Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 innovation (editor = jérémy dumont, strategic planner, france)

M-Lab

Forget your traditional definition of an amusement park, Wannado City leaves behind the cotton candy, the solicitors of large stuffed animals, the mindless entertainment and trash. Instead the “city” has redefined child entertainment with aspirational activities, all of which are framed around the question: “What do you wanna do when you grow up?”



Wannado City was crafted from the vision of Mexican-born Luis Javier Laresgoiti, who had a eureka moment while watching his daughter “play executive” on his business phone. Laresgoiti, with the backing of several major corporations has crafted a dream world where children are encouraged to take on an adult profession and see where it takes them. The park is located in Sawgrass Mills Mall in Southern Florida.



Each venue has its own concentration, such as the Motorola-sponsored M-Lab that focuses on innovation and invention. The M-Lab turns each visitor is given a white lab coat and transformed into an “M-Ventor.” The children are encouraged to work together on a technology-based game to solve a difficult problem. Once they’ve solved the situation at hand, they’re greeted with a congratulatory “Mission Accomplished” banner.



M-Lab however, goes far above and beyond the standard protocol for children’s playthings. The space was designed in collaboration with Motorola and Gensler, a self-proclaimed “global design, planning and strategic consulting firm.” The M-Lab lures passer-bys with its façade – clad in stark aluminum and panelite – which contrasts with the surrounding “quaint village” motif. Inside there are seven chambers, each meticulously designed depending on the room’s task at hand. The end result is a realistic series of rooms that embrace each child’s fantasy of becoming the next influential innovator. By L. Harper

The cool hunter

Leo et Choc

While Quebeckers have been trying to cool off during the dog-days of July, the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec in conjunction with agency BBDO Montreal launched a smart campaign for Chocolate Milk which has enthused bloggers, anima-philes and …dairy enthusiasts alike.

The Adventures of Leo and Choc is a new animation platform starring two flamboyant characters whose adventures are captured in cartoons and comic strips shown at movie theatres, on the web and in print. Leo, a drop of milk, and Choc, a chocolate square, are two pals who continually find themselves in sticky situations which always result in their messy blending into chocolate milk, whether caught on a beach under the blazing sun or being shaken on a wild roller coaster.

having made their on-screen debut on July 6th, Leo & Choc will continue appearing in movie theatres through mid-August with three animations running in succession prior to the feature presentation. On the Web, site banners show the animations and neither is the gaming community safe. As of August 2nd, Leo & Choc have made their way into titles as Need for Speed, Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland and MLB 2K7 through a three-month run of in-game billboard advertising.

In print, readers have been following the Adventures of Leo & Choc in the form of a comic strip appearing in Metro and Voir newspapers. All totalled, twenty-two stories (twenty-two in Metro and eleven in Voir) will be told, and each ends with an invitation to visit leoetchoc.com. In its first three weeks, over 80, 000 people have surfed over to see what the plucky heroes were up to: a huge amount for a small territory. The University of Sherbrooke’s Monde du Marketing Interactif blog writes 'I assure you this site will give you a craving for (chocolate milk.)'

On the Leo & Choc website, visitors get the chance to create their own animations through a toolbox offering choices of settings, characters, the character’s moods, the situation and more. To date, more than 4,500 unique animations have been created. The site also allows visitors to view five episodes exclusive to the Web and download a choice of screensavers.

So, it’s summer! It’s sunny! Go squish some chocolate and milk together over at www.leoetchoc.com.

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Giant Lego Man

We are mischief makers at Contagious, and anyone plotting anything like the sort of stunt we saw earlier this week when an eight foot Lego character washed up on a beach in Holland deserves a high five and a pint of finest ale for their efforts. Yep, surreal but true: this is exactly what happened. Check out the image to see the 2.5m sculpture and a couple of kids who look like their birthdays and Christmas have come at once.

Mr. Plastic Fantastic rolled in as stunned onlookers dragged him up the shore, clad only in a lego T-Shirt bearing the grammatically inept yet utterly intriguing words, ‘No Real Than You Are’. Googling these words led to a website www.egoleonard.com, now sadly defunct. A bit of sneaky investigative journalism (oh, OK. we hung out on the Reddit comments board until someone was kind enough to translate the Dutch for us) reveals the following text:

‘My name is Ego Leonard and I greet you from the virtual world. A world which for me stands for luck, solidarity, everything green and blooming, and without rules and restrictions. Recently, my world has been flooded with luck-seekers and those who want power. Many new meetings in my virtual world have left me very curious as to your surroundings. I am here because I thought of your world and wanted to discover and understand it. Show me all of those beautiful things which your world has to offer. Be my friend, and tell me tales, take me on your travels to beautiful landscapes, show me your words and gestures.’

Ego Leonard. Hmmm. L.Ego. Lego maybe? And to think of all the time we wasted looking for life on other planets when there was a thriving alternative civilization right under our noses. The site was registered to Dutch art collective Du Fois. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we get them on the phone. In the meantime, we’ve always been a fan of the way in which Lego’s marketing continues to make a simple bit of plastic so culturally relevant, so to the good people at Lego: if you had anything to do with this, we salute you.

And finally! As always on the web, most of the entertainment comes not from the stunt itself but from the commentary that follows. As soon as the story was linked to on Reddit, user Gulfie points out warily, ‘I think the Trojans were taken in by a similar device’. Does this mean Leonard is full of lots of tiny Lego people getting ready to invade Holland?

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How to create the devil of a web 2.0 community ?!

Q: How can an e-commerce website create a huge community in no time?

A: By launching a dynamic sales club web site opened to members only and also by telling them a nice story.

“Vente du Diable” is a French e-commerce website which claims it has attracted over 57,000 members in the space of just three months. Cédric Giorgi (a young Marketing manager in charge of strategy in a mobile startup to be) analyses the success of that website and tells us all about their secret for building a community that fast.

Access the ‘vente-du-diable‘ business-case in pdf format.