So nice, they had to show you twice.

AXE has launched one bad ass print ad in Uruguay to promote their new AXE Day and Night.  Knowing your target audience is the key to why this campaign works so well.  AXE knows their audience are both men and in the age bracket that actively use their phones.   So leveraging this knowledge they chose to roll out with an incomplete ad.  The ad (on the right) shows a model  in a suggestive pose, but any NSFW content is blocked out.  To see the full ad you needed to follow the below instructions:

To complete this ad send AXE to 2345 after 9 pm.

Once you fulfilled the requirements, an MMS image was sent to you (left image) that allowed the user complete the ad, driving increased interaction and frequency – Brilliant!!

On Tuesday, September 22, residents of Sydney awoke to a scene straight out of Total Recall.  Sydney had been blanketed by an apocalyptic glowing red dust storm. Red from iron-oxide: rust.   Gizmodo, noted that air pollution, particle concentration reached a thickness of about 15,000 micrograms per cubic meter—a normal day here has about 10-20.

This phenomenon caused a surge in multimedia traffic of up to 50 per cent as mobile users snapped photos on their phones and forwarded them to friends.   Flickr exploded as well, with photos of the city uploaded to the site more than tripled Day-over-Day, with a search for “Sydney” returning 4658 photos taken between 6-8:30am.  More images can be seen via the following Flickr page.

Out of the 13.9 billion search engine searches Americans conducted in August 2009, the chart above shows little share growth by any of the 5 major players in the space with the exception of MSN Bing and affiliated properties, which grew its market share 0.4% from 8.9% to 9.3%.

The total number of US searches as reported by comScore qSearch, increased by 3% compared to last month with Google receiving 9 billion, Yahoo with 2.7 billion, Microsoft with 1.3 billion, Ask at 541 million, and AOL offering 415 million.

A fun little stop-motion video on how street view was created.  Developed by the Google Japan creative team.

Advertising Week has been really fun so far.  Best in show at the 2009 Mixx Awards went to Tourism Queensland “The Best Job in the World” social media program.  While many struggle to figure our the social media space, this program did an incredible job of engaging the target audience in a dialogue to connect the consumer with the main call to action.  Specific metrics from the effort are shown below:

• Global news coverage from CNN and BBC – estimated media value $200MM
• Over 34k one minute video job applications received from 197 different countries
• 6.8MM monthly unique visitors to the web site
• Billions of impressions served to promote the campaign through viral marketing and forward to a friend metrics

T360 is in the house tonight at the Mixx Awards. What a show. Ad execs can really put on a big party. I’m interested to see who the big winners are. More to come.

Madmen has nothing on the Triumph360 team. Getting out to attend the different events is certainly outstanding. Seeing old friends …. really cool. Grabbing lunch with the boys – the best of the best.

My man Alex attending the Advertising Week session on the future of Radio and Print. The session was packed. Not a seat in the house. Steve Farella, CEO of TargetCast was the moderator of the session that certainly delivered good information about future trends in the space and new possibilities for both vehicles because of the proliferation of digital connectivity. A lot more to come.

To promote their new breakfast lifestyle, McDonald’s had a little fun in Vancouver, by launching a few installations like the one above of a street lamp.  The also offered free coffee for 2 weeks.