Proximity BBDO

Summary:

6 real claw machines can be controlled and played on from your browser. Pepsi Max combines bytes and atoms. If you’re passionate about something, max it. That is what Pepsi Max is all about. That and gaming of course. And how do you go about maxing a game that everyone is passionate about? You think bytes (as in ‘internet’). You think atoms (as in ‘real world’). You grab a soldering iron and connect both.

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Full post:

MAX YOUR THOUGHTS
Take 6 real claw machines, hook ‘m up to the internet and start playing. Unique codes can be stripped from the Pepsi Max bottles and used to add up for extra gaming credits. The lucky ones can win some cool prizes or grab a ticket for the final during which one plays with an 8 meter tall claw machine containing really huge prizes! Each finalist will be able to grab a huge bear and possibly win sunjets.be trips to Malta or Tenerife, or take home 50″ plasma’s and other cool Panasonic stuff.

OLDSKOOL CAMPAIGNING
The campaign is kick-starts with traditional online media. Bannering and an enticing e-mail to a database of Pepsi Max aficionados

SOCIAL MEDIA CUM
Today, more than 2.1 million belgian citizens are an active member of Facebook. So we integrated the power of Facebook Connect to make the game easily portable over the users contact network. Everyone registering with Facebook credentials, receives give-away codes for friends. Everytime anyone plays or wins it shows up in their friends newsfeed. How’s that for viral?

Frankly, a huge amount of users can freely access the website but only 6 can play simultaneously. Of course these users don’t want to be sitting ducks while waiting for a claw machines to become available. Statistics are put up to check when the site is very busy, a concept we introduced with, and was essential to, the Internet Is Mine case. Also, the claw machines Twitter when one of the slots is available.

KICK-ASS DESIGN
Phase 1: First wireframes were made in Powerpoint. They served as a basic feature-spec for the full website.

Phase 2: After being loosely briefed on the campaign’s concept and features, several paper sketches were made to serve as a rough guide. The concept at this stage was “a carnival or arcade, but maxed out!”.

Phase 3: Taking the best sketches into Photoshop, we created a digital painting that would serve as a moodboard and colour guide. This piece was also shown to the client in order to get the go-ahead for the look-and-feel for the rest of the website. You’ll also notice the (not-so) subtle use of Pepsi’s 3 main colours, creating a symbolic link between the logo and the site.

Phase 4: Using photos of the real grabber machines as reference, 3d models of the six cabinets, as well as a large “hero”-crane – a reference to the real-life final phase of the competition. The models were created and rendered in 3ds max 2008.

Phase 5: After all 3d models were animated and rendered, all assets were composited in Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. The mist was painted by hand.

Phase 6: After the final compositing of the scene, everything was then taken into Adobe Flash, where it was animated and integrated with the rest of the UI, which was also designed in Photoshop.

SOME HARDCORE GEEKNESS
Basically the client, your pc at home, simply browses to the webpage loading the Flash application. Through the Flash application the Socket Server receives the data of the logged in user and pushes that info to an Application Server on the same layer. The Application Server is there just to check the user data. N00bs would refer to this step as “checking with the database”. Furthermore the Socket Server just relays feedback between the claw machine and the UI. To put it straight, the Socket Server is the connection between the client and the claw machines at our offices. If a connection is established then that triggers the Socket Server and extracts one credit. Whenever a client is logged and ready to play, the Socket Server checks whether the user still has available credits to play the game. Credits can be added by entering game-codes found on Pepsi Max bottles and cans.

So, the Application Server feedbacks on the user-request and talks back to the Socket Server. Finishing this simple cycle the Socket Server pings to one of the 6 computers hooked to a claw machine. Each one of these computers is linked to a claw machine through 6, USB interface, micro-controllers talking to one of 6, physical, claw machines.

The micro-controllers allow users to address the physical controls of the claw machines. The connection between the two buttons to navigate and the coin collector are intercepted and thus hijacked by the USB interface of the micro-controllers. The micro-controllers send the claw machines the same electrical signals normally send by the original connections of the physical buttons.

The bears in the claw machines are stuffed with an RFID-tag. If a user manages to catch and lift a bear, the bear is dropped into a slide passing an RFID-chip reader. Once the reader is triggered a signal is passed on back to the Socket Server. The Socket Server then checks that tag with the linked prize in the DB inside the Application Server. When the match is made the UI displays to the user what prize he, or she, has won.

By the way, Proximity BBDO is looking for more ambitious developers willing to enforce our team and start create more of these wicked web-apps and games. Anyone with an interest can apply here.

Check out more of our geekness at Adnerds.be and check the conversation at #pepsimax, #twapero and #proximitybbdo

Dit weekend ging de eerste Proximity BBDO podcast live. Beide AdNerds, Jan (AdNerd sr.) en Bart (AdNerd jr.) hebben hun eerste episode gewijd aan Twitter, het micro-blogging fenomeen waar Facebook onlangs maar even 500 miljoen dollar voor wou betalen!

Op www.adnerds.be kan je je bovendien connecteren met je Facebook gegevens zodat we je makkelijk op de hoogte kunnen houden van nieuwe posts, podcast-episodes en meer van dat. Het opzet en de reden van zo’n AdNerds platform lees je daar overigens ook:

“AdNerds is a Proximity BBDO initiative to bundle all digital talent within the Proximity BBDO office in Brussels. Jan Algoed, often referred to as AdNerd senior and Bart Muskala, also known as AdNerd junior are the proud beholders of this project.

AdNerds.be aims to bring all marketeers and advertising professionals interested in how to broaden and improve their reach using the tools the Internet and the new media offers, together. Join the community – and more importantly – join the conversation by connecting to the site using Facebook Connect.”

Daarom:

1. surf nu naar http://www.adnerds.be
2. connecteer u door rechts bovenaan op de ‘Connect with Facebook’-knop te klikken
3. abonneer u op onze podcast in iTunes of via RSS
4. Geef uw opmerkingen, feedback, lof en meer op ons platform via de Feedback-knop of door een comment achter te laten.

Tot binnen 3 weken met een tweede episode over Facebook Connect.

The Digital Natives sessions are over. And they were a success.

For 6 weeks (from November 13 until December 18) we held 6 sessions about the Digital Natives, persons who grew up with digital technologies. Since they grew up with computers, mp3 players and mobile phones their brains are wired differently than most of us. That is one of the reasons Don Tapscott describes them as the smartest generation ever in his new book ‘Grown Up Digital’. We wanted to inform marketeers and advertisers involved in every day campaigns directed at this specific target group how to make sure their actions are 100% on target.

Our hands-on sessions (well, 4 of them, we had one introduction and an outroduction) were held in the House of the Future, Living Tomorrow in Vilvoorde, near Brussels. We couldn’t imagine a better place for our sessions to take place.

Session 1: The Digital Revolution. We talked about how not only people are changing due to the digital possibilities, but also about how businesses changed massively lately. We showed examples of industries that were both positively and negatively influenced by the Internet.

Session 2: Generic and Niche Social Platforms. You probably know – or at least heard about – Netlog, Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn. And you might have heard of A Small World, Shelfari or Ravelry.  Youngsters spend lots of time on those sites. And as a marketeer there are tons of possibilities of leveraging those platforms capabilities to your benefits.

Session 3: Online Advertising. Traditional online advertising is ‘passé’. And new channels, rules and possibilities are already queuing the line to take over. We have a deeper look at social network advertising and talk about viral, free and video marketing.

Session 4: Listening to Consumers. Two-way is one of the most used terms to point out the difference between web1.0 and web2.0. But conversations are only relevant if you start listening first. Understanding what your customers are talking about should be a priority.

Session 5: The Portable Web. Often confused for the mobile web, we talked about widgets, gadgets, desktop applications, embed codes and how portability are the new way of spreading your message.

Session 6: The Future of the Web. We ended our sessions with 4 predictions about the Future. We discussed the semantic web, the future of mobile and more interesting possibly next steps for the 15-year old Internet.

More info on our Digital Natives website.

All slides were posted on our Slideshare account and we made video’s about all sessions that were put online on our blip-pages.

We made some predictions about the future in our last session. Most of them are rather shocking – well, to most of you, it will be however ;-):

• We all will grow incredibly fat
• Everybody will become utterly stupid
• Laziness will become society’s steepest problem
• The Internet will totally disappear

Ok, this might sound hilarious and incredibly off record, yet every prediction is extremely linked to the future of the web. Let me explain why.

1) We all will grow incredibly fat

Since the introduction of the iPhone, people tend to surf more and more using a smartphone. Windows mobile users, nor BlackBerry, Nokia or any other device or mobile OS manufacturer created a browsing experience that was so fun to use. And never before was a phone the portal to such an enormous amount of applications. Over 10 million users worldwide downloaded up to November 2008 (in only 4 months !!!) over 300,000,000 (yup, 300 million) applications. Most of them allow you to sit down, relax and do what you want to do. Examples shown were ordering pizza, flipping a coin, turning on the heat, checking one’s bank account and even feeding the neighbour’s dog from your own lazy couch.

And as obesity is often caused by a sedentary lifestyle, we are pretty damn sure that the years to come we all will become very fat.

2) Everybody will become utterly stupid

Yet another unpleasant prediction. Or maybe not. The Google founders stated in an interview in Playboy (yes, that’s true, you can still read the article over here) what their utmost goal was: building a brain extention worthy that name. Sergey Brin even said:

“You can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example, you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear.”

They are halfway there with the google mobile app they released in December for the iPhone. Or think about how tools like Evernote made our life easier or cool gadgets like Livescribe offer new ways of connecting one’s memories to the Internet.

You see the need of being smart is no longer there once all gadgets and tools that surrounds us take over our memory…

3) Laziness will become society’s steepest problem

A third observation we made is the fact that your browser will become so smart, that it does most of the (dirty) work for you. The semantic web, as it is called, makes it possible for computers to understand and cooperate better with humans as Tim Berners-Lee once said (in 1999 already!). Many tools enable those experiences already, but it will get even more exciting the years to come.

Your PDA, GPS, cellphone, email program, browser, other applications, even your camera and your game console and settop-boxes all keep tons of data about you. It is only a matter of time before we can truly benefit from all data stored on those devices to inter-connect with each other with the power of the Internet as a catalysator. We gave three examples of how your life might change dramatically…

… in such a way that you never ever have to think for yourself again. Just let your devices do the talking.

4) The Internet will totally disappear

But it doesn’t matter one bit, since the Internet will disappear any time now. Or at least, the way we know the Internet will change. We entered the era of pervasive computing, meaning that everyday objects will be connected to the Internet. Better known as The Internet of Things. And forget about the Internet being limited to be browsed on your computer or mobile phone. It will be possible to collect data from it using RFID tags, graphical tags or even virtual tags (also called virtual graffiti) from anyplace anytime.

One day (well actually today if you live in the US) you will be able to take a picture of your internet connected phone and get info back about it: cheapest online prices with the immediate possibility to order it online or even prices at stores nearby with the route descriptions to it if you prefer so.

The Internet – as we know it – will have weaved in the fabric of everyday life as Mark Weiser once said (in 1991!!!).

The podcast of our entire session can be watched here and it is still possible to subscribe to it, as we will be updating it on a regular basis from January.

Or have a look at the presentation on Slideshare:

… op naar de laatste 2 sessies. De vierde Digital Natives-sessie zit er immers op en we hebben alweer de kaap van 100 deelnemers overschreden. Hieronder tref je bovendien alles aan wat we vertelden. Zowel de slides (voor downloads, klik even door naar de slideshare pagina) als de podcast (en yes – we are still the number one!) tref je hier aan of op http://adnerds.be.

En voor wie er om maalt: vanaf morgen kan je ons ook op Twitter terugvinden. Daar zullen zowel Jan (JA) als ikzelf (BM) nu en dan twitteren over onze avonturen als AdNerds.

Onze podcast is sinds dit weekend te vinden op iTunes en we zijn nu al een hit binnen de ‘Business’ categorie. We staan tussen (of beter: boven) bekende namen als Insead, Harvard Business Publishing, BusinessWeek, McKinsey on Finance en noem ze maar op. Uiteraard mooi nieuws en wellicht te danken aan het feit dat we voorlopig kunnen profiteren van een positie in de ‘New & Notable’ aanbeveling van het iTunes team. Dat en wellicht de vele fans die we ondertussen gemaakt hebben op ons eigen sociaal netwerk op http://adnerds.be.

Help ons mee die mooie positie te behouden en – onder het motto what’s in it for me? – word zelf slimmer door je nu nog te abonneren op onze podcast op iTunes. Klik dus hier of open iTunes op je iPhone en bij de Business sectie onder Podcasts tref je onze sessies aan.

De eerste Digital Natives sessie, die donderdag 13 november plaatsvond in Living Tomorrow was een succes. Tal van klanten en niet-klanten vonden hun weg naar het prachtige huis van de toekomst. De meeste kritieken waren lovend, met de weinige andere trachten we rekening te houden voor volgende sessies. En daar kan u zich nog altijd voor inschrijven via onze Digital Natives website.

Bovendien staat de presentatie ook live op ons eigen sociaal platform ‘AdNerds’. Alle links die we gebruikten als bron voor onze presentatie tref je eveneens aan op deze pagina. En vanaf vandaag kan je ook de opgenomen podcast bekijken bij het ‘Videos’-luikje. Of gewoon hieronder.

Alle feedback – voor wie er was – kan je nog kwijt via het formulier op diezelfde ‘Presentations’-pagina.

Hopelijk tot op één van de volgende sessies!