The U.S. Justice Department cleared the way last month for Continental Airlines and United Airlines to merge, creating the world’s largest airline. The airline will be called “United”. This is an interesting branding case study. In the pictures above you can see proposed aircraft branding once the merger takes place. The aircraft livery uses branding cues from both legacy carriers. It literally “unites” the two brands. The design retains the white aircraft fueslage, and includes the Continental Airlines globe on the tail. Two logo typefaces have been proposed so far - firstly, the airline name using Continental’s serif typeface and secondly, the airline name using United Airline’s sans serif typeface.

USA Today has reported that customer feedback would like to see the merged airline retain the famous United Airlines tulip shaped “U”…so, I guess you can’t keep everyone happy!

Bulkhead Nigel.

Share This

Share This

Back in June I posted a blog about Apple’s new iAd network which allows developers to embed highly interactive advertising within their Apps.

Now up and running the platform is receiving mixed reviews. An article in the LA Times says both Unilever and Nissan have been impressed with results with customers spending up to 10 times longer interacting with the iAd than with comparable online advertising.

On the other hand Apple’s control over the process of creating the ads seems to be causing a few issues as the industry is not used to this - and projects are taking longer to roll out than expected, according to The Wall Street Journal .

Matt

Share This

On July 1 Apple plans to launch it’s new mobile advertising network for iPhone and iPod touch devices called iAds. According to Apple “iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads”, with the advertising experience taking place within apps rather than redirecting users to a browser window.

When you select an ad it will take up the screen using HTML5 and from there the user can interact with and explore the ad.

This comes after Apple bought the advertising network Quattro Wireless earlier this year. Google are also looking set to enter the mobile advertising arena (on their Android platform) with an agreement to buy mobile advertising firm AdMob.

IT research company Gartner put the global mobile advertising business at $13.5 Billion by 2013 due to the increase in smart phones and other mobile devices.

Matt

Share This

 Global marketers such as Nike are describing the 2010 FIFA World Cup as a larger event than even the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That scale, combined with the intensity of interest in the sport, the national pride of fans and the fact that it’s the first major global sporting event ever held on the African continent…figures to sell a lot of sneakers.

FIFA sponsors…a group to which Nike doesn’t belong, by the way…spend up to $40 million for the privilege.

“It’s the No. 1 event in all of sports,” Trevor Edwards, Nike’s VP-brand and category management, recently told the company’s investors, adding that the World Cup will be viewed by “half the world’s population.”

All I can say about this three-minute epic by Nike…is holy shit!

Share This

Pitching can be pretty exhausting, but it can also be quite fun and exciting, it’s kind of the ‘competitive sport’ version of what we do, when there are lots of pitches on and once I feel like I’m a contestant in some sort of graphic design/advertising reality TV show along the lines of Master Chef or Project Runway. Here’s a cool segment from an Australian where 2 agencies og head to head to try and sell difficult ideas to consumers. In the first, agencies come up with a campaign to drum up public support for invading New Zealand. In the Second they must convince people NOT to holiday in Australia.

David McLeod

Share This

Furniture giants Ikea have come up with an interesting guerilla campaign currently running in the subways of Paris. The company has set up mini Ikea environments featuring the actual products and using traditional billboard spaces to add context (and further products). A great way to showcase to comfort and (hopefully) the durability of their products, whilst making life a little more pleasant for the commuter. Nice.

Matt

Share This

Over the last few weeks we have been working on a top secret Out of Home campaign (OOH). The brief was to create some “high impact” OOH, that would get people talking.

An early step in our process was to find and review examples of other campaigns that were considered “high impact”.

Below are my favorites from the world of OOH.

 

 

 

 

 

RMCD

Share This

I have a facebook page, I get my RSS on with a few blogs, but I’m not really an active social networker, I have never tweeted, I’m a little bit old school, I leave that for the birds.

I don’t believe that Tweeting and following twitters has any substance, it’s hardly revolutionary in my view, it’s called conversation, we’ve been doing it for a long time now. Of course, everyone’s interested in the marketing potential, Twitter is apparently worth a billion dollars despite not having turned over a single cent. I’ve always thought that my generation are a bit self obsessed and see Twitter as a way to talk about themselves even when there’s nobody else around, so it doesn’t surprise me that the most Tweeted topic is Twitter itself, iPhone is high on the list too. I imagine there are a lot of tweets along the lines of “just using twitter on my iPhone lol”.

Below is a list of brands mentioned over a 24 hour period on Twitter, it’s kind of a boring list, mostly computer/internet related stuff – mostly, it seems, people are getting on there computers and mobile devices to talk about their computers and mobile devices. I don’t really know what to make of it, there’s no mention of whether or not the Tweeters (Twits?) are saying nice things about these brands or not.

If you’re a tweet follower, someone sent me this a while back, it worth following, if you follow such things.

And now I’m going to get my old school on, with some old school goodness that you can’t find on your MyFace and SpaceBook pages…

This is still the most on-target advertising I have ever seen:

This is excellent old school exaggeration in advertising from Atari:

Cover Art…

Actual game play…

And here’s an ad for a 15MB Hard Drive for only $2495:

Moonwalk, electric boogie, head spin and top rock to that.

David

Share This

The Amazon Kindle is starting to become a new and exciting trend as a replacement to books and the traditional newspapers.

For those of us who still like to feel and touch newspapers and books this is sad to see.  However, the Kindle is a cleaner, environmentally friendlier option that also eliminates the clutter of books.  For our generation and our parent’s generation having bookcases of books, magazines, encyclopedia britannica and journals was something you cherished and even bragged about; nowadays the clutter of these material things is increasingly becoming less within the younger generations.

Thou it is hard for me to say lets embrace the Kindle as this is the sign of things to come in our digital age.

Folksey

Share This