Mother New York | Modular 4

Because it’s Friday. Because it’s Pantone. Because these are smoothies.

Art director Hedvig A. Kushner of Mother New York makes a lot of smoothies. Hedvig also noticed it kinda works like mixing paint. You add a certain ingredient, you get a certain color. So Hedvig started a little project about making some tasty smoothies that match Pantone color chips. Pantone Smoothies

Kushner buys colored paper from a local art store, matches it to a Pantone swatch, and makes the smoothie to match whatever color the swatch is. Then along with photographer Mike Kushner each is photographed three times. One shot with the ingredients, the second with the resulting smoothie, then the matching Pantone swatch.

You can check out the project at pantonesmoothies.com, and you can submit your own on the site, or via Instagram.

Mother New York has created a new marketing campaign for New Balance in collaboration with film director Jesper Kouthoofd. The campaign is built around a collection of 365 short films that explore the term “Balance” from a number of perspectives.

The website is broken down into a series of easy to understand categories. Months are spread across the top of a numbered visual grid that holds a film for each day of the month. On the left, there are 3 sections, one for today’s short, an archive link for previous months, and a link to an iPhone application that allows New Balance to push content directly to your iPhone. The iPhone application is an audio-visual alarm clock, and according to New Balance, the worlds first for the iPhone letting the end-user set it to receive a new video delivered to them every day.

Every day each month a new film is loaded to the site or pushed to your phone helping to keep the New Balance brand fresh in your mind and engaging the consumer. The site moves beyond a simple passive marketing campaign asking views to share the videos on a variety of social media sites helping to integrate the campaign in online locations that connect directly with their target audience.

In a brilliant move New Balance has partnered with a number of online retail sites allowing visitors to purchase any of the shoes featured in the videos. By offloading the purchasing process to partners like Zappos, and Nordstrom’s, New Balance shares in the profits without having to manage an online commerce site.

My only knocks to the overall campaign are this. Why didn’t New Balance allow you to do the following with the iPhone application:

Purchase shoes from the iPhone application?
Share the videos from the iPhone to the same social networks as the website?
Mark specific videos as your favorite like the website does?

Those three missed opportunities could have really pushed this to the next level.