With new digital campaigns launching every five minutes it can be exhausting to separate the wheat from the chaff. Geekmail is Lowe Sydney’s quick guide to what’s interesting online this month.

Burger King’s new US-only Facebook application, Whopper Sacrifice, is an absolute cracker. It’s so simple: delete ten of your Facebook friends, and you get a free Whopper. If your Friends list is bloated with people you hardly know, this seems like a fair trade. In the first week alone, around 250,000 friends were deleted. Unfortunately, the application originally notified Friends that they’d been traded for a burger: this contravened Facebook’s privacy policy, so that aspect has now been removed. Still, it doesn’t detract too much from the fun. This is one of the few marketing campaigns to effectively leverage social media, and shows some very smart thinking from US agency Crispin Porter.

What won top bill for its embracing of new and emerging media in 2008? HBO’s Voyeur, Burger King or Apple? It’s unlikely to be entered into any advertising awards but Barrack Obama collected his prize today when his Inauguration heralds the being of an internet-friendly Oval Office.

You could watch it on Facebook or simply go to change.gov, to see that there is no aspect to Obama’s (two year) campaign that doesn’t demonstrate how to effectively build a brand, get a message across in the new media environment and most importantly, mobilize an army of fans to feel part of history and become active participants in what change.gov calls sharing the “vision for what America can be".

He’s got my vote for effective 21st Century marketing.

I wonder how much time scientists have spent trying to find a cure for AIDS, cumulatively. Over 5 million research hours? That’s a lot of time. It’s also less than the amount of time people have spent watching Puppy Cam in the last three months. It’s nothing revolutionary - just six excruciatingly cute Shiba Inu puppies in a play pen with a webcam beaming their every bark, whimper and excretion to 26 million eyeballs around the world.

Brands have been using this kind of live webcam site a lot in the last year. Recently Heinz jumped in with their simple webcam experiment Talk to the Plant. Watching two tomato plants grow is not nearly as interesting as watching chubby puppies wrestle, but the Heinz site was still a genuine success. 18,000 messages were posted in 7 weeks with no supporting advertising - just good seeding. Ha ha. Created by Swedish agency Daddy.

http://www.talktotheplant.com/
http://www.daddy.se/

I'm not much of a gamer. The appeal of assuming the role of a Robocop-style killing machine with dozen or so weapons to shoot, mame, and decapitate my enemies has passed me by over the years and is more suited to other more volatile members of the digital team. However, I recently found a site that tapped into my inner aggression and convinced me that there may actually be some fun in grievous bodily harm. HAZE is a new PS3 game that has had some big marketing bucks spent on this "experience site". Not just a website...and experience in itself that even I was impressed with. It consumed a good 15-minutes of my eyeball time (did I mention I am a very busy!), and planted a seed in my mind about my next career move as a contract killing machine. All up, an effective and immersive brand experience for me. Now... where did I put my B72 Assault Rifle?

In case you've been living in a vacuum, void of Apple products and their marauding fans proclaiming Apple's benefits to society with qausi religious zeal. Then you may have missed the news that Steve Jobs is sick. But there's some more geniuinely worrying news. It relates to software released for the iPhone; It's heavily controlled. Applications on the iPhone must be approved by Apple, and if it rubs them ever so slightly the wrong way they’re likely to reject it. Read more about it here.

A site demonstrating how NVIDIA graphics processors have helped ideas come to life. What makes this one stand out is the excellent use of video, subtle use of 3D, a very simple color palette and nice animation transitions. The site also features a gallery section which allows users to post their work and show how Nvidia graphic processors have helped them.

Patrick Boivin a French Canadian autodidact director has created an amazing animated fighting viral game using Youtube’s annotation features.

The game allows you to select an opponent, choose your fighting moves, and eventually win if you play your cards right.

We rarely emphasize enough that information architecture and intelligent design hugely impact on users’ behavior.

This article written by Jared M. Spool (CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering) will show you a case study where changing a button increased a retailers’ sales by 45% resulting in an extra $300,000,000 in the first year.