Having caught you up on all things foursquare, you’ve now got a pretty good handle on how marketers are handling the rise of this location-based social network. Of course, foursquare’s not the only game in town. While the world figures out what to make of Facebook Places, Gowalla continues to be the best LBS alternative [...]

With Facebook recently unveiling their own location-based service, the press has itself in a tizzy trying to wrap its head around the impending arrival of the year of location. Y’know, the one we called out back in March. But no worries, we’re glad you’re all coming around. In fact, we’re going to spend the next [...]

After all our talk of QR codes and Stickybits and barcode marketing, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a second to pat ourselves on the back here at Upshot. As part of Pacifico’s sponsorship of the US Open of Surfing, we rolled out a program via QR code for the event’s attendees. Better yet, [...]

After last year’s SXSW Interactive conference, when our heads were still spinning with augmented reality apps and location-based social networks and gesture based technologies, we came to an unexpected conclusion: many of the most engaging consumer interactions were being delivered via plain ol’ streaming videos. Part of this success was attributable to steadily-improving content, but [...]

Let’s acknowledge this right off the bat: this is a silly idea. A “naughty” experiment? From Volvo?? Puh-lease. You’re no Axe. But, if we remove this ridiculous premise, there’s actually something salvageable from this campaign. We’ve thrown around some “social experiments” ourselves here at Upshot, and they often make for fun bits of trivia after [...]

Right before our break, we took a deeper look into how corporate social responsibility looks in the world of the Reputation Economy, where a brand’s (or a house of brands’) seemingly disparate actions are judged by consumers as a single experience. In the post, we pointed out that Pepsi’s notable efforts as part of their [...]

If you’re struggling to make sense of Twitter’s advertising system, that’s understandable. They’ve rolled out a handful of tweaks with little press, and brands are celebrating the results without a whole lot of context. So, let’s step back and take a look at the two primary options for advertising on Twitter (at least for now): [...]

Hopefully you’ve been enjoying the first stage of the World Cup – we wouldn’t want you to have dropped the ball on that USA-England game. Either way, we figure you must be enjoying the slew of great marketing efforts that have surrounded the games. If you haven’t seen it already, you should definitely spend three [...]

While no one’s taken us up on our suggestion to save Chicago’s 4th of July fireworks just yet, that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen smaller scale examples of Hometown’s Heroism. In fact, for Chicago’s Big Shoulders Realty, this is old news; they’re in the middle of their third year of offering free neighborhood bike tours [...]

I know we’ve been talking a lot about bringing gaming into everyday life, but we didn’t mean it so literally. Still, we can’t help but smile at this simple campaign from McDonald’s (in Sweden). Digital billboards show a steady stream of virtual objects, including an occasional item from the McDonald’s menu. Any passersby who snap [...]