This ain’t your grandma’s barcode for tomato soup. The evolution of identification codes continues and we now see new applications for the not so new technology popping up everywhere. If you don’t know what that funny looking black and white box above this text is, stand by. If you do, feel free to skip past the history lesson.

Quick Response (QR) codes are a type of two dimensional barcode that were invented in Japan in the mid 90’s. They were first used in the auto industry as a way to, well, just be better/faster/smarter than the Americans. The quirky little black and white pixel boxes can be read by scanners as well as mobile phones and smart phones with cameras. Ignoring the industrial uses, from a “Cool Marketing Tactic” perspective, when a you scan a code with your smart phone, it launches a URL, a starting point to almost limitless possibilities.

The adoption of QR codes as a marketing tactic seems futuristic, or future now. Especially when you come across the side of a building all lit up with a projected code. Something that could have been seen in Blade Runner. The Japanese invented it and embraced it long ago in part because they have been so far ahead with mobile technology for so long. They had their first 3G network and smart phones in 2001.  Texting is not nearly as popular in Japan because they have had mobile email as standard equipment since 1999. I still regularly tell people they are not making calls on a Cell phone, unless their phone looks like this.

So QR codes have been around forever, why are they just now becoming so pervasive in the West? The answer is that smart phones are finally becoming more available and cheaper. So much so that in the next 2 years we won’t even call them smart phones. All phones soon will be connected to the internet and able to scan codes for in store promotions, outdoor, contests, and good old entertainment. The code above is enabled and is a great example of what magical world lies beyond the scan. Oops, I dropped my pager.

To throw some numbers at the claim, 88% of the Great White North’s Internet audience watches video online, averaging almost 150 per month. 3.1 billion videos are viewed online monthly, over 50% of which are accessed through Youtube. Not bad for a country with a population less than the city of Tokyo.

How does this happen you ask, that a country known for hockey, pine trees, and antlered quadrupeds should be so savvy in the ways of the Internet. The first factor is high broadband proliferation thanks to the aggressive sales tactics of our cable and telephone service providers. We also have a technically proficient population with lots and lots of space between our population centres, making Internet channels a popular way to keep in touch. 75% of our population is online and that number is still growing. We clearly have a bit of a crush on digital content.

The whispers from the cornfield say “If you upload it, they will watch.”

Unilever were undoubtedly the stars of this year’s Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, winning the renowned ‘Advertiser of the Year’ award. It has to be said, that after 50 years of inspiring and pioneering campaigns, it’s thoroughly well-deserved.

Unilever won their first Cannes Lion with Omo washing powder in 1961 and there’s been no stopping them since, with over 200 Lions in total. Their campaigns include the groundbreaking Dove ‘Evolution’, the much loved PG Tips ‘Chimp Family’ and Marmite’s uniquely brilliant ‘Love It or Hate It’ ads.

We were thrilled to be asked to make a film that would showcase Unilever’s fantastic heritage of advertising campaigns (an accompaniment to Keith Weed’s acceptance speech as Chief Marketing Officer). With over 400 brands to choose from, and 50 years worth of material, we were spoilt for choice.

In terms of advertising, Unilever have always been on the mark -- they were behind the first ever TV advert to be broadcast (Gibbs Toothpaste 1955) and continue to be ahead of the game with recent viral campaigns such as Axe’s ‘Clean Your Balls’. We wanted to celebrate Unilever’s success whilst placing their work in context. Here’s what we came up with…

Alex Varanese may or may not be your favorite artist, but just see if you can get away with only one look at his collection.

Today marks the YouTube premiere of Evidently’s latest project -- Smober Up -- work of which we’re crazy proud.

I’ll describe it quickly to you here, but I encourage you to click the link just above to see it in its natural surrounds…

First off, some context.

One in 5 Canadians smoke. Two-thirds of them report that they’re desperate to quit. And once they’ve decided to quit, most will fail (repeatedly) before they succeed.

Smober Up is a 10-part docu-reality series that chronicles the real life experiences of eight Canadians as they try to quit smoking.

Following them over the course of 10 weeks -- from breakfast to bedtime and throughout their day -- we’ve spilled into their lives, discovering the ups and downs, the challenges and the rewards that meet these would-be quitters at every turn.

The series is hosted by Canadian endurance athlete (and ex-smoker) Ray Zahab, star of the recent National Geographic documentary “Running the Sahara,” a film co-produced by Matt Damon.

Smober Up is the centrepiece of a Canada-wide movement to kick the habit -- once and for all. Sponsored in part by NICORETTE®, the series lives within a fully interactive online community where smokers can share their quitting stories, track their progress, and lean on each other for support.

• Smober Up’s YouTube Channel lets people follow our eight ‘quitters’ and track their progress throughout the series
• Smober Up’s Facebook Page offers an outlet, on a familiar platform, for continued conversations, discussion forums and community support -- a place to announce progress, encourage one another and offer support through along the way

The simple truth is: getting started, much less starting over again, can feel like an epic and emotional battle, and we all know someone who’s gone through it…but no two quit stories are the same.

Our mission has been to capture -- with openness, honesty, and even a little humour -- the story behind our quitters’ commitments to change and the incalculable rewards that come with giving up this lifelong addiction.

We’re so grateful to have met Fraser, Kathleen, Sumit, KJ, Jaime, Kevin, Shelley and John and to have been invited into their lives -- I can’t wait for you to see the rest of the journey over the next 10 weeks. Be sure to stay tuned.

[Traditional and Digital PR - incl community building - by Edelman Toronto; Media by J3 Toronto.]

“So You Need A Typeface” was featured on Inspiration Lab, a blog by Julie Katrine Andersen, a Danish graphic designer. It was a brilliant project created by one of her students, 22 year old Julian Hansen. May it serve you as it has me during moments of indecision.

It all started in April 2005 when a 19-second video clip was uploaded to an unknown website. A year later, that same website had over 100 million daily hits. That website is YouTube, an internet giant and household name across the globe.

This past April, as YouTube celebrated its 5th birthday, the Google-owned site announced it now has over 2 billion daily page views. To put this vast figure into perspective, it equates to nearly a third of the world’s population and is double the prime-time audience of all 3 major US networks combined.

Not to mention that a massive 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute by YouTube’s users, with its archives containing over 7000 hours of feature-length films and TV shows.

The site’s explosive growth has not only made it a social media phenomenon, but a hugely effective marketing tool. The huge exposure the site receives on a daily basis has attracted a growing number of advertisers globally; in fact 94% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 advertisers have recognised the opportunities YouTube can offer their brand and have run campaigns on the site.

It isn’t just advertisers who have reaped the benefits of YouTube’s astronomical success. Lady Gaga is a prime example of a celebrity jumping on the YouTube bandwagon to promote her music -- with unbelievable results. Her Bad Romance viral music video remains YouTube’s most-watched of all time with 207 million hits, which had an enormous impact on her record sales and helped her rocket to global fame.

YouTube has also become the birthplace of a different kind of celebrity: the internet celebrity. Since the site launched hundreds of users have shot to fame; many of them average Joes who posted videos as a way of communicating with a world they felt isolated from. Of these, NigaHiga is the most popular, with over 2 million subscribers.

Many of these internet celebrities will be discussing their new-found star status on the YouTube 5 Year Channel, part of a wider initiative launched by YouTube to tell the story of the site and its growth over 5 years since its launch. The microsite encourages users to tell their own “YouTube Story” by submitting videos discussing the impact YouTube has had on their lives. The videos will be eventually be collated into a film which will no doubt be showcased on the site.

So raise your glasses. And here’s to the next 5 years!

I’m not too sure what to think of this. Does it make it cool that in a sport where technical innovation and performance is key, Apple’s latest offering is being toted around like a regular bit of stationary? Or does it kill some of the allure?

I’ve been lucky to have access having a play on the iPad on two occasions and I’m still undecided. It’s a flash memory device so unlike a MacBook or any Apple hard drive device, you cannot look at all the data / media through a Finder menu. Perhaps because I’m too used to that set up on my Mac, I find it annoying not to have similar control on the iPad.

There are lots of positives however. It’s a great place to gather apps, such as TweetDeck and The New York Times online. At the end of the F1 cover, the Jake and the pundits were rounding up by referring to viewer’s reactions to the race by picking out notable comments on Twitter – everything about this screamed on the pulse and got my thumbs up. It makes for a brilliant presentation tool if you’re presenting on a smaller, more personal scale (I was particularly impressed by the power of the speakers – could it be the boom box for our era?)And for the time being, it still has an air of new-ness and exclusivity about it, which makes it a neat thing to use and show off to others.

That aside, I can’t get over the fact that it seems like a peripheral device. For the functionality it shares with the iPhone and iPod, I like its smaller counterparts (particularly because I can add media easily to my iPod without having to sync it and I haven’t been able to apply the drag and drop method to the iPad yet). The features and applications it shares with it’s laptop big siblings, I would imagine that again, the scope of what you can do on Keynote, for example, would be limited in comparison to using the application on a Mac. Although don’t quote me on this last point, I haven’t had a chance to check this out in much detail yet.

There is an almost symbiotic relationship between the iPad and its host machine. It feeds off it and can’t really survive without it, but the only difference is, when you disconnect them, Mac can quite happily carry on without it.

I have another chance to test out the iPad this Friday (fingers crossed) so I could yet do a 180 on my view of it.

And she does it as a commencement speech at Harvard…good on her.