Campaign of the month: Virgin bets

Lean Mean Fighting Machine has won July’s IAB Creative Showcase Award, run in association with Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, with its work for Virgin Bets, a gambling site for people who get put off by the complexity and seriousness of high street bookies. The campaign was based around the latest series of Big Brother and the primary aim was to get people to bet on weekly evictees of the Channel 4 show. Lean Mean Fighting Machine used interactive videos to simulate “live” bets with the result happening then and there. Featuring a magician named Pete, in each execution the user is asked to guess the outcome of various challenges involving objects that represent the Big Brother contestants nominated for eviction that week.

The first runner-up this month was Play with its microsite, “My Amoy”. The task was to inspire young, busy people to break their ready-meal routine and get creative in their culinary habits with the Amoy range of cooking sauces. Play combined film and illustration to create a colourful, inspiring environment that allowed users to create their own stir fry with ingredients ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Second runner up in July was AKQA and Yell.com, with their follow up to the successful “Results for Real life” campaign. Powerfully illustrating the benefits of the Yell.com product, AKQA developed an integrated campaign with the strapline “Find Your One in a Million” which launched with digital, broadcast, outdoor and ambient activity in June. Targeting office workers, the online activity comprised a page takeover and a range of interactive rich-media executions such as “hangover cure” ads that ran daily at breakfast time between 7am and 11am, tempting workers with that “morning after” feeling to build their perfect cure. Once their appetites were whetted Yell.com pointed them in the right direction to find the nearest café or sandwich shop.