Very nice. Hat tip OgilvyOne massive.

Next question… can brands who finance this functionality, make it pay for itself by selling the application to local vendors to be featured? If I’m selling strawberries and ice cream just near Henman Hill, I’m sure it would be a great way to improve your chances of being found and chosen particularly if you ran a promotion. Incorporating a voucher incentive scheme (the voucher redeemable when you showed your IBM map on your phone for example) could tell you exactly how many strawberries and cream sales have been converted and driven by the ad I’ve placed within the IBM map.

Oh yes, and lest we forget, activity like this (with a story), google normally says ‘yes’ to:

And having had nothing really to report for the past few weeks (due mainly to the fact I was asleep on a Portugese beach for two weeks), blog-worthy stuff has been coming thick and fast since I’ve got back in the saddle.

So, to kick things off, IBM. OK, being totally transparent here, they are one of our clients and we’re helping get the word out for the ‘fight carbon’ campaign, the website of which you can find here and facebook page here (I’m finding myself ‘pitching’ to a few of my contemporaries, who I read on a regular basis, which is a little strange, but luckily the campaign is pretty sweet.)

So, it’s a b2b campaign developed by Ogilvy targeting business decision-makers (of course, the core of my readership as this previous post and comments would ratify) to highlight that by tracking down carbon in unexpected places within a business, can actually impact the company’s bottom line quite dramatically. And of course there are the regulatory pressures (EU emissions trading scheme for example) and rising energy costs as added incentives to ’cutting carbs’ at the top of your to-do list.

But of course, carbon is not always transparent (unlike this blog). So the creative idea to communicate this initiative for IBM was to use a technique called ‘reverse graffiti’.

Cut carbon. Cut costs.

A mural artist was employed to scrape back the soot on dirty buildings and railway stations in and around Toronto (our team found a non-operational subway platform, a rooftop parking lot, and a tunnel) to produce some lovely messaging on the grotty surfaces. Without further a-do, here are the vids…

Operation Subway: Reduce Carbon. Pull the Plug

Operation Rooftop: Reduce Carbon. Rethink Your Transport

Operation Roadside: Reduce Carbon. See Big Savings

In the spirit of the clean graffiti project, the locations were cleaned entirely using only water, a rag and a non-harmful cleaning product. After each mural was completed, the entire site was cleaned, leaving no trace of the artwork except on film and hence why now they’re being distributed online. To find out more visit the site here.

Have I just sold my soul?! Nah, this campaign is pretty good. An utter abuse of my position to get content first? Probably…