BlackBerry's new global creative director for the revamped company is featured in the first video for her part of the "Keep Moving Projects" cultural influencer project. The Grammy Award-winning musician is asking fans to use the video-editing feature on the new BlackBerry Z10 to contribute to local crowdsourced videos showcasing her current global tour.

Watch BlackBerry's video pitch to Keys fans, along with the first two episodes of author Neil Gaiman's BlackBerry project, below:Continue reading...

Last year, Americans spent nearly $135 billion on gifts during the holiday season, with video games ranking most popular for kids. So this holiday season, Energy BBDO and Xi Chicago decided to remind kids the simple joys of play with the opposite of a video game: a cardboard box. 

Remember Caine's Arcade, the touching video of a boy who made a cardboard arcade in his dad's used auto parts store in East Los Angeles? Cue "Mister Imagine's Toy Store," a pop-up shop selling nothing but cardboard in Chicago’s Wicker Park, to promote real play and creativity, as part of the Chicago Children’s Museum’s current “Unboxed: Adventures in Cardboard” exhibit.

As Adweek notes, “Children can select a box (a donation is requested) and then head to the art room to create their own unique creation. If kids are having trouble figuring out what to make, they can step up to an augmented reality station and see options appear on their box, ask a handy art facilitator on staff, or simply look around at the stunning artworks that make up the decor.”Continue reading...

It’s been about two and a half years since nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil was dumped into the Gulf of Mexico as the result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the owners of that particular well – BP – would love it if the world would just forget about the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

Now a key piece has been settled with its $4.5 billion fine, the energy giant is returning to full-on “advertising (in the UK) next year with a campaign showcasing the contribution the company makes to society,” as Marketing Magazine reports. The corporate citizenship-themed push will note its cultural partnerships with the London Royal Opera House and the British Museum as well as its sponsorship of the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

Even while the oil was gushing into the Gulf, BP spent nearly $100 million on advertising, CNN reports, three times the amount of cash it had laid out in the same time period the previous year. BP claimed that the increase was partially due to ads it bought in the Gulf Coast region to inform people there about the recovery effort.Continue reading...

In socially conservative India, consumers can’t actually buy a copy of Playboy magazine even if all they want to do is read the articles. The mag known for its pics of naked women is banned from being sold in the second most populated country in the world, but that doesn’t mean the Playboy brand isn’t strong there. 

It is so strong, in fact, that a Playboy club is set to open in mid-December there, accoding to the Times of India — but don’t get too excited, fellas. The club won’t have any nudity.

“There will be nothing contrary to Indian sensibilities,” said Sanjay Gupta, chief executive officer of Mumbai-based PB Lifestyle Ltd, which has licensed the Playboy name in India and plans to open eight clubs there, the Wall Street Journal reports. “We are in the process of launching a sustained PR campaign starting this month to dissociate Playboy with adult content and nudity.” 

"Bunnies are an integral part of Playboy culture," said Gupta to AP. "We will have bunnies but keeping in mind Indian sensibilities, we are toning down the costume. We are working very closely with Playboy to design a bunny outfit for India." Details of the Indian bunny costume, he added, are "confidential."Continue reading...

BMW is taking its Guggenheim Lab cultural collaboration to Mumbai after stops in New York, and Berlin.

The six-year collaboration between the blue chip automaker and the prestigious museum kicked off this past summer in New York. Now the global road show is heading to India to examine the relationship between social behavior and art and cutting to the heart of pressing urban challenges worldwide.

Running from December 9 through January 20, the Mumbai installation — which will be based in the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum — will offer “design projects, participatory studies, tours, talks, workshops, film screenings and cultural activities [that] will address challenges and opportunities related to public space and the choices Mumbaikars make to balance individual and community needs.”Continue reading...

Dolce & Gabbana's spring/summer 2013 runway show had barely finished parading on the catwalk in Milan on Sept. 24 when the luxury fashion brand found itself generating buzz ... less for the clothes than for the accessories — specifically, the earrings dangling from the models' lobes. Depicting an African American woman's fruit-carrying head as earrings smacked of colonialism to some, and just plain offensive to others, and not just women and people of color.

D&G, accused of "romanticising slavery" and worse, turned to Vogue to publish the brand's explanation in an online article titled "Dolce & Gabbana Explains Controversial Jewellery." That's fairly ironic, considering Vogue has been behind both the NBA star LeBron James "King Kong" cover controversy and raked for a reference to "a pair of large, gold hoops as 'slave earrings'."

But did D&G's own show add the ultimate irony of its excuse? And what did they think would be the response?Continue reading...

One way McDonald's plans to keep on growing around the globe is to open itself increasingly to local tastes rather than simply trying to impose the Big Mac on every national market, which is how the chain started out. Interestingly, however, just as McDonald's is making such a move in India with new vegetarian restaurants, it's being tripped up by a matter of cultural sensitivity just a few hundred miles from McDonald's Chicago headquarters in the good ol' U.S. of A.

It seems that billboards in St. Paul touted McDonald's breakfast offerings in Hmong, the indigenous language of Hmong-Americans who comprise a major enclave of 64,000 people in the Twin Cities. The billboards put up by local franchisees — the first time McDonald's has ever advertised to Asia's Hmong community in the U.S. — were supposed to say, "Coffee Gets You Up, Breakfast Gets You Going."

But thanks to a garbled translation from English to Hmong, the text reads as gobbledygook to the Hmong-American population. McDonald's apologized for the error and set about to correct it immediately. Overseas, meanwhile, McDonald's newest culturally relevant move outside the U.S. — bringing vegetarian-only fare to some restaurants in India next year — is one of the biggest efforts by McDonald's in accommodating its brand to consumers outside its home U.S. market, and also inadvertently stepping on some toes.Continue reading...

One mooncake wears a thong. Another, called the "full monty," is a bare buttocks. One other mooncake, called "spread my cheeks," is exactly what it says.

The very unconventional line of mooncakes comes from Hong Kong's cheeky design maves at lifestyle brand/retailer G.O.D. (short for "Goods of Desire") and it, according to Jingdaily.com, "puts the 'moon' in mooncakes."Continue reading...