It’s official, Warnie will grace the living rooms of cricket lovers across the nation this summer for VB, taking off where Boony and Beefy ended. Being a little fussy about where he sits though, Warnie has decided to bring his own VB couch from where he will interact with the TV broadcast of the One Day International Series and give you his take on things. “Bowl Warnie!!”

There’s a lot more to come but for now you can register your interest at the VB Warnie website. Stay tuned or check after the jump for more launch images.

We’ve combined with a group of other talented people to form 808south. There’s no firm category at present for what we aim to do but it revolves around the interactive space. We bring together emerging technologies and interactive thinkers to build complete brand strategies. Our projects fuse sensory engagement with marketing savvy to deliver brand experiences.

The sole focus is around the iBar at the moment, check it out on the 808south website.

For those of you who may have read The Age or Sydney Morning Herald on Friday just gone may have noticed a little paragraph or two about the upcoming promotion this summer. It was tucked in at the end of an article on the last sports pages. It’s true, Mr Warne will be replacing Boony and Beefy as the VB ambassador for this summer’s cricket season. We’re sad to see Boony (and Beefy) go but all good things must end at some point. Keep it locked here for more…

Not that many readers would care but we’ve worked out what we’re doing with brandslappers.com - Take a a sneak peak. It’s the back end of a print advertisement we’re running for this year’s APPA awards.

Here’s an interesting idea from the designer who gave us Flashbag. If pushing numbered buttons on an ugly plastic brick is not your thing, then perhaps flicking through a chain of glowing orbs will take your fancy - Meet Remobeads - remote control beads..

We’re told switching channels is effortless with Remobeads simply press lightly over the glowing beads and you’re right there pondering how much longer they can possibly keep Big Brother running. Kind of like what you’re doing now I hear you say? Well does your remote control play mantras as you channel surf? Yeah that’s right:

“As an option you can add a sound - enjoy listening to your favourite mantras while switching the channels.”

Now before you go clicking off to order one, this doesn’t appear to be on the market yet, no information as to prototypes etc. but there’s a patent pending.

Great design and the option of programming TV Network logos straight into the orbs could be appealing but why stop there? I’d like to see a graphic for upcoming shows pop up in the orbs in real time, a live TV guide if you like.

Apologies for the silence lately, but we’ve been extremely busy working away on a number of projects but hopefully we’re back on track with some regular posts.

Inspired by a term that’s being thrown around with it’s fair share of negative light in the promotional products industry and an upcoming self promotion campaign, we thought we’d do something. We set up brandslappers.com. And by set up we mean that we’ve registered the domain name, uploaded an image, set up a basic inbox and written this post. We still don’t know what the hell we’re going to do with it. The term brandslapper has a good ring to it though, maybe we should change our whole company name to brandslappers. If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them or read them…

There was a time when creating promotional invites or any sort of card required the services of a design, print or promotional firm. In this era of generation ‘C’ though, all you need is a little imagination, a good piece of technology and you’re away.

I’ve always been a fan of this Moo thing and I can’t have been happier with the quality of the cards I printed early this year but I didn’t give much thought to how a service like this could be taken beyond D.I.Y business cards and thank you notes and put to genuine use in a promotional or trade show environment where perhaps the need for individually coded cards is greater. I guess being in the industry though, we’ve always had the benefit of local expertise here that could fill our requirements just as well whether for ourselves or a client. But if you’re not in the industry and have some time, you could give it a shot yourself.

This might seem a little self-cannibalistic of us but it really is a relatively easy process and one worth sharing. Addega.com have managed to create their own uniquely coded invites for their social wine discovery project. If you have a similar requirement or an event that requires serial numbered cards, read their post - How to make unique Moo invite cards.

Greentomato cars offer a taxi fleet in London made up completely with the greenest cars around - The Toyota Prius. The objective of the company is to get people from A to B while emitting as little pollution as possible into the environment. Off-setting carbon emissions is the hottest item going around at the moment (just ask Thorpie) but I there’s still an element of unknown, the greentomato concept however makes simple sense. They use hybrid cars and they offset unavoidable emissions by planting thousands of trees. If presented with this option at no extra cost, I’d like to think many consumers would opt-in.

To generate awareness, the company did a local door drop, but how do you do a door drop that isn’t wasteful of paper? Well, you can do an online campaign or in this case, produce one single door drop that can be passed around the neighborhood. Each street gets one door drop each. The first recipient ticks off their address once they’ve noted the taxi number and then passes it on to the next resident until the whole street has seen this one door drop. There’s considerable room for things to go wrong and the chain broken, but it’s true to the cause and I think the service itself is a pretty good offering and good offerings usually generate awareness all by themselves.

The agency - Harrison Troughton Wunderman UK.

We received this letter from APPA today. Has Boony done it again? Guess we’ll have to wait until Spetember to find out.

I recieved an SMS from my auto-mechanic this morning. It’s an obvious proforma type message reminding me to bring my car in for service. A few personal details like my name and registration added, nothing special but “it’s high in value as it is low in bandwidth. The very kind of communication and promotion if you like which has been undervalued and misunderstood by brands particularly.

This is a little left field in terms of promotional marketing, but I wanted to share an intelligent piece of writing about the attraction of stripped back communication as used by platforms likeTwitter and Facebook. Michael and I had an interesting discussion about these social media applications last week. Apart from convincing him that I was not like a sixteen year old school girl SMS-ing like crazy on my mobile, I failed to express as eloquently as Rory has here why this form of digital communication works. This form of compressed inter-personal communication is enticing and as I sit here typing this post pondering the concept of technology and promotions, I wonder how many brands are allowing their customer’s to project themselves to a network of friends? A light turns on in Michael’s head!

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