Overview: Chalking
the roads is a Tour de France tradition during which spectators write
messages of encouragement to their favorite riders. LIVESTRONG and the
Lance Armstrong Foundation embraced the idea of using the road as a
canvas; as part of Nike’s Open Roads project, boxes of yellow chalk
were handed out at the Tour of California and at select LIVESTRONG
events, encouraging people to chalk messages of hope in the fight
against cancer. The Nike Chalkbot was a way to take positive messages
to the Tour de France. By sending a message to the Chalkbot through
Twitter, SMS, Web banners or wearyellow.com, people around the world
were able to make their mark in yellow.

During the Tour, a team of six operated the
Chalkbot— agency producer, art director, CTO, software engineer and two
hardware engineers—and averaged twenty-hour production days for a month.

Over the course of a month, the Chalkbot gained over 4,000
followers on Twitter, received over 36,000 messages of support and
inspiration. Over 13 stages and several thousand miles of the Tour de
France more than 5,400 messages were chalked, tagged with GPS
coordinates and photographed—photos and GPS data were sent to the
writers of the messages.

Overview: The “Is It
Monday Yet?” campaign for Monday Night Football on ESPN was about
finding entertaining and unexpected ways to remind football fans about
the upcoming Monday night match-up. As the centerpiece of the 2009
integrated, multiplatform effort, storefronts in New York, Chicago and
Boston were outfitted with interactive touchscreens utilizing gesture
recognition technology, so passersby could stand in front of the store
windows and try to catch consecutive footballs “thrown” at them by a
virtual quarterback. The game used a computer vision based NUI (natural
user interface) and, based on the user’s motion of “catching a ball,”
the system would determine whether or not the pass was successful,

Audio commentary by ESPN talent narrated each
user’s performance until they missed a catch, which would “shatter” the
window and end the game.

The development team’s own high scores during testing were wiped
off the leader board within the first hour of going live; by the end of
the game’s five-week run, the top scores on the leader board had more
than doubled.

The game had lunch hour spikes as high as 40 games per hour.