It’s a good question, everyone knows what a ringtone is, even if you don’t, the name pretty much tells you everything. But when it comes to ringback tones, most people won’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

A ringback tone is the sound plus your callers hear when they call your mobile, but instead of the ‘ring ring’ they hear music and custom sounds.

I guess it’s partly to do with the name, ‘ringback tone’ doesn’t actually make any sense, I mean, what would you call the things?

Good pals at mobile & digital agency Movement put together a couple of clever videos to explain the whole thing in less than a minute…with SOCKS!

McCann Erickson have come up with this little beauty for a client who originally wanted a quick and cheap banner campaign. Well they actually talked them out of it and convinced them to do this instead. WINNER.

The result was 125,000 views on YouTube apparently.

Doesn’t this computer trickery viral feel a bit played now? You’ll get people arguing it out in the YouTube comments section for weeks saying stuff like “Dat iz real, my cousin did it on a Vespa last year you idiot…lolz” but it’s not really showing us anything new.

I wanna see more stuff like the Volkswagon piano stairs viral (click here)

A small selection of similar video that came before it:

Kobe Bryant Jumps Aston Martin viral:

Nike Ronaldinho viral:

Adidas Gerrard viral:

[Via Adverblog]

“People have to feel that they are included in a campaign if they are to share it” said Andreas Englund from DraftFCB, the digital agency behind this campaign.

It’s a no brainer really, personalisation of advertising makes it….well, more personal. We’ve already seen brands utilise Facebook Connect, pulling information from personal profiles to add a extra level of engagement to the experience. Campaigns like Fight Club and Orange Friend-O-Meter were very well received, the same applies to mobile with Vodafone YouRockstar, all getting great response rates and lots of sharing.

So it seems entirely fitting that the first time I’d heard of ‘The Hero’ was when a friend forwarded it to me already personalised with my face (above). Click here to view mine.

The campaign is by Radiotjanst, the organisation behind collecting the license fee for TV and radio in Sweden. In an effort to encourage young metropolitans to pay the fee (where only 6 in 10 do so voluntarily) they came up with this ‘thank you’ video praising you the subscriber.

Head on over to http://en.tackfilm.se/ and make your own now.

Although it not the first time something like this has been done, the quality of production is top notch. Would have loved to seen this on mobile too.

It was so successful that the company had to block countries other than Sweden visiting the site because they were hogging bandwidth! However after 5 milllion uniques it is now open to everyone.

BBC are you watching?

According to the BBC, Coca-Cola are ‘incentivising’ buskers on the London Underground to include it’s ‘Holidays Are Coming’ jingle over the Christmas period.

It’s a great idea, especially as Oxford Circus tube stop alone sees around 5 million commuters a month.

The question is this – what would you rather hear at 8am, a badly covered hit from the 90s or a corporate jingle?
I’ll take the jingle.

[Via Rubber Republic]

(Click on the video above to view)

Absolutely love this Facebook campaign by Ikea, great to see such a big company do something a little bit funky.

To promote their new store opening in Malmo, Ikea set-up a Facebook profile for Gordon Gustavsson, the store’s manager. Gustavsson (or the agency) uploaded pictures of the stores showrooms to his photo album and any ‘friends’ who tagged the products with their names won them!

If you’re familiar with Facebook you know that tagged items then appear in other peoples news feeds, basically turning the social networking site into one big word of mouth promotion.

[Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors]

[Via Creativity Online]

I heart Microsoft.

The only thing wrong with this is that it’s not available in the UK or USA. It only costs the equivalent of £5 too.

I’m not even going to bother making a joke about (Big) Mac OS X 11 etc etc.

[Via Electronista]

If I had it my way every sports advert video would be like this. Love the feeling of nostalgia it creates using the 8-bit game format, makes me want to dig out the old Sega Master System from the attic.

The campaign titled ‘The Fun Theory‘ is a series of experiments that try to change peoples behaviour by injecting an element of fun into it.

The best video of the series called Piano Stairs, turns a set of subway steps into piano keys which make a sound whenever touched. The objective was to encourage more people to use the steps instead of the escalator. It succeeded by 66%.

There is some great behavioural insight here, shows how important entertainment value can be to consumers.

Other videos in the series included the 50ft deep dustbin:

and the soon to be released Empty Bottle Arcade!

The agency behind this is DDB.