iPad users who visited the New York Times HTML5 Web site January 18 unexpectedly became detectives when a rich-media ad for the season premiere of USA's White Collar turned actual content into clues to unlock series' videos. The ad ran for one day and featured a virtual scanner in-ad that could be moved throughout the home page to find clues. Scanning copy or images would then reveal a QR code that indicated a video was found and ready for viewing.

Ryan Partnership aimed to establish credibility with Dove Men+Care's target, men ages 25-45, by placing interactive rich-media units themed around the NCAA tournament on top sports sites. In videos, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Bobby Hurley and John Thompson talked about family relationships and memorable NCAA moments - all ways each became "comfortable in my own skin." Users could also take an NCAA trivia quiz and enter a contest for a chance to meet Johnson. Result: high interaction rates on sites where users are typically difficult to engage.

To promote the release of the Toy Story 3 Blu-ray Combo Pack, mOcean targeted the broad audience for Disney's highest-grossing animated film series by creating over 40 advertisements for three different age groups, with varying banner types from simple Flash to more complex interactive quizzes. For example, the adult and general audience versions featured the series' most popular character, Buzz Lightyear, invading the user's screen to deliver news about the Combo Pack. An interactive trivia quiz provided a teaser of the trivia section on the Blu-ray.

Avatar Labs used rich media effectively both to tease new viewers and provide an experience beyond the trailer for presold fans of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean. On the Yahoo home page, the tease began with the Yahoo logo changed to "Yo ho" and a skull moving across the page. For the Yahoo movies page, fittingly, the takeover was more detailed, with 3-D-like scenes playing. Fans could click on clips ranging from Jack Sparrow's pirate recruitment video to footage of Walt Disney introducing the …

By actually making the SMS engagement part of his on-air act, magician Criss Angel was able to directly include the audience in his "mind-reading" experiments. That was the first of a three-part SMS campaign by A&E which successfully increased ratings by 20 percent week-over-week, as well as boosted social media participation. The second part allowed viewers to vote via text message on their favorite levitation trick, with the possibility of their messages appearing on the final episode. And, the final portion was a text-to-win campaign for a magic kit.

They seem to go together - old-school physical media rentals and the almost old-school SMS marketing. It turns out, though, both still thrive as Redbox proved in this successful "10 Days of Deals" campaign. Mirroring their highly available and simple rental kiosks, Redbox offered an extremely simple and highly available SMS promotion to receive discounts by texting DEALS to 727272. By rewarding their loyal "Text Club" and reaching new customers, Redbox generated over 1.5 million texts from 400,000 unique people including more than 200,000 brand new subscribers.

Aside from yelling into friends' ears, texting was probably the most common communication technique for festival-goers at the Bonnaroo music festival. Kargo helped Rolling Stone and Garnier take advantage of this fact to create an SMS poll for the crowd to vote for their favorite band during the artists' live performances - with the winning band to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. This extra level of natural engagement during the concert gave sponsor Garnier Fructis an excellent opportunity to personally touch every participant in post-vote messages.

In this deeply engaging iAd, Imano first played the brand's tongue-in-cheek Ice Lounge TV commercial, then took characters from the commercial and placed them in unique parallax scenes where viewers could uncover hidden video, music and other goodies, including a contest based on the ad. Not only was the content rich, the navigation featured a clever 3-D menu spinning around a Stella Artois beer bottle. Successfully promoting this holiday brand during the holidays, the ad also drove downloads to two stand-alone branded beer apps.

Taking a unique approach for a fashion/lifestyle publisher, Cosmopolitan worked with Deep Focus to create an in-app placement for seven brands - Baby Phat, Est'ee Lauder, Lanc^ome, mark., Nivea, Revlon, and Yves Saint Laurent - to showcase their products in a whimsical virtual boulevard of window fronts. This creative and charming way to present advertisers' products has a distinct Cosmo feel, allowing for rich interaction within the app, such as contests, videos, brand engagement, and even shopping as users "take a stroll along the boulevard."

Mixing well crafted video and character content from Disney's Tangled, with Apple's new iAd interactive format, AvatarLabs crafted an app-like experience into this ad for the movie. The transitions and navigation were creative and led to fun sections, allowing viewers to get to know the characters, listen to and purchase the full movie soundtrack in iTunes, play games, see additional video, and even take advantage of the iPhone's Google maps to pinpoint theaters in which the movie was playing.