I haven’t seen any of these promotions in Melbourne as yet but then again I haven’t been to Target lately. To promote Australia’s biggest Toy Sale, Target had actors dressed up as toys being controlled by a gigantic rubber hand!

A unique concept and good use of the performing arts to catch the attention of people passing. We heard it was that effective and realistic that the grey-haired security guard at the centre nearly had a heart attack. He called in the ‘Code Red’ and alerted 000 that a crazy gunman in camo gear was loose in the centre taking pot shots at everyone with an AK47. He was quoted saying though, he had no idea what sort of political message the guy was trying to make with the big hand.

The promo was by The Campaign Palace.

A recent discussion with a client about the direction of the promotional marketing and promotional products industry got me thinking about likely trends in our space. We usually post about the current rumblings of the promo world but today I’m going to change the tune a little and post my top trend prediction for promotional marketing. A big call I know! but hey, it’s the blogosphere afterall. Read more »

M&C Saatchi Sydney developed a simple little promotion for ebay HK involving nothing more than a cardboard box and some copy that read: “Quit your day job and start your own business”. The objective was to tempt office workers into resigning from their cubicle jobs (I guess there are plenty of them in HK) and move to creating their own business with ebay. Read more »

What’s Joost? I hear you ask. Well first of all, it’s pronounced ‘juiced’ and not ‘Yoest” as my Dutch friend with the same name and I would have thought. Joost is an interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the web using peer-to-peer TV technology. It’s near TV quality video streaming to a PC or Mac. Read more »

WWU (work without undo) is the latest from the lofty heights of the accurecreative artroom. Just a bit of fun for now and justification for Gregg’s big computer and Wacom thingy.

An ongoing feature perhaps??

Earlier I posted about a short book from Marty Neumeier. If you haven’t read it yet, you may not have to. Marty and his brand consultancy have produced a slideshow that does a very good job at explaining how to bridge the gap between business strategy and design. Worth a look here people - Don’t let the 162 slides put you off, it’s quite succinct and annoyingly good.

It seems there is nothing that can’t be turned into a USB drive these days. In our industry we’ve come across our fair share of crazy USB flash drives, some are fantastic and functional while others just sucked in terms of design. But despite the fact that every peripheral and it’s mum is operating via a USB connection and port space is now a premium on most people’s computers, the lure and ease of a flash drive finds a way to command space. It must be our infatuation with the term “plug n play”. Read more »

We’ve been on a website and blog refinement journey as you may have noticed. We decided to redesign our website to add a bit more information while keeping it simple, clean and easy to navigate. Hopefully, we’ve achieved this. We adopted the same line of thought for Carpark - simple clean lines and big fonts to bring some consistency to our two platforms. I must admit though, the site still uses Flash and requires at least some knowledge of code to build. Now we’re not trying to take anything away from Leon here (good job Leon!), but this morning I was captivated by one of the most unique and basic websites I’ve come across. Read more »

UPDATE: We’ve decide this new look you’re seeing right now on Carpark is here to stay. It’s by no means finished and yes we do realise there are bugs in its current format but we’re working to fix them. We ask for your patience

If you don’t use a RSS reader of somesort to read this blog, you’re probably freakin’ out at the different formats being thrown around on this site at the moment. You’re not going crazy and your machine isn’t playing up. We’re just testing and playing around with a few new things. Before you know it, we’ll be bigger and better than before. We’re really sorry for this but hit has to be done.

More and more we are seeing BTL promotional campaigns distracting our daily routines. This grab for attention is something we at Accure are faced with constantly. The distraction however needs to be cleverly constructed to deliver the message in a way that is memorable and delightful and not just for ‘creative’ sake. The latest from the US is a good example of how to generate massive ‘front-of-mind’ brand equity for a relatively low cost. Read more »