We Are Autobots – Thumbs Up

I wrote about Augmented Reality (AR) a few days ago in a post about the game ARhrrr.  Here is another cool example of AR that you can try yourself if you have a webcam.  It’s a promotion created by Picture Production Company (PPC), with augmented reality specialists Total Immersion for the upcoming Transformers movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  It uses facial recognition to turn your face into the mug of Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots.

 

Check out weareautobots.com to try it yourself.  It takes a few minutes to set-up, but it’s worth the wait!  Definitely a lot of fun.  This is a great way to get people excited about the new Transformers movie and get them to interact with the brand.  I wonder if enough people out there have webcams to give the site the viral success that the marketing teams are probably looking for.

GM Ad Parody – Thumbs Up

During the whole General Motors bankruptcy deal recently, GM decided to release a new ad to try to save their image.  While I was personally a fan of the ad itself as crisis communication (I posted about it on this blog), I can understand that a significant amount of people would be skeptical of the message.  I was wondering if GM was going to be able to live up to the promises it made in the ad.   Here’s another example of a skeptical viewpoint.  Current TV’s “InfoMania” show dubbed the commercial for a funny parody:

Maybe GM has lost too much credibility with the public to affect them with a positive messages about the brand.  I’m hopeful that they will make it out of this and  I’m very interested to see what comes out of this situation.

BlindSearch – Thumbs Up

Thumbs Up: With the release of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, I’m interested to see if it is actually more effective than the dominant search engine, Google. Thankfully, Michael Kordahi designed a cool experiment to test which search engine works the best without branding. Type in something to the search bar and results for your query show up in three columns from Google, Bing, and Yahoo without being able to see the search engine’s logo. So far I’ve found that Google tends to give me the best results. Find out which search engine works best for you: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/