The end of May marked a big event for Honda and Channel 4 as they placed a live tv commercial showing 19 skydivers who spelt out the letters Honda whilst parachuting. The brand was supporting their ‘Difficult is worth doing’ strapline.

Impressive as it is, it’s certainly not the first live tv commercial in the UK. Back in the early days of television, most commercials were shot and aired live.

C4 sales director Andy Barnes tells us:

“We wanted to create something unmissable and what better way to produce something ‘must see’ than to stage the first live ad event on TV. It’s about creating talkability on a big scale, managing the risk and being seen as pioneers for it.”

The follow on for the campaign features skydivers over the USA’s Mojave desert, creating shapes that depict the Honda Accord’s features

University researchers have developed an interface between a mobile camera phone, Bluetooth and a video display. It allows the user to control the cursor on the screen. A crude prototype at the moment, but it has great promise if you imagine a crowd in a bar or an event or on the high street playing games via a large video display or projection. Turn your phone into a Wii-style remote!

The system was developed by three guys at British universities. Nick Pears researches Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Robotics in the Advanced Computer Architectures Group at York University whilst Patrick Oliver and Dan Jackson are at Newcastle University.

Here’s a concept a little removed from the advertising arena until someone sees a route to deliver a media application. Sometimes the very best advertising media ideas come from thinking a little out of the box around quirky ideas like this.

New Scientist reports a paper presented at the 2008 Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC). Scientists at the University of California have developed an application that gathers people’s music tastes in a room and creates a dynamic playlist that delivers the most popular music for those in the room. Each user’s mp3 player sends out its playlist via wi-fi to a central dj box. This computes the location of users by triangulating the strength of their signals. The Smart Party was developed by Kevin Eustice and Peter Reiher.

So you might be thinking how the hell am I going to make this a media buy? Strip it to the core elements and you have the essence of some great interactive possibilities for an ad campaign. The elements are:

• location detection by triangulating a device’s wi-fi (or bluetooth) signals
• Identifying preferences from those devices
• calculate a dynamic list of most popular, fastest rising, all time favourite, best in the past hour etc.

You could apply this principle to many, many things beyond music and have great fun at your next big event.