Facilitating Real World Interaction Through a Digital Medium

Timberland has a new campaign with startup social network called Changents. The site allows you to throw your support behind small environmental campaigns and join up with others to promote them.  Timberland has teamed up with the site for a Facebook application that allows you to share seeds for a virtual tree. The more seeds you share the the larger your tree grows, and for every tree that reaches full size Timberland will plant a real tree in a deforested area. This is a great example of using interactive marketing not just to entertain on the web but to actually get people to interact with your brand in real life.

If you ask me where the future of the web is it is here, when digital agencies can inspire people to think about their clients’ brands in an offline setting they become worth their weight in gold. Elf Yourself is a great example of a campaign achieving all of the commonly accepted hallmarks of digital media success but achieving absolutely nothing. How many people had memorable offline experiences from being able to paste their faces on a dancing elf.