The Valpar’s “Love Your Color” campaign offered high-end beauty with a catch: If the buyer doesn’t love their color, the next one is on Valspar — guaranteed. If you’re ever anguished over 40 shades of yellow, only to discover the can and the wall don’t match, it’s a compelling lure. Launched in House Beautiful, the advertising splashed color across various media — which helped deliver double-digit sales increases. Valspar is crazy for hue; colored me convinced.

 The CW’s 2012 Fall Launch, was celebrated with the introduction of the first-ever Live Twitter Feed in a Magazine. An active 3G data chip was added to thin digital video screens, which pulled a live feed of tweets from the CW Television Network onto the pages of Entertainment Weekly.  For the first time ever, technology reached a threshold that empowered the connection of a traditional print magazine wirelessly to the internet; resulting in tremendous press coverage and social sharing.

The Lexus campaign took machine art to a new level. The 90% recyclable Lexus CT Hybrid was dissembled into 2,000 parts; then designers used various pieces to create wearable art. The designs were featured in a six-page spread in Vogue, along with short docs, generating 136 million earned impressions—on auto, fashion and eco sites. The work transformed a conservative brand into a fashion-forward statement. If owners squawk at the trade-in value, they can always try Seventh Avenue.

When National Geographic Channel asked Mediahub from Mullen to help it position “American Gypsies,” a reality TV series chronicling a dysfunctional Manhattan-based Gypsy clan, the agency began by researching key insights that would attract viewers by leveraging contemporary perceptions about gypsies, including two big consumer insights. The first identified that unconventional characters such as vampires, fantasy and reality characters have become pop culture norms, and that “American Gypsies” needed to leverage the underlying gypsy culture to help the show differentiate from other reality fare. The other big insight …

Operating like a “news network,” Starcom MediaVest Group’s Global Sensing Investigations integrates the local and regional perspectives of more than 125 “human experience strategists” in 35 countries, thinking in unison about the same consumer-centric topics. Each investigation is fielded over two weeks yet represents hundreds of hours of material and thoughtful consideration that can only be seen through the nuance of real life examples and local culture. By aggregating the local perspectives, the SMG team mines the universal insights that run across them. For example, in exploring the …

Roundarch Isobar’s Nowlab built The Bubbler, a HTML5 based data visualizer for Coca-Cola’s senior management team. This social media dashboard pulls from various web services globally and delivers real time consumer emotions. The data is displayed with a nod to the company’s iconic product: a sea of effervescent bubbles. Each bubble, defined as a brand or social media outlet, “pops” to reveal natural user experience, robust charting and easy to understand graphs. This is a most refreshing way to access and understand Coca-Cola’s consumers.

Foot Locker bills its target audience as "Sneaker Expressionists," individuals who wear their individuality on their, uh, feet. So a program involving photo-expressionist depot Instagram seemed a natural fit. Foot Locker encouraged anyone and everyone to upload photos of their sneakers and append them on Twitter with the #kickstagram tag. The campaign succeeded in growing Foot Locker's social-media following: within 30 days, it had tripled its number of followers.

360i set out to prove that Oscar Mayer’s new premium bacon was as good as gold with the “Great American Bacon Barter.” Comedian Josh Sankey traveled across the country in a 3,000 mile social media-driven road trip with no cash or credit cards. Everything he needed along the way would have to be bartered for...with bacon.

Attempting to boost business on a scandal's back is always a risky gambit, but the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority happened upon a rare opportunity when Prince Harry's guests - "shameful profiteers," in the authority's eyes - sold photos of him enjoying his Vegas stay. It had just concluded a "Know the Code" social campaign (what happens here, stays here), so this hastily planned, after-the-fact extension of it reminded everyone of the pitfalls of not following the code.

When a fire broke out on the track during the Daytona 500 last year, a curious thing happened. The crews pulled out huge boxes of Tide detergent to douse the flames and clean up the mess. In an effort to capitalize on the resulting free publicity, Procter & Gamble turned to SMG to help explain what had happened. They aired a 15-second spot featuring Daytona 500 clean-up footage, along with the announcer’s commentary to create relevancy. And just like that, millions of normal American households saw that Tide …