Aap! - Alternative Advertising Possibilities

“Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking.” -  Robert Stephens of the Geek Squad and head of one of the growing number of brands that have been built without the help of major advertising agencies or budgets.

Read more in BusinessWeek’s Re-cap on Advertising and Branding 2007

 

With 1000’s of members around the world participating, Windowzoo is one of the world’s most popular community art projects.  

Using non permanent markings, participants release animals into mostly urban environments with the placement of vinyl adhesive “animals.”

From eagles to giraffes to sharks, the collection of critters is outstanding and brings new meaning to the term “urban jungle.”

Stuck on making your own WindowZoo Critter > Learn how with this WindowZoo 9 step guide 

More on WindowZoo Art Project

* Flickr Photo by BAYT from the Windowzoo Flickr Group 

Around noon on every business day, thousands stride briskly along the sidewalk of Mumbaiâ??s (Bombay) business districts delivering lunches to 350,000 people daily, at a cost of about $3.80 a month in beautiful, simple multi-tiered lunch-boxes known as Tiffins.

These hard working individuals ensure that the businesspeople of Bombay can still have home-cooked meals personally delivered to their desks — without the inconvenience of carrying meals to work themselves on overcrowded trains — and at bargain prices.

Read the rest of this entry »

Outside of our office is a beautiful massive 40 floor wall scape that was just waiting to be covered with artwork. Using common vintage overhead projectors, a set of EVD 400V lamps, and artwork transparencies we were able to project large format graphics to create a fun, professional wall scape.

Want to see it person - visit the corner of Kearny / Pine in San Francisco on week nights.

Up Against It is a public art competition. The winning entry will be seen by up to 2,000 commuters daily on a wall over 60m2. The competition is open to all types of creative and artistic expression. The entries will be judged on your response to the words “Closer than you think”.

How to enter:

1. Go to www.upagainstit.com to find out more.
2. Click ‘Enter the Competition’ and download the wall template, this is a guide for laying out your design.
3. Fill in the online application and upload your entry, alternatively send you artwork with the application form to: Up Against It, c/o Raw Nerve, B209 Faircharm Studios, Creekside, London SE8 3DX
4. Tell everyone you know to vote for you (every vote counts).
5. The top 20 entries voted by the public will then be judged by an influential panel of artists and designers. The winning entry will be displayed on the ‘Up Against It’ wall in Deptford, London.

Aap!Global is presenting @ Pecha Kucha - San Francisco August 29th on the topic of Legal Graffiti and New Media!

Come meet with us and others to talk about design, art, entrepreneurship and innovation.

New to Pecha Kucha?

Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-chak-cha) was started in Tokyo, Japan in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture, as a way to attract people to SuperDeluxe, an event space they had set up in Roppongi.

A Pecha Kucha night is an event format in which presenters show a slideshow of 20 images, each of which is shown for 20 seconds â?? giving a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds. Each event usually has 14 presenters. Presenters (and much of the audience) are usually from the design, architecture, photography, art and creative fields.

The event format has been replicated in 42 other cities, including New York, London, Mexico City and Shanghai. Events are usually limited to one each month per city.

More info @ http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

A few days ago we wrote about the rather tasteless, but effective rural marketing exploit in the UK of a painted field with a corporate logo and URL.

A German artist has mowed a large 160 meter square Semacode (data matrix code) cut in a field in Germany.

From the project website: “A Semacode measuring 160 x 160 meters was mown into a wheat field near the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18 x 18 bright and dark squares producing decoded the phrase â??Hello, world!â??.The project was realized in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture flight in the following month.”

Cute- the message when read by a semacode or data matrix reader blurts “Hello! World!”

The young German quotes : ” With â??Hello, world!â?? the code serves as a kind of branding of a digital culture whose omnipresence is obvious, yet whose modes of action are unknown in wide parts of society.”

See more @

Project Website

Flickr Series

Via [Ars Technica]

‘GATWICK Passengers landing at Gatwick airport are being greeted by a giant naked pole dancer. The 9,000 sq m (100,000 sq ft) image is painted on grassland under the incoming flight path

.

Planning officers are investigating whether permission was granted for the advertisement, which promotes a website. The Council to Protect Rural England said that the display was â??a tacky advert which set a nasty precedentâ??’

Expect copy cats to follow suit.

And yes - of course we took a peak at the site…

Illegal and a first for Japanese Politics - upper house member Kan Suzuki has opened a virtual office in Second Life in hopes of winning a 2nd term. Suzuki is using Second Life to discuss policy, field questions and to propose new policies with net citizens, deliver lectures and also hold meetings.

But Mr Suzuki, who is seeking a re-election in the upper house in July, could be breaking the electoral law. Japan’s Public Office Election law, which was drawn up more than 50 years ago, limits the distribution of text and images for use in election campaigns to postcards and pamphlets. Sounds like a great idea - but Japan’s fifty year-old Public Office Election limits election campaigns to using only postcards and pamphlets.

Officials have recently ruled that web pages cannot be created or updated during the official period of campaigning for elections.

While probably a PR stunt - Suzuki’s act bring up some interesting questions and points:

- Is Suzuki breaking the law if he passes out “virtual” postcards & pamphlets while “chatting” with citizens in Second Life an act he is allowed in the “real” world?

- Is Suzuki - an active upper house member actually trying to engage younger people instead of the usual practice of targeting the old - the only who vote in large numbers in Japan?

-Isn’t it time the entire Japanese political campaign trail went viral and virtual - letting us sleep in morning without hearing the campaign blasts of their loudspeaker equipped vehicles?