Do you Oohgle?

Yep, Oohgle. Not Google. O-o-h-g-l-e.

Hi all, Happy New Year & Welcome to the second season of Friday Thing/k.

The first Thing/k for 2009 is coming from the UK and is an offline-online story: an integration between the oldest medium alive (outdoor) and the (strong) kid in the block. You know him.

Posterscope, UK's leading out-of-home communications agency, wanted to promote its new Prism Search tool that analyses the link between Out of Home advertising (billboard, posters, etc.) and search in an intriguing and innovative way.

This new tool allows Posterscope to measure the impact of OOH advertising on search, giving some insight to the advertiser of the potential to increase search through OOH activity.
The move came at around the time when advertisers started not putting their URL on posters, but instead placing the message “Google X for more information”.

Posterscope created the verb ‘to Oohgle’, a hybrid of Out of Home and Google, and plastered the phrase on Out of Home posters.
The poster gave no information about the brand at all, leaving people intrigued to go and search for it online, thus creating the link between online and offline marketing.

People who typed “Oohgle” into their search engine were directed to a sponsored link to the website, http://www.oohgle.com/ (not live at the moment. You can Google it and then ‘Cached’ it).

The homepage revealed the meaning of "Oohgle" and explained that Posterscope was behind the campaign. It also allowed people involved in advertising to visit one area and “regular punters” to visit another area, with the chance to win prizes in exchange for answering a few questions about the campaign.

According to Posterscope, the campaign promoted the power of out of home combined with search and early indications suggested that the website received huge amounts of traffic.

Before you’re X-button-ing me. Have a quick Italian coffee.

Internet-based travel provider Expedia was offering consumers in Germany some great flight deals to Italy and wanted to publicize them in a subtle and low-cost way.
There are probably few things more Italian than cappuccino, so Expedia teamed up with coffee shop Deli Star to create a quirky new advertising medium: frothy milk.

Stencils were distributed to all of the branches, and when someone ordered a cappuccino, the server would use a stencil to mark out an offer on top of the foam - for example, "Pisa 246 euros." Underneath the coffee cup, a paper coaster provided Expedia.de's details and explained the offer. LOVE IT.