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This month’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine has an augmented reality feature in which you use a smartphone to ‘bring the cover to life’. It’s far from the first magazine to do it, and it’s hard to miss adverts on the tube or at bus stops that have some variation of ’scan this advert to [...]

British Airways unveiled their big new commercial recently, as part of their £20 million advertising campaign:

It has a Downton Abbey/Mad Men retro vibe, mixed with a go-getting drive to the future; we’re meant to admire these brave ‘young men’ (as they’re always called – not ‘young people’ and certainly not ‘young women’) as they venture [...]

There’s an advert on TV for I, Robot where a typically breathless voiceover proclaims that in the movie, ‘Will Smith defines excitement’. For some reason I can’t get out of my head the image of Will Smith beginning the movie by reading out the definition for ‘excitement’ from a dictionary.

I just watched the DVD for Honda’s Cog advert, which you can order for free, and it has clearly been made with the same loving craziness and ingenuity that the advert enjoyed. There’s a ‘making of’ feature, about five minutes long, in which they interview the makers and show some outtakes. There’s also an ‘Illustrated [...]

Cog (4MB Quicktime) – It’s been mentioned in a few places on the net already, but this new advert by Honda is an understated work of art. Some more info at torrez.org.

Guerrilla advertising – Meg has cleared up a mystery for me! When I was in London last week, I saw a lot of anti-Esso Poems on the Underground which surprised me no end since I couldn’t see how the London Underground could get away with it. It turns out that someone has been printing and [...]

Is this Lord of the Rings Winamp Skin really by New Line Cinema? It certainly looks like it, and if so, it’s quite a clever piece of work. It’s had almost half a million downloads so far, and for the price of however long it took an artist to design it, it’s generated an incredible [...]

Eat at McDonalds in Sims Online. I have no problem with in-game advertising, but apparently you can improve your standing in the game by eating McD’s food, which is ridiculous and will no doubt cause a player backlash (via ec).

Thanks to a generous grant from Trinity College at Cambridge University, I was able to attend the full week-long British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival of Science in Leicester this year, from September 9th to 13th. This is a brief report of what I learned there.

Stephen Fulljames wrote to the Culture about a terrible scam being perpetrated by Acclaim (a computer games company). Basically, Acclaim ran a marketing promotion for their new game Turok Evolution, where volunteers would receive £500 and a free X-Box if they changed their name by deed poll to ‘Turok’.
The winners have been announced, and if [...]