Campaign of the month: Vodafone

This month’s winner of the IAB Creative Showcase is the Vodafone Mobile Office Solutions campaign, developed by Dare Digital.

The campaign is focused on persuading business people to use their mobile phones for work, and highlights the frustrations of workers tired with their office environments. Using a real-life two tonne steel crusher, users can pulverise one of six desks – each with different characteristics such as overflowing invoices or spare parts everywhere.

Once the crushing is complete, users can click through to a series of Flash demos showing how Vodafone’s services let people work away from their desks – whether sending out invoices, checking stock levels or getting hold of important documents.

It’s a comprehensive campaign which does its best to rise above the potentially boring nature of the brief. Actually building the desk-crushing machine certainly helps differentiate the main footage.

The first runner-up was Hall Moore CHI’s Tango Bravo campaign for Tango. It’s starting point was a spoof of the Sony Bravia “balls” campaign – using fruit instead of coloured balls tumbling down a street and causing destruction. From there a series of fake websites highlighted the complaints of local residents about the damage caused by the film crew. These residents also put photos of the damage on Flickr and then tried to sell broken items on Ebay.

The second runner-up was Lean Mean Fighting Machine’s campaign for Virgin Casino.

The Creative Showcase Awards from the IAB are sponsored by MSN.