Jim Beam makes you strong like Arnie

With over 28,000 views this video is reasonably popular. What interests me is the comments such as (excuse the language in them)...

"jim beam is the shit, sooo much better then jack,."

In many ways, although this is clearly a random video and not made by an agency or endorsed by the brand, it does give the brand a massively masculine vibe. Just a bit of fun really.

MyPenguin

From the ever brilliant PSFK:

"When we were in London a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin books was kind enough to give us a new edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Magic Tales from the Brothers Grimm. The interesting part: the covers are blank and the owner is invited to draw his or her own cover. They're part of the MyPenguin series and the back of the book announces, "Books By The Greats, Covers By You".

Penguin are also asking people to send scans of their covers to an online gallery here. As you can see from the above, we've still got to get to the book - we were thinking, wouldn't it be nice if after we finished the book we'd leave an image that was inspired by the book, then we'd pass the book on for someone else to read and leave their own mark and so on and so on..."

Here are some examples which you can see here.





You can imagine something like this working for any number of our brands which are often bought as gifts.

Loopt

Similar to Dodgeball which we have blogged about previously Loopt offers the chance to organise your entire life through your phone. See where friends are hanging out, tag good places to visit and stay in touch with everyone at the same time.

This looks like a great site and a brilliant way of integrating a campaign.

Via Russell Davies blog.

Generator

This blog full of user generated tools is brilliant. Of particular interest is this Absolut example. You get a chance to fill in the top and bottom lines as per the example below.



I wonder whether anyone is capturing the lines that are written and whether there is a gallery of user generated bottles somewhere?

Other great examples include this tattoo generator.



Have a look at the rest of the Generator site for some great ways of dressing up presentations.

Thanks to Russell Davies' blog for this.

Threshers implosion!

Threshers the UK off licence is bracing itself for a huge loss as uptake on its 40% off voucher far exceeded expectations.

The Observer has an article detailing the current pre-Christmas craze for vouchers as retailers try to lure people away from the internet and into their shops.

Personally, I think Super High Street has the answer.

Pop up bar in Soho

From PSFK:

"Earlier this week we checked out a pop-up bar that the Heavenly Social team have set up for four weeks in the old Pop bar at the top of London's Soho (remember Pop anyone??). The idea behind 'Everything Must Go' is to take a deserted bar and run special events including live music."

The beauty of pop up bars is that they offer the chance to test ideas and give a brand energy.

For previous entries on pop up bars click here.

Great Christmas present site

A typical question board above... and a few of the gift options below.



Imagini gift finder is a very clever site where you can create a profile of the person you need to find a gift for by completing a set of visual indexing tasks. Really great idea and brilliantly executed. Would be a really interesting way of launching a global gifting catalogue for VAPs.