do you hate your car? Do you want to let the world know how frustrated you are driving around in a jalopy that is beyond repair? Honda can help – sort of. For the rest of today, Honda will be tweeting back Vine videos at unhappy drivers who post #WantNewCar on Twitter. The Twitter/Vine combo, developed by the automaker’s longtime agency RPA, is part of Honda’s Summer Clearance Sales Event, and is meant to provide some catharsis to drivers even though there aren’t any discounts or financial incentives for using the hashtag. There probably should be.

If you watch the promo clip above, you’ll see what it looks like when brands use social media for the sake of using social media rather than really committing to interacting with consumers on various social platforms.Take KFC and their annoying, yet memorable, #IAteTheBones campaign. It’s made to go viral and is primarily identifiable to KFC and no other brand. On Twitter, KFC offers followers free merchandise and deals related to the hashtag on a regular basis. Honda is only responding for one day. Even though Honda’s hashtag is much more relatable (one could argue it’s too generic) the execution feels unsure of itself, just like a teenage driver getting behind the wheel for the first time. Credits after the jump.

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While we’ve seem almost every iteration of brands turning fans’ tweets into ads by this point, here’s a new spot for Wendy’s new Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger from agency VML that adds a musical component to this formula.

Using that hashtag #PretzelLoveSongs on Twitter AND Facebook (gah, Facebook has hashtags now), consumers who say exceedingly positive things about Wendy’s new burger had the opportunity for their praises to be turned into a musical number, with some having even been sung by former 98° frontman/Jessica Simpson spouse Nick Lachey during a live event last night in New York, where live-streams always take place for some reason. While the press release doesn’t say if the specific location was Times Square, we’re going to go ahead and guess this happened in Times Square.

Nothing like watching a former boy band member/reality star sing about a cheeseburger in probably Times Square. Oh, and VML offered the chance to participate via your social media, because the most effective use of it is to either praise or make fun of brands who spend a lot of money on advertising. If we’re lucky, it might even be a trending tweet. Update: The event actually took place at a Wendy’s location, natch, on 34th St in NYC.

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Catering to current trends of craft and crowdsourcing, Clear Channel Outdoor commissioned two “high-profile billboard muralists” to handpaint people’s tweets on a giant canvas during Cannes. And by smushing enough ideas together on a 16m x 4m screen, they’ve set a couple records: This was the world’s first hand-painted micrography billboard made entirely of tweets, and also the world’s first gigapixel image searchable by tweet.

To gather relevant words, CCO started Twitter debates with questions like, “Who owns the creative agenda?” and “Is technology redefining creativity?” People were into it: over the four-day period, the campaign delivered a total campaign reach of 15.7 million impressions on Twitter. “Who owns the creative agenda?” trended number two worldwide. As the responses streamed in, social media visualisations of the #canvas Twitter content were displayed on CCO’s website, digital screens at the festival, and a high-resolution projection to a separate 18m x 5m canvas located on the roof of the Le Grand Hotel.

It’s a sweet reflection of the spirit of Cannes, one that could have only been more accurate if it involved alcohol. See if your tweet was chosen here.

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