Award-winning branding. Advertising. Design. Interactive. Social media. Broadcast. Print. Outdoor. Identity. Packaging. POS. Direct mail. Media planning and buying. Production. Not to mention the Tip. All in one action-packed agency in downtown San Francisco.
Judge Rachel Pasqua pretty much hit the nail on the head when she described the interface, created for the new generation of Hard Rock Cafes, as “an innovative combination of social and touchscreen technology with a tactile twist on the old restaurant booth jukebox that lets users thumb through the memorabilia and cast their vote for the next video.”
It all started with a groundbreaking little Deep Zoom website, conceived and designed by Duncan/Channon, that enabled rock fans to get extremely up-close-and-personal with Hard Rock’s memorabilia collection without having to travel. The site, now featuring 1,100 priceless pieces of rock history (en route to thousands more), was an immediate popular success – and a critical one, too, winning D/C two Webby honors.
But even as development continues on still more amazing editions of the site and its widget, Hard Rock management threw down the gauntlet: get the technology “out of the box” and into the properties, starting with the new flagship cafe opening today on the Las Vegas Strip.
Working with Hard Rock’s crack technology, property-development and memorabilia teams, and our friends and software development partner Vertigo, D/C designed three new interfaces for the cafe. These include two apps for Microsoft Surface – the multi-touch, multi-user, interactive tabletop – as well as a touch-based interface for the restaurant’s 38 booths, where guests can manipulate memorabilia, peruse merchandise and vote on what video plays next in the cafe. The agency also consulted with Obscura Digital on the Rock Wall™ – a massive (18 x 4 ft.), interactive display that enables six simultaneous guests to explore Hard Rock memorabilia with their fingertips.
There’s more. And more to come. But, honestly, isn’t that enough?
2) Share your favorite items on Facebook. Zoom in on any item you like and click on SHARE in the info panel to post that image and story back to your Facebook wall. Facebook?! Connect?! Yeah. I know. Friend my pal Watermelon Gum to see it in action… or go to the site and try it for yourself.
3) The Facebook Connect stuff is aided by a lightweight (invisible) Facebook app. Click the Fan button at the top of the page to keep in touch.
4) Filtering/searching via URL queries. No?! Yes! That’s what I’m telling you. Here’s an example of each of the link types we support as of today. Try ’em…
5) Filter-based embeddable widgets. Shut up! This is a bit of an “expert” feature for those in-the-know, and may only be used by Hard Rock for now, but – for you adventurous types – here’s a how-to page for custom widgets. And here’s a sample – every item that mentions the word “autograph.”
And there you have it. As the man said, Rock is King.
PS: Hidden bonus feature, just for kicks… Go to the site, enter v in the search box and then zoom out from there.
Whether it’s our favorite Dick speaking out against Obama and for torture. Or Senator Jim “MC Jimmy” DeMint vowing to break Obama over healthcare. Or Rush Limbaugh calling Sotomayor a “racist.” The right-wingnuts seem hell-bent on providing political satirists with rich material and our progressive, cause-marketing phone company client, CREDO Mobile, with perfect foils.
This just in: Duncan/Channon has been awarded two prestigious National ADDY Awards, for the much-honored, Deep Zoom-based Hard Rock memorabilia website (plus embeddable widget) and our own new, blogalicious site. Competing against, well, just about every ad agency in the entire ad universe, digital and analog, all of whom had received either silver or gold in regional ADDYs in order to qualify, D/C took home hard-earned silvers in the categories of Consumer Website and Interactive Self-Promotion. Hooray for brilliant ADDY judges.
We all know Birkenstocks are good for you. But sometimes we need to be reminded that they also look good on you – and sometimes a little bird can do just that.
For Spring, ’09, the venerable German sandal macher, pulled out all the fashion stops, with new colors and looks meant to once and for all put to rest the notion that anti-fashion has to be funky. Then they invited D/C to communicate this shift to a marketplace that has some deeply ingrained ideas about the brand.
Whereupon D/C tossed the ball to, among others, a monkey, who seems to have nailed it. Go, monkey.
The manufacturers of the original Danish clog, Sanita, have been making shoes for the US market for years. But now they’ve decided to sell them under their own brand. As part of a complete re-branding, we created print ads, POS, banners, social media outreach and a new website. And as part of that process, D/C discovered that the brand’s essence was the wonderfully difficult-to-pronounce, echt-Danish concept of “hygge.” It’s kind of like comfort, but so much more. You really need a Dane to explain. (Click the image above to cue web video.)
The groundbreaking, Deep-Zoom-able Hard Rock Memorabilia website and widget – conceived and designed by D/C and built by Vertigo – have been designated an Official 2009 Webby Honoree in two categories: Music and Best Use of Photography.
As the Webby folks explain, Honorees are the “top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement… with nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries.”
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