To help raise awareness to women in Mexico on the hazards of putting on make up while driving, Mini created the above campaign. They removed the soap dispensers in girls bathrooms and then while they were doing their make up, set off a hidden airbag with a safety message. Watch above and enjoy the reactions.

Ad Agency: Publicis, Mexico

Touching ad from for the Home Depot by The Richards Group, Dallas. The filmed employee’s kids talking about the great things their parents do to help others, helping to humanise the Home Depot brand. Simple, effective.

Cafe Neamess is one of Israel’s most popular coffee brands, but people often don’t publicise they drink it because it isn’t seen as a premium brand. To change this and get people talking ad agency BBR Saatchi & Saatchi, Israel, created a site that allowed people to appear in a billboard at a location of their choice, along with a personal message. 1000 people were picked and given their own billboard, because it was personalised the people shared it with their friends, helping to create huge publicly for the brand again.

If you want some inspiration/tips, and a nice short advertising success story, watch Neil Blumenthal, founder of Warby Parker share how he built his brand into a multi-million dollar company in under 2 years from some creative ideas.

Via: PSFK

Children with special needs struggle to communicate. The children at the Al Manzil School for special needs were trying to reach out to the world through art. Ad Agency DDB Dubai created Conversations, a unique exhibition of their paintings giving them a platform to establish a dialogue with the world.

A simple device next to each piece of art enabled people to listen to what the child had to say, and then record their response, thus completing the conversation. The public responses were then played back to the kids, helping to give them a better sense of worth and happiness.

Conversations is now a permanent platform that will continue to showcase the artistic talents of these children, making them feel exceptional, rather than an exception.

Great to see an example of technology used for good by helping to bring people (and 2 countries) closer together. Coke created vending machines that got people in Pakistan and India to connect live and share an experience and a Coke. The campaign was made by Leo Burnett Chicago & Sydney. I must say it’s a brilliant piece of work, but does bear somewhat of a similarity with the below Google Project Re: Brief Share a Coke campaign from last year though.

Something fun, simple, and short to brighten up your day from Specsavers, featuring a joke with a cat, what’s not to love.

Another nice activation from Heineken, although this one does feel a little staged. They put stadium seats in a designer furniture store and challenged guys to get their girlfriend / wife to agree to but the seats. The first guy to get his girl to let him buy the seats won tickets to the UK to watch the UEFA Champions League final.

Nice idea from Nike. To help promote their new Nike FC247 football boots that can be used on any surface, they created a portable laser projector rig then enables you to project a football pitch on any surface. Would be interesting to see how this gets used in the future.

Nice work by agency Doubleyou, Spain.

The above case study is a pretty effective, yet shocking, ad tactic for the Australian Transport Accident called Roadtrip Forever.

The interactive campaign uses Facebook and features custom video clips with made up augmented dialog from your best friend showing what could happen if you drink / text and drive. If you don’t mind being shocked give it a go at Roadtrip Forever.

Agency: Southern Cross Austereo, Melbourne.