Honda's Ethical F1 Team Sponsorship

Social awareness and ethical marketing arrives at one of the biggest marketing and advertising arenas - Formula One.

Normally sporting hundred of corporate logos from sponsors keen to be seen associated with the high octain sport, this years Honda F1 car it will have only an image of the world wrapping around it's high tech body. Reflecting the general trend in eco awareness and ethical issues, Honda's campaign is probably the biggest to tackle the issue of global warming.

Honda appears to be reinvesting it's traditional marketing dollars back into it's own F1 project - sponsoring their own car, not with their own branding, but with an eco awareness campaign. Their desire is to raise awareness of global warming and at the same time capitalise on the interest generated and raise awareness of their own efforts aimed at developing more eco friendly technology.

The car itself is quite stunning, with its large and totally un-Formual 1 livery, and is guaranteed to generate reaction and hence should fulfil Honda's objectives. Visitors to the MyEarthDream.com URL, the only text to apear on the car, are encouraged to make a pledge to help stop global warming and donate to a charity set up by Honda to support eco causes. Visitors that pledge will be rewarded by having their name printed onto one of the actual F1 race cars.

No doubt what Honda may miss out on in sponsorship invvestment they should recoup in PR. That said, I am sure that there will be many sponsors who while not featured on the car itself, will captialise from association with the car.

The site is very simple and well designed. View it here.

Less Rain - T-Shirts

A really nicely designed and fun t-shirt design label. The t's are nice, farly common designs, and nothing too new - the dot matrix and 'Hello - My Name Is' t-shirts are cool as you can customise them with your own designs, blocking out squares on a matrix, or writting your name on the name sticker design. What is really nice is the simple and ironic animated store.

Check them out here...

Search By Sketching

This is a fun new experimental service which lets you search and explore a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

It will not recognise what you are drawing - say a corporate logo or a face for example, which would be a very interesting way of searching (although if you are searching for a chair, whiy not just type in the word chair) - but rather examines the colours and composition, delivering you results that are similar to your sketch. Draw a big red circle and you will get cherries and strawberries. Draw a yellow rectangle under a blue one, and you'll get images of the sea.

This is a great way of searching for images that you want to match certain colour ways or moods. Possibly one day it could be a way of searching for that elusive image in your collection that was not tagged in a searchable way.

What ever it's practical applications, it is a fun tool to play with. Have a play here.

Thanks to Peter for the link.

UPDATE:
This is another nice search tool for Flckr - where you can search by predominant colour of the image. View Here.

Brio Network Toys

Brio's new Network range brings the line of traditionally classic wooden toys more upto date. Retaining the clean and high quality design, the new wooden toys have a more hi tech subject than their more classically themed train and farm yard predecessors. Appealing to the computer generation, the collection introduces computer themed characters, such as viruses, CD burners and characters that deliver emails. The toys retain their low tech and durable appeal and work much as the traditional counterparts, but have some interactive features when some pieces are placed near other components.

The site is also an example of very good web design. Essentially a slick catalogue style presentation, the site features impecable integration of 3D animated video. The site was made by Swedish agency, FarFar, who also created memory stick gadgets from the collection - which I think are almost more desirable than the toys themselves!

Visit the site

Let's All Make A Wiki

The software that runs the popular site Wikipedia is now being made available for free by it's creators. So maybe the blog is dead, and we will all have our own wiki's next year?

More...

Audi R8 Interactive Video

Audi's new R8 sports car is due to be launched in the early part of 2007 in Europe. Their site designed to introduce the new car pushes the envelope in emersive web design, featuring vast amounts of integrated interactive video. It is not much more than a very slick brouchure, but it certainly does a great job of presenting the car, making it desireable and is in a class of it's own, when it comes to generating video for the web.

Take a lookhere
(You may need to launch the site from one of the links presented in the page, depending on if you use a pop up blocker.

Diesel's Christmas Tale

Diesel launched a Christmas site last week. A Christmas fable pop up book called the 'Tale of the Black Knight and the Calamitous Dragon'. The story is inspired by Diesel's holiday jewellery collection and tells the story of medieval knight, a dragon and a beautiful girl that mysteriously disappears one Christmas eve night. The tale with a dark twisted end can be viewed online or downloaded as an audio book designed to be listened to in from to f the roaring fire during the Christmas holidays. Various items from the collection feature throughout the story, and there is also an overview of the main items from the collection for people looking for Christmas gift ideas. The site was made by Diesel's creative team in collaboration with Hi-Res! of London.

View the site and find out what happens to the girl and the dragon at Diesel's homepage - or directly link here.

Podcasting Tips - Getting Featured in iTunes Podcasts

Tips on how to increase your chances of getting your podcast featured in iTunes store podcast 'Featured' directory. From Podcasting Tips blog.

Creative Showcase - Diesel Wins With Angels Online Campaign

Diesel and Airlock have picked up the Creative Showcase award for September for the online advertising for the Angels campaign.

Halloween Site For Loft

Japanese brand Loft have launched a Halloween themed site to promote what looks like a fashion collection - I can't quite fathom it out, but it is a stunning site. Beautiful intro with comic style graphics and video of the models wearing the clothes. This very successfully presents the products in an extremely emotive way. The site has been created by Japanese agency CMD9.

Dixie Chicks

Interesting fly over navigation for Dixie Chicks site, by WeFail.