1. Burberry on Vine
The 157-year-old fashion label Burberry has been noted for its digital innovation in the past few years and, most recently, it has taken to creating looping videos on Twitter’s six-second social video service, Vine. The brand has "Vined" invitations to live streams, clips of its catwalk shows and montages of some celebrity friends, including One Direction’s Harry Styles. Crucially, it has grown an audience on the fledgling video service to more than 38,000. Vine was introduced by Twitter in January and reportedly has more than 40 million registered users.
2. BMW i3
Virtual reality has never quite broken into the mainstream, but this app for the i3 from BMW and WCRS brings it closer. In this test drive with a difference, the user receives a call from a panicked man before embarking on an adventure. The interactive, first-person experience is fully immersive with ambient sounds and allows the user to explore their environment in 360 degrees. Couple this with wearable tech such as Google Glass, and the future for virtual-reality marketing looks exciting.
3. GuardianWitness app
As part of its commitment to open journalism, The Guardian launched an app in partnership with the mobile network EE to crowdsource videos, pictures and stories from the general public. GuardianWitness empowers a community of contributors and allows journalists to use and credit the crowdsourced content in the brand’s existing products. The partnership is also intended to raise awareness of EE as the leader of mobile connectivity. The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, Tweeted that the platform enables the media brand to "follow, as well as lead".
4. Mercedes-Benz mash-up
With a little help from Tinie Tempah, Mercedes-Benz created an interactive music experience with Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and the digital production company B-Reel. The campaign targeted a younger audience who are potentially more likely to be creating video and music content and publishing it online. It centred on a standalone website where users could remix the soundtrack to the TV spot for the Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG saloon, Pass Out by Tinie Tempah, to include noises of the car model. Users were then able to share their creations across social networks.
5. The Co-op’s snapchat vouchers
The Co-operative staked its claim as the UK’s first retailer to use Snapchat for marketing purposes this year when it launched a voucher campaign on the platform. Snapchat, an app that allows users to exchange "self-destructing" photographs that disappear a number of seconds after they have been viewed, was used to send students a promotional code for 30 per cent off laptops purchased from The Co-operative Electrical. The code was only available for five to ten seconds after the image was opened on the consumer’s phone.
6. Tesco and Amscreen
The partnership between Tesco and Amscreen has brought us a little closer to the technological world of tomorrow as depicted in Minority Report. Amscreen’s OptimEyes technology is claimed to be able to determine a customer’s gender and age, and will be launched across 450 Tesco petrol stations in the five-year deal. Tesco estimates that the digital media network will capture up to five million adults each week with dynamic, branded content about news, weather and sport. Amscreen’s chief executive, Simon Sugar, said he was "extremely excited" about the roll-out.
7. Nissan Note interactive film
Nissan and TBWA created an interactive film to promote the car-maker’s new model Note. The video started with the user being invited on a test drive and played out like a wedding runaway drama. It used Facebook’s application programming interface to incorporate the user’s data, such as their name and photos available on the social network, into the narrative throughout the experience. Users were also able to share the film with a friend through Facebook to create a personalised experience of their own.
8. Department for Transport ‘#publooshocker’
To raise awareness of the dangers of drink-driving to young men in a new way, the Department for Transport and Leo Burnett created an online, hidden-camera video set in the toilet of a pub. While visitors are washing their hands, a mannequin’s head smashes through the mirror in front of them, complete with car-crash sound effects. The video has been viewed 9.7 million times and has been shared an estimated 270,000 times.
9. O2 Be More Dog app
Extending the "be more dog" campaign into the digital space led to the launch of an app, created by Lida. The light-hearted app is an eight-ball-style question-and-answer game in which users type a question and choose between a "dog" or a "cat" answer. Customers were contacted via e-mail and text message with a call to action to "shake things up" and use the app to "be more dog". Answers were shareable on users’ social networks.
10. Red Bull ‘imaginate’
Two years in the making, Red Bull worked with the Scottish trial cyclist Danny MacAskill to create "imaginate". In the spot, MacAskill cycles and performs stunts around a playground of his imagination – huge coloured pencils, toy soldiers and pyramids made from life-sized playing cards. The seven-minute film has been viewed on YouTube more than 11 million times since it was released in June. It has also picked up more than 600,000 shares across Facebook and Twitter alone, and has attracted in excess of 13,000 comments.