With it’s 3-intertwined steel cube’s wrapped in electric-white led neon tube, the hanging chandelier has several animated light sequences that will change over the next few months. Get into General Pants mid-city store and check it out (and the fashion! the fashion! all the fashionable clothes). .

Parklife is a national outdoor music festival held every year in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, and Melbourne. Fuzzy has been presenting it for a few years now , and whoy’ oy ‘boy, do they put on a great party. This year there’s more than a mile-wide nature strip of talent including Missy Elliott, Chiddy Bang, Groove Armada, Cut Copy, The Dandy Warhols and many more internationals, plus local musical talent too of course.  We got a chance to produce their TV promo which will spruke tickets on sale for the coming Spring Events.

Phillip Sage directed the spot with the assistance of Jen Fuller and Nadia Surtees who helped craft the hundreds of pieces of paper and cardboard blades of grass, flowers, bugs and beatles.  You’ll see the clip on Channel V, or can check it out on our site in the Pusher Lab section soon. There might be a few Parklife tickets remaining, and if you do get the chance to boogie on down make sure you check out the giant performance backdrop screen at the main stage as there’ll be some more Pusher stop motion pieces behind the big acts on stage. Check out the promo on Vimeo

A Start in Life is an Australian charity that has been providing underprivileged children with basics like school books, clothes, school shoes, education and support. A Start in Life has been doing this for over 85 years. Pusher was able to help in the development of their ‘Adopt an Aussie’ campaign and also created a 30 second TV commercial starring a very focused young actress. In the early hours of a noisy school day, her role involved starring down the lens of one very big camera for a very tense 30 second shot. Filming on location at Bondi Primary School the scene was brought to life with the help of the schools existing desks and props, along with a rang of our developer Raymond’s kids toys, drawings and artistic masterpieces (thanks Ray).

A brilliant performance by all. Special thanks to Jungle Boys for the production, and Luke Eve (who we’ve now had the pleasure of working with on spots involving Japanese pizza shops, ‘trained’ pit-bulls, primary school kids, and let’s not forget the coffee cups banking commercial!). Master Luke.

The spot’s been on Foxtel for a few weeks now and hundreds of donations to the charity have helped many more Aussie kids. There’s also a 30 second info-graphic on air to support our School Girl TVC. It’s more of a statistics based educational animated piece. You’d be very surprised, and concerned about the number of Australian children currently living in poverty. This is 2010, Australia. Who would think the number could be so high? If you want to help, why not Adopt an Aussie and change a life today?

A fair few weeks back the team signed their lives away (at least for the month of May) to pitch on the digital creative account for Ardent Leisure Group, owners of Australia’s most loved fun-parks including Dreamworld, WhiteWater World, AMF, King-Pin Bowling, M9 Laser skirmish centres, and the national chain of Goodlife Health Clubs.  Today, after being tight lipped in celebration, Pusher and B&T Mag got to exclusively announce the win.  Along with becoming a top’notch key account for Pusher, this roller-coaster’strike of a win holds a special place for me. Many years back, my first Award School crack for the ‘The Claw’ made it to the wall.   Diggidy, top tune & salad days! Ecstatic to have had a dream brief in the early days…and now am getting to work on that dream. This feels better than the best job. v- happy friday.

Grab your 3D sunnies (which you should have in your back pocket these days) and check out our little 3D trial. What do you think?

If you are a social networking hick and love all things ville and wars you can now buy and redeem products at 7-Eleven and gain points on a virtual punch card to unlock uber gifts to share with friends on Facebook.  Trialing in the US & Canada for now, the promotion is like a fly-buys points program for convenience store shopping that rewards you with an online Zynga game challenge every time you buy specially marked products. The ‘Buy, Earn, Pay’ promotion in-game Zynga challenges allow you to gain Ville cred, and depending on what you’re into, there’s challenges for MafiaWars, YoVille and FarmVille. Each game has its own unique gifts with users scrolling over the items for more details. You can also submit your code via text message and activate the in-game challenge that way.

I don’t know if the flight to LA is worth it at this stage, but when the promo hits Australia you can bet there will be plenty of people waiting to uber-gift on Farmville, Fishville, YoVille, Vampire Wars and the recently released FrontierVille where you get to carve out a home in the wilderness and raise a family, fight bears and snakes…you can collect FrontierVille Facebook gold too. Fellow pioneers who have been Frontier’ing for a while, can someone please tell me if I should start counting my chickens that the price of my gold is going to go up? How long before the first 7-Eleven opens in the Wild West?! All this land clearing has made me super thirsty for a Slurpee.

-mike

I went to a presentation this weekend on Technology and Behaviour for the Creative Sydney festival. Mike Walsh was one of the speakers, and I was really impressed with his insights. He talked about some of the interesting trends happening in Asia specifically, including internet addiction, group buying, user generated (or altered content) and the future of mobile phones. I could probably write an essay on his talk because I found it so interesting! But I’ll just talk about one point.

One of the main points I took from the talk was the fact that our world will soon be filled with people that have always lived with the internet and will not know life without it (people born after 1994). The internet will not be something you “go to” but just something that is. From this we need to make the technologies work for us, and change with them. One example of this is in China where group buying has become a phenomena. If someone wants to buy a fridge they put the call out to find 300 other people that want that same fridge. They then set a date and store location, and flash mob it, demanding 300 fridges at a huge discounted price (shop owners are normally so afraid of having 300 angry customers in the store, that they usually agree! ha). Perfect aye!

Another example about this was from another speaker Rachel Botsman. She believed that we were moving from a hyper consumption market into a collaborative consumption market. Pointing out that as technology is advancing our behaviours seem to be moving back to old ways of bartering and sharing. Things like share cars, couch surfing and land share are creating experiences we want to share and show off rather than things or objects.

I was really inspired and optimistic after hearing these two speakers about the future of technology and social media. Basically I feel that we are moving into a more social world with technology, where everyone can share their social experiences, help others and feel good about themselves. The more we can use technology and trust it, the more it lends itself to us being able to make it work for us and really benefit our lives by making them richer and fuller.

-Brett

Good news comes in 3’s, and this week turned into one hell of a triple-decker whopper when was Pusher nominated for an Effie Award. Introduced by the New York American Marketing Association in 1968, the Effie Awards have become recognised as the pre-eminent award in the advertising industry. Now held in 39 countries around the world, The Effie Awards honour the most significant achievement in advertising and marketing communications: effectiveness.

The 2010 Australian Effie Awards attracted 154 entries from agencies and clients with Pusher making it as a finalist for the most effective small budget campaign (less than 500k). We’re not hegding bets just yet, but we’re hoping a million’ that it’s ours. Winner announced end of August!

 -mike

Having just recently knockoff another birthday with the Pusher crew the week before, Brett Walsh still had time to sneak into the Young Lions Finals in the digital Cyber category.

Working with Natalie Dummigan, their brief for the final round of competition was for ‘Reach Out’ and addressed the issue of binge drinking among young people. Did it take them long to crack a great entry? Well, as per the rules of the global competition, they answered the brief with creative and production of their entry in less than 24 hours! Check out their solution and the winners.

Unfortunately, as the results came in, a team from Clemenger BBDO Melbourne managed to pinch first place, but Pusher have still got a few more fighting entries to come next year. Stay tuned and check out the great work from around the globe here.

-mike

It was my 26th Birthday yesterday, and the rest of the pusher crew helped me celebrate in style the crazy cats! No “normal” pictures allowed here! ha Oh and the celebrations continued today with me finding out I was shortlisted for the Australian Cannes Young Lions 2010 competition. #http://www.newsspace.com.au/cannes/lions/brief

Next Monday I get given a 24 hour cyber brief that I need to resolve. Fingers cross I nail that and will be jetsetting to Cannes to rep Australia! ha If you want to check out my shortlisted entry #http://www.visualicecream.com.au/yl10/1st_round