Cinematic film Desert Nemesis follows Nissan’s inaugural GT Academy winner, Lucas Ordonez, as he takes the innovative Juke-R to Dubai’s International Marine Club to face some of the world’s most famous supercars in a thrilling street race. In Desert Nemesis, award-winning film director, Rob Kaplan, captured the noise and excitement generated by the muscular Juke-R and a street race against its loudest, most acclaimed adversaries.

Nissan has set itself a four-week window in which to take serious orders, after which it will begin building the cars. So, technically, the Juke-R is only limited by the number of people that wish to buy one.

“The Juke-R was originally intended as a one-off concept to marry two of Nissan’s most innovative models. But the reaction we had to the car in Dubai was amazing – people were making offers for the original on the street! With such a strong reaction, and with three genuine offers on the table, we decided we had to make the car a reality. We can’t let down enthusiasts who are this keen to add to their collection of cars. The Juke-R has become something of a phenomenon and I’m enormously proud of the impact it has had. There will be more news to come on Juke later in the year,”

said Juke’s marketing manager, Gareth Dunsmore.

In the run-up to the film launch on May 3, several teaser trailers have been released through Nissan’s Facebook and YouTube channels, offering the audience ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage of one of the automotive industry’s bravest, boldest productions.

Teaser video 1: Overtake

Teaser Video 3: Departure

Teaser Video 4: Asphalt sensation

Teaser Video 5: Helicopter

… and finally: The Race.

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And with growing user numbers, the audience for marketing campaings is growing. Several brands have realized that already. For example, Honda rolled out a ‘Pintermission’ campaign last month with the help of its longtime agency, Santa Monica-based RPA. The campaign is definitely inspired John Lennon’s quote “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” and promotes the new CR-V, which is all about “getting out and living”.

Honda is asking the most active pinners to take a 24-hour break from their computer and realize all those things they have been pinning about. Aneat handmade-style designed pin, mentioning the pinners in the title directly is the perfect and most media-adequat way to challenge those pinners.

The brand will return the favour by sharing the images from their short leave on Honda’s Pinterest page after coming back. And more important is that Honda is giving $500 to five of the most active pinners that agreed to leave.

“We’re just dipping our toes in the water here with our first campaign, but it will be a good opportunity to market some of our vehicle launches [in the future]. It’s such a fast-growing social-media network and seemed like a really good, different, creative outlet for us and a chance to use a visual medium to promote our cars. The car is definitely targeted toward females, ”

commented Lauren Ebner, assistant manager of social media at American Honda Motor Co., to Ad Age.

Two of them have already taken the challenge—one of them is going to London, and the other one is heading to Hawaii.

This is in my eyes the best campaign mechnic on pinterest so far. If it will sell more cars? Probably not. Will it communicate the car and what it stands for? Definitely. Will it position the brand as innovative and insiring? For sure. What more can you expect from an $2,500 campaign?

“This is the perfect cultural insight for the technology of Ford that facilitates your everyday actually - or even could terminate almost a cultural trend,”

says Fred Levron, Executive Director, Head of Digital & Brand Content at Ogilvy & Mather Paris.

For their “Ford Park Pinball” the team of Ogilvy & Mather isntalled a huge digital display above a small parking space in Paris, which let the game begin – the participants found themselves all alone.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the smart eball event, the cars were also converted into a game.

For the new model, the VW Amorak, McCann Istanbul presents a little campaign on Facebook, called Flipdrive, to show that the Amarok is the ultimate all terrain vehicle. It goes on everywhere, from mountains to streets of urban jungles. With more than 200 photos  following each other, users can navigate through a virtualdrive in the new Amarok. Users just keep their finger on the -> button and flip through the album so fast that it turns into a never ending movie loop.

Just recently we saw a similar campaign on Twitter. There Mini told a neat little story in ASCII code.

As with almost all technological development, it’s first about playing around and then spinning-off real services for the user. That’s why the next generation of in-car apps has to be all be about providing “smart” services, that could go as fast as autonomous driving. Google and Audi are only two prominent brands for these developments. An Audi A8 with a beta automated driving technology called “Urban Intelligent Assist” could become soon reality in parts.

“The vision is to develop Audi models that will recognize individual motorists behind the wheel, know preferred destinations, routes the motorists have most commonly traveled and the time needed to reach appointments.”

According to ERL (Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab) director Dr. Peter Oel, one of the biggest challenges in integrating networked technology into cars is bridging the Silicon Valley engineering culture with automotive engineering culture. Anupam Malhotra, Manager of Connected Vehicles at Audi of America, talked at this years CES about the future of Audi’s connected services.

Futuristic concepts of gestural-based dashboards are a clear step towards that direction. But according to Anupam “context relevant location-based services” will come before, as an ongoing development of excisting lbs-services, such as real-time news and weather, gas station locations, POIs (Points Of Interest), traffic information and travel destinations. Anupam Malhotra knows what he’s talking about. Having started at GM’s OnStar subsidiary in 2000, he is part of the development since the early days.

But the HMI (Human-machine interface) in the car will come sooner or later, finally with the autonomous car. After buttons around the driving wheel and touchscreen controls in the dashboard, voice controls is the current stage, that all major manufacturers have to reach and the drivers have to get comfortable with. In the near future we will see gesture controlled systems, which Audi and Mercedes demonstrated at CES as concepts.

All these future concepts and developments have the same goal, according to Malhotra: to take away the “misery” aspects of driving. These would be parking problems, dealing with traffic congestion, fuel management. This will allow the driver to enjoy the actual driving part.

All kinds of things are becoming connected to the internet, from plants to street signs. After all, the car will essentially mesh with the environment offering a real-time feedback with optimal solutions on routes, weather and parking. Sounds like fun to me.

“Being able to use our GT Academy graduates in our ever-growing range of top-level motor sport activities is another example of Nissan’s innovative approach to everything we do,”

explains Darren Cox, General Manager Nissan in Europe.

This year’s edition of the European GT Academy started on Tuesday 1 May and remains open until Sunday 24 June. The new for 2012 gaming format features an eight-step qualification programme that can be played online by anyone with a PlayStation 3. The download will use the best selling Gran Turismo 5 game as a base and has been specially developed by the legendary creator, Kazunori Yamauchi.

The ultimate winners of each of the GT Academy competitions from Race Camp will then be put through an incredibly intensive and thorough Driver Development Programme to prepare them for the chance to take part in the challenging Dubai 24 Hours in January, 2013 – the ultimate competition prize.

Follow the qualification and the race on https://www.facebook.com/GTAcademy.

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A dream car that can exist, thanks to West Coast Customs, who turned a 2012 Ford Mustang with a 1967 fastback body into the “Project Detroit”. The concept car was created in order to inspire developers to think about building apps and automotive technologies of the future. Connected-device scenarios featured in the car incorporate Kinect for Xbox 360, Xbox 360, Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Azure, Bing, Ford Sync and more.

The specially developed Viper SmartStart app for a Windows Phone, gives almost full access on the car. Remotely locate, lock, and unlock the car, is just tiny part of it. The car has a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot that allows interaction and fast online connection with the cloud. The vehicle has a built-in 4G wireless network that supports multiple devices. Front and rear Kinect cameras provide a live video feed of surrounding pedestrians and objects. You can even watch and listen to the live audio and video stream from the Kinects remotely using a Windows Phone and send a message to the external audio system like “Hey skateboarders: stay away from my car.”

The dashboard greets you with a Windows 8 touchscreen on each side. The driver can swipe the touch-screen instrument cluster to get different information on average fuel consumption, music track, or navigation status. The make it more fun, the look and feel can be toggled between different dashboard skins including a 1967 Mustang, a 2012 Mustang and a Windows 8 Metro design style version.

Fully integrated is also Ford SYNC with voice control. The Windows 8 touchscreen on the passenger’s of the dash side lets a passenger play on Xbox without distracting the driver, surf the Web, or pull up Bing maps-to give you directions or find the nearest restaurant so you don’t have to.

Plus, for extra entertainment, when you park, the rear windshield doubles as a projector for playing Xbox Kinect. While driving, the rear windshield can serve as a customizable display system that can play video, show images and display custom messages, like “Stop tailgating me please” or something more direct.

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Actually, it’s a stop-motion animation, written in ASCII, that comes to life, when the users stars to scroll down using the “J” key (or “K” for reverse mode). The “commercial” made of 450-plus tweets show a Smart car strolling down a city road and cleverly park between two other vehicles.

The simplicity it this idea perfectly suits the Brand and the message. Eventhough, in reality it won’t work as smooth as shown in the video, because on scrolling only a block of Tweets gets loaded. So the stop-motion movie turns into a stop-and-go movie. Nevertheless, I like the idea. And it could be the start of more ads like this. Twitter itself hasn’t been target for many innovative campaigns so far, maybe this examples breaks the barrier of the “140″-restriction in some creative heads.

And again it’s about a small activity within a social network with huge viral potential, instead of a big campaign that gets rolled out. New communication forms and methods take place, that adapt to user behaviors and rely on new distribution models, thanks to hyperconnected users.

Scion has just released a new interactive ad campaign on youtube for their all-new Scion iQ, with the aim to illustrate that the car has enough space to comfortably seat four adults.Therefor they released 4 new videos, first of which features women in bikinis eating donuts and drinking milk. Hm? Yep. While they’re all in the car eating and drinking, they’re driving donuts (making speedy circles). Aside from “Babes n’ Donuts”, there are “Dudes n’ Donuts,” “Bikers n’ Donuts” and “Police n’ Donuts.”

The new Scion iQ marketing campaign comes just weeks after the company launched two other ads touting the vehicle’s parking benefits. The automaker released a series of nine online spots just last month demonstrating how versatile the iQ is in terms of parking. Scion also recently revealed a free parking promotion in conjunction with New York’s Central Parking Company. The unique promotion, which has been prominently supported via bus ads and by local DJs, enables iQ owners to receive 6 months of free parking at over 80 Central Parking locations in New York and New Jersey. Visit the iQ website for more information about dealer participation and eligibility and read Scion iQ Owners Get Free Parking in Manhattan.

Website Scion iQ: http://bit.ly/Hivtrl

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Together with Tribal DDB and in cooperation with Facebook, the campaign “Hitchhike with a Like” has been developed to promote the new 21st Century Beetle. All users, who become a fan of the new VW Beetle on Facebook   are able to participate in the “social game”, which leads them on a virtual road trip through the most beautiful cities in Europe. A total of 256 different road trips are available. During the trip, players can earn points that can be redeemed for various prizes. The player with the highest score look forward to a real road trip to various music festivals in Europe - of course in a real 21st Century Beetle.

Chris Baylis, executive creative director at Tribal DDB Amsterdam, says:

“The beetle was a symbol of nonconformity - the Beetle translated this attitude into the 21st Century. We replace the thumb of the hitchhiker from the 60′s with the thumbof the 21 Century. The Facebook ’Like’ ”

The campaign will run in ten markets across Europe. Together with MassiveMusic, Amsterdam also has its own soundtrack for the game has been developed. It can be downloaded after earning enough points and unlocking the music package.

“The Beetle was always a very social. So we were excited about the opportunity to develop a program that reveals the social potential of the Beetle on Facebook,”

says Alexander Schlaubitz, director of consumer marketing at Facebook.