Daniel Regueira Blog

“The taste of Coca-Cola is a complex feeling of happiness, satisfaction and refreshment all at once, and yet there remains one little word that best sums it up: “AHH.”

In celebration of that “AHH” moment, Coca-Cola is owning AHH online by buying every Ahh.com URL, from two h’s all the way to 61 h’s. The campaign’s 61 unique URLs are each home to an original experience—including films, games, animated GIFs and more—that bring to life the dimensions of AHH and offer bite-sized interactive experiences featuring teen-worthy moments of randomness, creativity and delight.

And yet the AHH effect is different for everyone, which is why Coca-Cola is holding some of the URLs for fans to tell us what they think “AHH” feels like. Some of the most user-generated creative ideas will be produced and live on one of the Ahh.com sites.” – (http://www.wk.com/campaign/the_ahh_effect)

W+K is crazy. Each of these URL’s feature different things for coke. I’m pretty sure last week the games were different and this week there are other interactive pages.

Mentioning this in passing to people they question whether or not it adds value to coke. To me it seems to be a branding effort that makes coke seem pretty cool through these URL’s and games.

My opinion is somewhat subjective, but most people would agree that this helps to contribute to the popular coke brand image and adds some fun to it. It’s a pretty interesting interactive effort.

Yes, ants. Ants are fucking cool. I know a ton of people hate them, and I most definitely do not love their presence in my home, BUT on a purely analytical and scientific level they are SUPER COOL.

There’s a new study of science/philosophy called “emergence” (TL;DR it’s the science of how complex and sohpiticated systems come out of seemingly simple things). It’s similar to the interpretation of gestalt in art.

Long story short, each individual ant is an absolute idiot. Every single one, including the Queen. Actually “Queen” is a terrible name considering she does absolutely NOTHING except give birth (she’s basically the ovaries of the colony). That’s literally all she does.

So if the Queen doesn’t give orders, who does? NOBODY. Somehow ants have become one of the most sophisticated creatures on the planet despite being absolute idiots and having no one individual or group in control.

Yet somehow they are able to accomplish so many things.

1. Caste Systems

Queen — Queens are usually larger than the workers, she’s the one who gives birth, the ovaries of the colony. Nothing more. After they born, once they’re ready they fly away and find a male to mate with and then fly away somewhere safe to start birthing thousands of eggs and start a colony. Queens birth workers, soldiers, males, and other queens.

Workers — Worker ants are the ones we usually run into. They forage for food clean up the nest, take care of the queen, take care of the larvae, etc. They’re all female and almost never lay eggs, and when they do they’re normally used for food. In the case of a dead queen they hatch into male ants.

Soldiers — They fight. That’s it.

Males — Males are normally small. They only have one purpose in life which is to inseminate a queen. They die shortly after.

 2. Some Ants Take Slaves

There’s a breed of ant called the Slave-maker.

Here’s the crazy part. The queen when ready to have babies will pretend to die near a host colony. The host colony takes her in as food to a chamber within the colony. Once she awakens she finds and kills the queen, covers herself in the dead Queen’s pheromones and then starts laying eggs for the colony to tend to. Eventually the Slave-Maker ants run the colony and begin raiding other colonies, killing the adults and raising the pupae as their own.

Sometime the enslaved ants rebel by killing the larvae and pupae of the slave-maker ants. Just like real rebellions sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t

3. Ants Have Livestock

Much like humans ants like sugary things. Aphids happen to poop this sweet liquid ‘honeydew’ that the ants like to drink.

Some species of ant will herd aphids on a plant, taking their poop to be shared and drank by everyone.

They also furiously defend these aphids. Ladybugs eat aphids naturally, and if the ants catch the ladybugs trying to eat their aphids they kill them very quickly.

They even move them to greener pastures when the plant is dried out so they can eat up all they want and keep making honeydew.

That’s one part of the science of emergence in a nutshell show through ants. If you wanna see something scarier look up “Siafu” or “driver” ants. They kill up to 100,000 animals a day and are rumored to have killed men too.

More on emergence and ants from the best podcast on earth: Radiolab.

“A Time of Change

In the 1960′s, advertising went through a creative revolution that changed everything simply by partnering up art directors and copywriters. The idea of a creative team made up of art and copy was born.

Today, it’s happening again. We’re in the midst of a second creative revolution, driven by technology. Code is being added to the core creative process, enabling new forms of brand expression and engagement. Art, copy and code is the creative team for the connected world.” (http://www.artcopycode.com/#/)

Google is doing something quite interesting. Coding and digital/tech interaction is becoming more and more important.

Google has teamed up with creative houses like 72 and Sunny,YesYesNo, and others, pairing art directors, copywriters, and coders from Google. There isn’t too much on the website because most of the projects are a work in progress.

This particular example is a little lame, but it’s the only one on their website right now.

Guess I need to start learning code now…

This recent extension of the Dove Real Beauty campaign from Ogilvy Toronto does a great job of continuing to speak to the truth of the self-deprecation that women experience.

” Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.”

This video exemplifies the point beautifully.