Prada has launched its first mobile app, an extension of a visual partnership with fashion illustrator Richard Haines — a major digital move for the Italian fashion label, one that it describes as the culmination of "a multi-platform project combining hand-made artistry and cutting-edge technology."Continue reading...

Everywhere you look are advertisements: on your clothes, on your gas-pump handle, on manhole covers, or on the front of your subway card. But one man is aiming to create a special spot where consumers will be advertising-free. Strangely, though, it’s a place that has long been a home for advertisements: the billboard.

Artist Stephen Glassman believes that drivers shouldn’t have to be looking at advertisements when they are stuck in traffic. Instead, wouldn’t it be nice if they were looking at gardens floating in the sky? Glassman, who has been creating large-scale bamboo installations in L.A. since the 1992 riots there, would like to transform the world’s billboards into a sea of floating bamboo gardens, NPR reports.

Well, if we can bring clouds indoors, why not help more of nature float outdoors?Continue reading...

The tony Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas made its name with the “Just the right amount of wrong” campaign.

Building on that theme this summer was an on-site installation that invited the public to share their "right amount of wrong" in an exhibition called "Confessions," a public art project designed by New Orleans artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang, whose public installations aim to spark conversation. Visitors were asked to share their secrets anonymously, keeping the brotherhood intact of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but wooing over 1,500 confessions by exhibit end.

As artist-in-residence at The Cosmopolitan, Chang turned its P3 Studio gallery into a giant confessional, “inspired by Post Secret, Shinto shrine prayer walls, and Catholicism, people could write and submit their confessions on wooden plaques in the privacy of confession booths.” The confessional themes that emerged ran the gamut: “Over half were about sex, love, or fears of dying alone.”Continue reading...

Louis Vuitton today released a closer look at its year-long collaboration with Japan's dot-happy avant-garde artist Yoyoi Kusama. In addition to the limited-edition collection featuring her iconic polka dots, the brand is sponsoring her current Whitney museum exhibition in New York and released a book and iPhone app in support. Its new video walk-through of the pop-up store at Printemps Paris, above, gives a closer look at one of seven Kusama-centric Vuitton in-store boutiques around the world.

In an unprecedented move at one of those co-branded retail installations, Selfridges is devoting all 24 windows at its London flagship to the Vuitton x Kusama collection through Oct. 1st, including producing two short films titled "Spot the Difference" for the takeover and extending the Kusama craze to a Tate Modern tie-in. More on why Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs and Vuitton's partners are besotted with Kusama's dots below.Continue reading...

In a summer of shimmering heat, two high-end jewelry brands are offering royalty and art as artistic salve.

As you can see above, Tiffany & Co. is finally opening its Soho store in New York, and fêting the event with four artists’ renderings of true love — a recurring theme for the brand — “to trick out the hoarding around the façade” for two week stints each, each installation displayed on oversized wooden canvases in front of the Tiffany & Co. storefront as behind the scenes everything's getting ready for the opening.

Artist Danielle Dimstom kicked off the collaboration on July 16 with a stylized combination of text and drawings, followed by street artist Ellis Gallagher’s unique take on the colors of love on July 27. The current installation features a mural from Igor + Andre, which will be followed by the final artist in the series, Natasha Law. The installations can be viewed at 97 Greene Street.Continue reading...

Olympics sponsor GE is using data visualization to engage the public in the gargantuan logistical underpinning involved in mounting and hosting the Olympic Games.

"What (g)oes into building an Olympic city? GE's chief marketing officer Beth Comstock tweeted from a panel discussion Monday on the future of cities at the London Olympics. "Lots of technology and big machines hidden in plain sight." Her tweet linked to GE's Building the Games interactive map, which (powered by Bing search) features GE's infrastructure work behind the scenes of London 2012.Continue reading...

Sharpie loves fan input, evidenced by last year’s takeover of YouTube’s home page with user-generated art in an interactive mosaic ad that generated more than 62 million impressions in one day.

This year, Sharpie is inviting fans to create artwork for a music video for indie-pop band, California Wives, making their debut at the MTV Video Music Awards in September, in a campaign from Draftfcb Chicago.

Now through August 6th, submissions are open via the brand’s Facebook page and website. “What we’re really about is putting fans at the center of our story,” Ryan Rouse, global director of marketing for Sharpie, tells Marketing Daily. “It’s not about ambushing an audience with an ad; it’s about taking the passion within our community and amplifying that.” Continue reading...

God help the poor Pepsi-loving soul who wanders through London over the next few weeks. The dreaded brand police are swarming the country in search of any signs of anyone mentioning or attempting to showcase any corporate entity that is a competitor to the official Olympics sponsors, and anyone who even so much as thinks of sponsor Coke’s biggest competitor should fear the consequences. But that's nothing compared to what Nike is staging: the brashest act of ambush marketing in the history of the Olympics Games. And we'll bet they get away with it because, well, it's Nike.Continue reading...