TBWA, adidas, the ALL BLACKS and Photosynth

TBWA have teamed up with adidas to launch the 2009 All Black jersey with a  new campaign.

This is how it works:

1) Buy the 2009 All Black jersey to go into the draw to photograph the All Blacks during the national anthem at one of the home test matches.

2) The photos are then loaded into photosynth and embedded on the adidas website.

3) At the end of the home matches the photos are going to be used to build a stylised 10th Anniversary adidas ALL BLACKS poster.

As a side note I have been working with TBWA/Shift and David Gedye (Group Manager for Photosynth & best known as the original founder of the SETI@home project) on the scoping phase of this project. If you look at the second synth of the All Blacks vs Italy you’ll see improvements to the approach over what is currently published on the adidas website.

Just like in Christchurch at the sell out first Bledisloe Cup match in Auckland 500 disposable cameras were given out to the public when they entered the ground. More than 160 of the cameras were returned and form part of the resulting synth that you can check out at https://tr.im/RichieMcCaw (also embedded on the adidas.com site). You can see the difference in quality of the pro shots and the “low fi” film shots taken by fans.

Incidentally before the match the competition was explained and the campaign video was played out on the big screen.

 

TBWA worked with Jonah Lomu (rugby legend) to explain photosynth and the latest crowd sourced All Blacks poster. I noticed that Andy Blood chose to embed a  quicktime video in the page so I thought I’d use one of the new Expression Encoder 3 templates to play that same MP4 video using Silverlight below.

All the tweeting during the match was enough to get the term “All Blacks” as the #2 trending topic on twitter around the world!

I’m excited to see photosynth being adopted by large companies, events,  magazines (caution link contains bikinis) and innovative execution. Done right this technology forms the basis of a very solid campaign.

Add geo-location and Bing Maps 3D and we are starting to get something really quite special!

As an alternative experience the amazing team at Soul Solutions in Australia have created a prototype that enables photosynth to work natively on Bing Maps using Silverlight. You can try it out for yourself at https://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au.

At a time when new media agencies are trying to differentiate themselves and fight shrinking budgets, innovative solutions like Silverlight & photosynth can really play their part. I don’t know the cost of this campaign but I can only guess that it is substantially less than the ambitious $1.3 million campaign that Sanitarium took on to leverage their sponsorship of the 2009 All Blacks.