There are things that you describe to get people to try out.  And there are things that if you try and describe them, you know ultimately that your effort will fail to do the subject justice.

The Wilderness Downtown is one of those subjects.

So I won’t talk to much about what it does.  I’ll talk a little bit about Why it exists and How it does what it does.

Google wanted to create a way to showcase the powers of HTML 5 as a new standard of programming.

How it does, or what it demonstrates include the use of your location to generate content, customized renderings of street maps, using your mouse pointer to interact with the experience and for me the coolest thing was the coordinated pop-up windows.

Now I normally hate pop-ups (like everyone else), but they’ve shown that even bad things can have great effects.

Since this was done by Google, it only works on Chrome.  Only 17% of the world is using Chrome right now, but The Wilderness Downtown might be a good reason to try it out!

A colleague passed this video to me this morning.  It’s a good set of case studies on companies that are doing Social Marketing well.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypmfs3z8esI[/youtube]

Short post.  I saw this Infographic called the “Map of Social Networks.” It’s really cool.  Spend a couple minutes to check it out.

I just love this AT&T banner game.  For one, it puts the game inside the banner, thereby maximizing the game’s reach.  In Vietnam, very often we see games being embedded in the center of a microsite, which reduces its reach by a factor of 1,000.  An average CTR in Vietnam is 0.1%, or 1 out of every 1,000 people who see a banner will click on it.

By putting the game in the banner, they have vastly increased the chances of people playing in the game.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJX1JheBe0A&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

On the other side, this game actually uses a real life mechanic of “heading” the ball.  Instead of manufacturing an artificial behavior to highlight Augmented Reality, AT&T uses a gesture that users are already familiar with.   The banner brings you right into the soccer game.  A motion capture technology called ZugMO from interactive marketing agency Zugara.  You in a very real sense are taking part in the game.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xEoqWuN1_8[/youtube]

Here’s a great campaign from Durex, on why you should wear a condom.  I love how they’ve utilized the iPhone to show the very real cost of not using contraception.  

Classic example of advertising the benefits of using the product, and not the product itself.