Creative Bus Ad Uses Eye Tracking Technology

A poster at a bus stop in Hamburg, Germany actually changes when people look at it. The poster, which is a domestic abuse awareness ad from Amnesty International, uses eye tracking to determine when someone is looking at it. What first appears as a photo of a man striking a woman changes (after a short delay) to a photo of a happy couple when it detects that someone is looking.

People have speculated that this ad was created primarily to win an award, which it did (Silver Award at the Cannes Lions 2009 Outdoor) since it has only been installed at one location. With that said, it's been getting a lot of publicity and it's reach has clearly extended beyond the lone bus stop in Hamburg.

I love seeing technology used so effectively to convey this point. What do you think? Do you know of other examples that effectively use new technology?

Microsoft Has Found Apple's Achilles' Heel

It seems that Microsoft has found, and is exploiting Apple's weakness. It's long been argued that Apple computers are overpriced. I happen to disagree with that opinion, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the perceived imbalance in value and the Laptop Hunter ads exploit that perfectly.

In case you haven't seen the ads, they show someone looking for a new computer to fit a certain budget. The shopper glances at the Macs but deems them too expensive and settles on a PC. (View Ads) These ads seem to be quite effective. As a recent AdAge article points out, Apple's value perception has fallen while Microsoft's has risen.

The funny thing about all of this is that Apple seems to be afraid that the ads are working. Wired recently reported that Microsoft COO Kevin Turner recently said that he got a call from Apple telling them to stop running the ads. For now, Microsoft just seems to be emboldened by the response from Apple and doesn't plan to stop running the ads anytime soon. And whey should they? The ads seem to be working perfectly.

Adam Lee Design Wins Gold and Silver at the 2009 Inland Empire ADDY Awards

The winners of the 2009 Inland Empire ADDY awards were announced on Friday night and we came away with a couple of awards.

We took the Gold award for a set of posters we designed for Loma Linda University Children's Hospital. The posters were for an event that featured olympic athletes and were a very fun project to work on. I blogged about the posters back in November and you can see a few of them in that post.

Our Silver award was for last year's annual report design for Loma Linda University Medical Center. This was a great team effort involving an AE and writer from LLUMC as well as a photographer that took some amazing photos. The annual report will be up in our portfolio soon.

The ADDY Awards is an annual competition conducted by the American Advertising Federation. The awards honor excellence in advertising, graphic design, web design and in the elements of advertising, illustration and photography.