Arcade Fire and Google Chrome - impressive viral marketing

Arcade Fire have just upped the bar for music videos and online band promotion with a new viral experience, partnering with Google Chrome.

The Wilderness Down Town is an interactive video accompaniment to Arcade Fire's single 'We Used to Wait', directed by Chris Milk.

Facebook places – where are we now ?

Unless you live on another planet you should know that Facebook places is out . There have been many reviews and thoughts as to what the service can do and how its the Foursquare or Gowalla killer.

So where are we, no pun intended, how has the reaction been and what's next?

At this point in the UK doesn't have access, but it is interesting to see the thoughts and opinions floating around from the loyalist Foursquarers to the facebook supporters.

Have you got what it takes to be a Lounge Trendhunter?

We’re looking for cutting-edge individuals around the world aged 11 - 35 to be our ‘Trend Hunters’. These are in-the-know people who keep us up-to-date with the latest things people are doing, excited by and talking about. We want to know about all the newest stuff – what’s creating a buzz amongst you and your friends.

Man Tweeted to round the world trip

Rather than letting his friends know what he's having for his tea, a British man has used Twitter to travel around the world.

Newly-wed journalist Paul Smith got back from his honeymoon and decided that he wanted to get more holiday time, with the aim of getting to Campbell Island, 200 miles off New Zealand, within 30 days. When his appeal was retweeted by Stephen Fry the campaign took off.

He managed to blag:
- Ferry ticket from Newcastle to Amsterdam (tweeter called Leanne)
- Train to Paris (two French tweeters)
- Free bed at a hostel
- Train to Saarbrucken
- Lift in car to Frankfurt (German tweeter Andrea Juchem)
- One-way flight from Frankfurt to New York (tweeter called Owen, using Air Miles)
- Spare bed in hotel room (tweeter from Yorkshire called Mark)
- Then travel to and stays in Washington DC, Chicago and San Francisco by plane, train and car (US tweeters)

- Flight to San Francisco (Zurich-based tweeter)
- Car to Los Angeles
- Free flight from LA to Auckland (Air New Zealand)
- Ferry to South Island
- Lift to tip of South Island (tweeter called Smiley)
- Boat to Stewart Island.

When Paul got to Stewart Island he hoped to get a lift on a boat to Campbell, but was unsuccessful. He said: "my main aim was to get as far around the world as I could in 30 days. When I gazed across the sea towards Campbell Island I didn’t feel like a beaten man. "

Air New Zealand offered him a free flight home where he set about writing up his experience in new book, 'Twitchhiker.'

Near Virtual London

Near Global allows you to virtually walk the streets of London's West End, shop, get information and even watch films and concerts in real-time. Global allows real companies to take online shopping a stage further, offering a hybrid shopping experience somewhere between real-life shopping and normal online. You can go up to shop windows and click on them to browse and buy.

Super Cute Kawaii! Harajuku girls come to London

The 6%DokiDoki World Tour: Harajuku Kawaii Experience comes to London's Japanese Art Festival this weekend (21/22 Aug).

Self Proclaimed 'Social Media Experts' - damaging

I mentioned the Influence Project a while back on my personal blog, plus if I recall I think I tweeted my link three times. Just to see how I did. Then a lot of articles came out against the whole thing. At first I thought it to be the usual bunch of people shooting down a good idea but looking a bit closer it all started making sense.

Our campaign for Lynx Fever is in Marketing Magazine!

Our campaign for Lynx Fever shower gel was featured in Marketing Magazine's experiential leagues 2010 article today!

The experiential campaign at T4 on the Beach and Boardmasters festivals last year has also just won the Gramia 2010 award for Best Brand Experience.

BRING BACK FITFINDER: Student Social Netflirting isn't dead yet

Ask most students and they’ll admit to having a library crush. Because the university library is not solely a place of serious study, but a sexually-charged hub of students subtly checking each other out over the screens of their laptops. From this mix of hormones, procrastination and high-pressure academia the FitFinder emerged.

Creation of UCL Computer Science undergrad Rich Martell, FitFinder has been described as cross between Twitter and a students’ lonely hearts column. However, students weren’t advertising themselves for love so much as sharing a bit of banter. Each uni had a ‘fit feed’ where students posted location-specific descriptions of hotties spotted around campus, e.g.:

“Pembroke Library: Female, Blonde, 1^st year classicist, can’t keep my eyes off you, PLEASE let me see your coliseum.”

Launched in April, the site received over 5m hits and covered 52 unis. It was forced to close after only one month due to mounting pressure from universities and Martell was fined by UCL for “bringing the college into disrepute”.

Despite some unis claimed that FitFinder was too distracting, they have been tolerant of Facebook which had very similar origins. Its prototype, ‘Facemash’, was created by Mark Zuckerberg as a Harvard version of HotOrNot.com. The real objection to FitFinder wasn’t procrastination. It was that students weren’t only documenting the ‘buff tings’ around campus but also the physical failings of their aesthetically-challenged peers (one post at UCL read,“body of an angel… face of a smashed crab”).

The FitFinder homepage has nearly 10,000 signatures petitioning its return and Martell has stated he plans to bring the site back. He’s already been approached by entrepreneurs looking to expand FitFinder to festivals and to create a mobile app. Brands could play upon the mating game facilitating boy- meets-girl in specific locations. Despite having come under fire for its ‘MunterHunter’ alter ego, FitFinder was always intended as banter between friends. The Fit Finding phenomenon isn’t over yet.

This blog also appears on Brand Republic's blog, The Wall

London's a real dream for teens: Lounge MD James Layfield talks to the Evening Standard about teens and brands

Our MD James Layfield appears in today's Evening Standard, interviewed for 'London's a real dream for teens' by Jasmine Gardner.

In the article about the Underage Festival, James tells The Evening Standard:

“Teens are in a position of power, because they have grown up with social media and computers,” says James Layfield, head of The Lounge, a London youth marketing agency that has conducted extensive research into the social lives of teenagers. “They can get more out of life because they are more aware of everything that is happening. They can be at one event in Covent Garden while receiving pictures uploaded by a friend somewhere else. It's a life of 'augmented reality' with an additional level to it.”

What Layfield and The Lounge discovered — and what no parent will be surprised to read — is that teenagers conduct their social lives primarily and wholeheartedly through Facebook.

It's where they develop and alter their identities, join groups that interest them and stay in touch with their favourite bands, brands and products. As a result, every brand out there is vying for their attention, seeing, as Layfield puts it, “the long-term value of young consumers. Brands really do want to get under the skin of these teens, because if they do, then they can make a lot of money”.

This is the reason we now have brands such as O2 and Orange doubling up as entertainment companies, sponsoring music arenas and half-price cinema tickets. And why Red Bull, one of the teens' most popular fan pages, pulls stunts such as Formula 1 pit-stops in Parliament Square.

But it's not an easy job. “In London teenagers are overwhelmed with opportunities,” says Layfield. “There is something happening every minute of every day that they could go to, often for free, but the hardest part is to get them out of their bedrooms in the first place. Because of the internet, a lot of them are a lot less imaginative than they might once have been. Teens want to be more entertained and that entertainment is much easier to come by now. So it's about creating something so engaging and exciting that they get interested.”

The Lounge Spain's PR / il PR del Lounge Espanol!

The Lounge Spain has been getting loads of great PR lately for their work with DYC Whiskey!

Admittedly helps if you can read Spanish, but it was covered by....

www.anuncios.com: 'Dyc utiliza un original soporte en su última campana', www.marketingnews.es: 'Ambient "graffitero" de Dyc en laz zonas de marcha de Madrid' www.interactivadigital.com: 'DYC en los cierres de Malasana y La Latina'

"WOAHHH, DOUBLE RAINBOW!"

Double rainbow. Nearly 9 million views on YouTube.

Double rainbow = good
Guy's crazed reaction to said double rainbow = apparently irresistible!

As one YouTube user rightly observed, "He would have died on the spot if it was a triple".