The A-League kicks off this week and to launch Season 3 we’ve produced a shiny new campaign which has received some great coverage over the last week.

Lowe Hunt CEO Stephen Pearson says the fans’ experiences provided a powerful proposition for the new campaign and the inspiration for its visually arresting and compelling creative, complete with new line: “90 minutes, 90 emotions”.

“This campaign for the third year of the Hyundai A-League is about celebrating the infectious atmosphere which comes from the fans’ collective experience and the emotional roller-coaster of highs and lows throughout 90 minutes of each and every game.

“It was vital that this was presented in a visually striking manner true to the brand, and we knew we needed to be true to the scale and youth appeal of the first two campaigns, showing the power and atmosphere in a fresh way – not how you might see a game broadcast,” Stephen says.

The “90 minutes, 90 emotions” brand and retail campaign will run across cinema, commercial and subscription TV, viral, web, print, radio and experiential.

Check out the TV on the A-League website.

We recently took on the challenge of how to get a positive message about a power company through to students. Using online gaming to cut through the clutter in an increasingly fragmented advertising market, the result was a sophisticated online educational game called ElectroCity.

After 18 months of intense creative, design and technical work, the game has already been overwhelming successful: there have been up to 55,000 daily visitor sessions on the www.electrocity.co.nz site, and the average length of a session is more than ten minutes. More than 7.6 million page views have been recorded in just over two months and over 370 schools have registered to play the game, which is designed for classroom use.

According to the game creator, Tom Markham, “ElectroCity is educational, but it’s also really fun to play. You start with a pristine New Zealand landscape of rivers, mountains and bush. Then it’s a case of deciding what you want to do with it. You can create a clean and green tourist town or a monstrous metropolis with millions of citizens. You can even do nothing.

“Unlike other building games, our scoring system does not force players to focus only on growth. But ElectroCity is still competitive and addictive. That’s the trick.”

Play it for yourself or watch the interactive case study or better still chat to Mark on how we can do a campaign for you.

Staff profile of Han Lee.

Han is an outstanding designer, illustrator and animator. Armed with a degree in Visual Communication earned in Christchurch New Zealand, Han has put his skills to work on mobile and online games, web design, interactive campaigns, and advanced mandarin peeling.

Working at Lowe / Rivet, Han has contributed to interactive projects for Football Federation Australia, Genesis Energy, Nestlé, Thomson Education, and Unilever.

He rocks at - well - just being Han! We love him.

GM 4.2 has just been sent out letting you all know about the best sites and interactive stuff from around the world. Jeremy Brook, our new Senior AD has a great thought-piece on Social Networking as well, and our star animator and flash developer Han Lee is also showcased. If you want to get on the mailing list email me. The current GM is here.

Campaign Brief’s Videoblog was in action at last week’s AFA’s and has just posted a pretty comprehensive video report with vox pops from the event as well as insight into what excited the judges.

AIM’s ‘Don’t Torture Your Soul With The Wrong Career’

While it seems like there was some significant debate over the final winners, one thing that was clear from all the judges – they were overwhelmed by the detail to which agencies and clients had gone to demonstrate effectiveness and ROI. In picking up gold on our Football Federation of Australia campaign - Finalist Judge, James Sheffield of Commonwealth Bank said the campaign showed ‘good innovative thinking’.

Our work for the Australian Institute of Music - Fuelling Inspiration and Business – was the last of the bronze awards of the night. With an ROI of over 500% and 46% increase in revenue for AIM – the campaign demonstrates how approaching the education sector with innovative creative also let us achieve some great results.

Last night we had two campaigns short listed in the 9th Annual AFA Advertising Effectiveness Awards. Against a strong filed we picked up Gold for our work for Football Federation of Australia (Season 1 and 2) and a Bronze for our Australian Institute of Music print campaign.

As one of only five Golds handed out it was a great reward to see creativity and thinking applauded. Congratulations to the whole Lowe Hunt team!

Stella Screen have screened the classic horror film The Shining in Brisbane’s Old Museum, which was refitted to look like the film’s hellish Overlook Hotel. To create a genuine buzz around the event we extended the experiential theme by recreating the ghostly bar scene from the film. The bar was a meticulous recreation of the film’s Gold Room, complete with eerie 1920s barman Lloyd.

Groups of passers by were invited into the depths of The Stella Artois Gold Room by pale strangers dressed in coat and tails. Guests then followed the sound of 1920s ballroom music anticipating the buzz of a crowded bar only to be confronted by the lone bartender, Lloyd. The visitors were then directed to another room located down a dark corridor where they’d find other scary cues from the film. On entering room 237, another stranger would ask them to write their details in the guest register so they could be contacted.

The Brisbane locals that didn’t run out screaming left the bar with a mysterious invitation and code to enter a website - stellagoldroom.com.

Using their code, they could access the guest register on the website and confirm their booking details. The ticket was then emailed to them. The Stella Artois Gold Room achieved excellent word of mouth filling seats for the screening within days.

We created Stella Fight Club. A campaign to get people in to watch a special screening of the movie Fight Club, which was sponsored by Stella Artois.

We painted up barmen to look like they were in a massive fight and left the customers to ask what happened. The barmen would then slide a napkin across that had the url - www.fight-club.co.nz written on it - and that was all that was said. Customers registered on the website and were invited to the screening.

Account Manager Wanted

Develop and manage the day-to-day client relationships across a range of existing Rivet clients and assist in the development of new relationships within existing group clients and new business.

Details on Facebook or contact Jeremy

Yes it’s true. Two new vids have been released today. Check them out here.