In June, I would like to share more creativity and advertising, a bit less crowdsourcing and a lot less research-related stuff. And not only because it was Cannes Lions season. The image on the left shows an excerpt of Apple’s “World Gallery” video, which won the top prize in the Outdoor category, and which I share an article about in this post. I really like that a people-powered brand campaign won a Grand Prix at Cannes, it shows how advertising is taking user-generad content seriously. Other links relate to Facebook stalking, Russian humor, smart activation campaigns and… crowdsourcing. I couldn’t help it.

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When you send a message from Facebook’s Messenger app there is an option to send your location with it, and this “option” is by defaults sending a location with all messages. At least it was, because in May, a Harvard student “decided to have some fun with this data [and] wrote a Chrome extension for the Facebook Messenger page that scrapes all this location data and plots it on a map.” His “Marauder’s Map” revealed how much of a privacy invasion this default setting was, and since then, Facebook took some action. The article linked in the tweet now says: “Facebook has deactivated location sharing from the desktop webpage so the extension will not work. However, it seems locations are still being shared on the mobile app and sharing is still enabled by default.”

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eYeka presents the Creator of the Month of June: Boris from Russia, a.k.a Mordov-centre. It is actually a whole team of creators who work together on videomaking and scriptwriting.  They have already won 5 prizes on eYeka and, in this funny video, they tell us more about themselves!  love their humor and the simple fact to discover creatives from Nijni Novgorod share their story with the world is very cool! That’s where Nijni Novgorod is in Russia.

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Ted Southern started his career making wings for Victoria’s Secret clothing line, but in this CBS News spot you see him talking about his work with NASA to create new-age spacesuits: “Southern was designing gloves for his master’s thesis when he read about a NASA competition to redesign astronaut’s gloves in Popular Science. […] Southern lost the competition, but met Nikolay Moiseev, an engineer and fellow competitor from Russia. They teamed up, and two years later their unique single-layer glove earned them second place, and a $100,000 prize.” It’s very cool to see another competition participant tell his story!

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This fascinating animation charts the swells of people moving to —and leaving— the Manhattan over the last 200 years. To create the visualization, Patrick Lamson-Hall and Solly Angel analyzed decades of old maps, aerial photos, and census data. The map shows density spreading from Lower Manhattan upward and then slowly starting to subside. “As the city got richer, people each started taking up a little more space, and moving to other boroughs. That couldn’t have happened without some changes in infrastructure,” FastCoExist wrote. I love travelling back in time like this, cool project!!

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To activate its sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League, Heineken Brazil and Wieden & Kennedy Sao Paulo created this nice promotion. The idea was to create a connected lock that opens with a Heineken… and only with a Heineken beer. I like the idea Heineken that uses a fun device to encourage people to consume Heineken beer while also emphasizing the social side of drinking beer. Heineken offered Brazilian customers the possibility to create and join events, which would each receive such a lock to allow guests. Thanks Stamper for sharing that nice marketing operation that makes social events at home quite fun!

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Meet Google Expeditions, a Cardboard app and program that’s designed to take kids on a virtual-reality field trip to faraway places. It comes as a kit with everything that a teacher needs to take their entire classroom on a VR fieldtrip: Every student gets a Cardboard headset and accompanying phone to use with it, and the teacher gets a tablet from which to orchestrate the adventure. “Cardboard Expeditions should never replace actual field trips, mind you, but I think they can be useful when a field trip just isn’t possible,” GreenBot writes about it. “It’s unclear how Google plans to distribute the Expeditions kits, but I certainly hope they’re affordable for all teachers who want them in their classrooms.” Agreed! Watch the video, it’s pretty darn cool.

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I have been at eYeka for over 4 years now, but this is just half of the company’s existence! So with our marketing intern, Alix, we had the idea of tracing back the website’s layout since the birth in 2007. Mostly using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine,  we did a timeline which now decorates the office. A great way to showcase a young company’s evolution as well as pst design trends.

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Apple’s “World Gallery” campaign, that showcased iPhone photos taken by amateur and professional photographers around the world, has won the top prize in the Outdoor Lions at Cannes this year. In this tweet I share a FastCoCreate article that explains how Apple found and reached out to those people, which is great. I initially wondered if that could be crowdsourcing, but it isn’t as Apple hasn’t openly called for submissions: “The brand has been scouring the Internet [to] find a few dozen non-commissioned images to feature in its “Shot on iPhone 6”-themed campaign, which launched just this week,” the article says. Now you know a bit more about the 57 photos that you probably saw on billboards.

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And finally, an interesting article about an important announcement that happened in June: the creation of You & Mr Jones and their acquisition of a majority stake in the crowdsourcing company Mofilm. It is interesting because it doesn’t just share the news by copy-pasting sections of the press release, it actually discusses it. “That [crowdsourcing] approach has ramifications,” VB’s Barry Levine says. “I personally know two excellent graphic designers, a fantastic illustrator, and various other creatives whose reasonably healthy pay rates have been decimated by the widespread net-based availability of much cheaper — and often lesser — talent.” But the article isn’t just critical, it highlights how an industry veteran foresees the future of an entire industry, and it does that quite objectively. Congrats to Mr Jones, to Pixlee, Mashable and the other companies part of that new agency, and let’s keep innovating!