Above, watch a video case study submitted to the Cannes Lions for Jeep-In, a mobile interactive game created for Chrysler's Jeep brand in Poland by Leo Burnett's Warsaw office. The mobile marketing promotion targeted young car-buyers by inviting them to hit the off-road and check-in along a virtual treasure map and collect awards along the way, with the player collecting the most awards winning a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Elsewhere in Europe last year, Leo Burnett Brussels tested a different spin on treasure hunts for a different Jeep model (the Compass) with a different interactive game challenge: to find Belgium's most deserted mailbox.

A 24-hour theater production has just wrapped — on Facebook, of all places. Stuff Theatre, a digital branded experience strictly for Facebook, was a first of its kind live, global event where performers took over Facebook for 24 hours straight. The curtain went up at 9 a.m. on Wednesday and wrapped 24 hours later.

The brand behind the stunt: Norton Securities, owned by Symantec, whose mission in life is to grab people's attention to what's happening online. Consider Stuff Theatre a mini-marathon of branded entertainment, a sponsored social campaign that can't be zapped (like TV commercials) and offers fresh original content in a space where consumers are likely to pay attention.Continue reading...

The marketing folks at McDonald’s seem to be a little obsessed with the fast-food chain’s fries these days. The company has a national television commercial with a grandpa fishing with his young grandson, who catches a few humans that are after his bait: a fry. Yes, kids, they're not fly-fishing but fry-fishing.

Now comes the news that the company’s new regional ad campaign around its corporate hometown of Chicago, “Best Fries on the Planet,” features a few billboards designed by Leo Burnett that honor the fried potatoes with giant streaming shafts of light.

The new billboards for McDonald’s, which is based in that city’s suburb of Oak Brook, are “giant boxes of fries with beacons of golden light illuminating the night sky,” according to NBC Chicago. Yes, kids, they're frylights, not skylights.Continue reading...

Counterfeit branded products continue to plague legitimate marketers both on the street and online. Fueled by wary consumers seeking bargains and a global economy hampered by weak or non-existent intellectual property protection, phony goods skyrocketed last year, and this year will likely be no different.

Counterfeiting is a global problem, but it seems that China has developed a reputation as ground zero for fake brands. In China, counterfeiting is a black market industry that goes far beyond luxury brands, pervading virtually every product category. In part, it is because Chinese manufacturers can knock off brands with relative ease, given the low cost of manufacturing and high consumer demand, coupled with copyright, trademark and patent infringement regulations that are lax at best. 

While fake brands steal revenue from legitimate brands, the problem is all the more severe when a phony brand actually presents a health hazard to the consumer. Last year, for example, some 200,000 Chinese died from consuming counterfeit pharmaceuticals, according to Interpol's secretary general, Ronald K. Noble.

That's why brand owners have been feverishly trying to come up with anti-counterfeiting techniques.Continue reading...

Next week, starting June 21st, the either very brave or very stupid David Perez is going to the Cannes Advertising Festival, but with a peculiar mission. In a Subservient Chicken-like social media experiment dreamed up by his boss at Leo Burnett in Chicago, Perez will obey the 24/7 dictates and whims sent to his Twitter account (@davidondemand). The Chicago Sun-Times calls it a "stroke of unbridled tastelessness" — what say you?