Have you noticed a change in Diet Coke‘s packaging this month? If you have, or even if you haven’t, be sure to read about what The Heart Truth campaign is and the role Diet Coke is taking to support the cause!

For the fifth year in a row, Diet Coke has teamed up with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s (NHLBI)The Heart Truth campaign. Also teaming up for the cause is actress Minka Kelly and iconic fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. The goal of the campaign is to raise awareness of women’s hearth health educational programs. Five lucky Diet Coke fans will have the opportunity to join these women for the star-studded Red Dress Collection Fashion Show on February 8, which is the big kick-off for New York Fashion Week.

The Coca-Cola Company recently created the newly designed packaging for Diet Coke to commemorate the soft drink manufacturer’s fifth-year of support for the NHLBI’s campaign, to promote heart disease awareness. Aside from the newly designed packaging, Diet Coke has also participated in a variety of awareness-raising programs to build the campaign over the past few months. The special packaging will be featured on Diet Coke throughout the month of February. The design features a stick figure painting a large, red heart. More than six billion packages of Diet Coke will feature The Heart Truth logo throughout the year

Diane von Furstenberg also donated more to the cause by creating a limited-edition collection of Diet Coke aluminum bottles that feature her iconic styles and prints. The bottles will only be sold in select Diane von Furstenberg stores in New York and at her designer website during February. Proceeds from the bottle sales will benefit the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), in support of The Heart Truth and women’s heart health research and educational programs.

The campaign efforts by Diet Coke are taking place both offline and online. Diet Coke will be engaging via social media, through packaging, and on the runway to raise awareness for women’s heart health educational programs. Online, Diet Coke fans will be able to use their social networking abilities to “show their hearts” for the cause and even enter for a chance to win a change to attend the annual Red Dress Collection Fashion Show.  Twitter users hashtagged “#ShowYourHeart,” and people shared photos of themselves wearing red via Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram.

All of the entries were judged, the five best photos were selected, and final judge, Minka Kelly, got to pick one of the five top entries for one grand prize winner. The grand prize winner received a shopping spree with a style expert. All five winners get to join the fashion show this week where on the runway, Minka Kelly will join Diet Coke and in the Red Dress runway will don a custom made Diane von Furstenberg dress.

Supporters of The Heart Truth can also help raise for the cause by “donating a tweet.” For each person who re-tweets Diet Coke’s The Heart Truth post on February 8, Diet Coke will donate $1 to the FNIH, up to $100,000.

“For five years, Diet Coke has been a passionate supporter of The Heart Truth and its efforts to raise awareness about the importance of heart health,” said William White, Brand Director, Diet Coke North America. “While we’ve shared this vital message with millions of people through our partnership with the NHLBI, we’ll reach even more this year with creative online programs, in-store activations and eye-catching packaging.”

To see how else you can support the cause, check out The Heart Truth website to support raising awareness for heart disease!

Sources: Packaging Digest, The Coca-Cola Co., National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

It’s been a habit since we were kids, but it looks as though simply reading cereal boxes as we are eating breakfast is soon to be a thing of the past.

Mark Addicks of General Mills says that on average, a person reads the text on his/her box 12 times. This may be people who are looking at the nutritional information or counting calories, looking at the pictures or filling in the maze, or those who are looking to just passing the time as they eat.

People love their cereal boxes, and now, General Mills is working on ways to extend the experience by creating ways for us to use our cell phones while we eat. Through the use of QR codes, apps, and augmented reality among other things, General Mills wants to enhance your breakfast routine via smartphones.

“There’s never been a time like this,” says Addicks, a 23-year veteran of the company. “Because of the digital technology that resides in people’s hands … we can now deliver content that engages and enhances the experience. Before, we had to rely on a 30-second TV ad.”

Addick’s has big plans for the cereal giant and wants to basically reinvent food packaging by using digital technology and making it more interactive. Without revealing much, Addick’s says that he is working on concepts that he hopes will be out by the summer.

The main form of smartphone interaction Addick’s is hoping for is through QR codes. “You point to a logo and things start to appear,” he says. “Maybe some functional content will pop up on a cake-mix box, or you might see entertainment and games coming from a cereal box. What I’m hoping for is pure entertainment.”

Although General Mills competitor, Kellogg, already uses QR codes on their recent boxes of Special K and Krave cereals as well as an augmented-reality promotion on the back of their Corn Pops, General Mills isn’t discouraged.

General Mills isn’t completely new to creating smartphone apps for its products and has already started to experiment with a smartphone app on its Yoplait Greek yogurts. The app invited consumers to find Greek items on the backs of their packaging and in turn, General Mills made donations to food shelters. The company has also already tested augmented reality on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios.

So, with a smartphone in hand, be sure to keep an eye on General Mills cereal in the months to come.

When a fashion brand decides to launch its own perfume packaging is an essential element. Choosing packaging is much more than simply pouring the perfume into the most accessible bottle. Not only does the packaging need to be eye catching and make the perfume look desirable, but it needs to represent the image that they brand stands for.

International fashion label, SuperTrash, owned by Dutch designer and entrepreneur Olcay Gulsen, is further expanding upon its fashion empire with a new high-end perfume called Phenomenal, which will be unveiled at Amsterdam Fashion Week 2012. The fashion brand not only offers clothing, but shoes, accessories and lingerie. SuperTrash felt it only fit, like every other major company in the fashion industry, to launch its own perfume.

To help them venture into the perfume market and create an eye-catching package design that exemplifies the attitude of the brand, SuperTrash joined powers with international branding and packaging design agency CARTILS. The objective of the package design was to reflect the uniqueness and authenticity of the SuperTrash brand image. The brand revolves around living a successful life, being sophisticated and exposing yourself as you are. “Phenomenal” targets independent women with a great sense for fashion and style.

Gaston van de Laar, Group Director Client Services at CARTILS explains: “The powerful angular bottle shape represents independence and confidence, while the cap texture and gold colouring show the absolute class and style the international brand stands for. The sophistication and great sense for fashion are underlined by the delicate ribbon and SuperTrash charm.”

To create SuperTrash’s Phenomenal, a large-scale research was conducted by Jorijn Harms at the Delft University of Technology to determine how scent characteristics can be translated in packaging design. The research results offered clear insights on color, shape, angularity and more. The insights that were gained were then connected to the characteristics of the perfume (sophisticated, independent, and fashion forward) and combined with the SuperTrash brand to create the foundation of an outstanding package design.

“Launching my own perfume has been a dream of mine for so long, I think Phenomenal fits the SuperTrash lifestyle perfectly”,  Olcay Gulsen comments. “CARTILS really brought the SuperTrash brand experience alive in Phenomenal’s packaging design. It clearly represents ‘feminine independency’, a characteristic the brand is known for. Besides that, it differentiates from all the offers that are currently on the market. It is satisfying to see that a company, that is a relative outsider within this segment, is in touch with the market and the SuperTrash brand in such a great way. ”

Earlier this year we shared Mashable writer, Matthias Garcia’s annual mobile marketing trends on the rise in our blog “Mobile Marketing Trends to Look for in 2012,” and one of those trends was marketing through augmented reality. This trend is already starting to make its mark in 2012 and can be seen courtesy of Bandai’s new Thundercats, Ben 10, and Power Rangers.

In this augmented reality package design, consumers who want purchase the product may use their smart phone or iPad  to bring the package to life via Aurasma’s augmented reality. Parents as well as kids are presented with a to-scale 3D animated image of the toy that they want to purchase. The benefit of this allows the consumer to see the product from all sides and angles without having to actually open the box.

“The toy industry is always looking for new ways to excite customers so we are thrilled to be the first partner of this pioneering 3D technology creating 21st century window shopping,” said Darrell Jones, Marketing Director at Bandai.

Martina King, Managing Director of Aurasma, expanded on Jones’ enthusiasm:

“Parents will now have to remember not to throw away the packaging which, thanks to Aurasma, looks set to become an essential part of the toy’s experience and something kids keep returning to.”

“Using new technology comes as second nature to kids today and whether using their parents’ or their own mobile phone, this imaginative partnership between Aurasma and Bandai will delight the whole family. And best of all, because Aurasma is free to download, it means that now pocket money can be stretched just that little bit further.”

Apple never ceases to amaze.

Anticipation, impatience, and excitement are just some of the emotions that Apple wants its customers to feel as they are about to open their brand new Apple product. Many of us know that the packaging that holds our new product is great, but what many of us do not know is how serious Apple is about keeping its packaging a secret by lock and key.

Apple clearly cares about creative, well-designed packaging, and with each new product there are countless details that make the packaging special and unique. Every Apple device comes in an elegant, simple-to-open box that makes us feel as though we are ruining a masterpiece by tugging it apart. The experience in opening an Apple product is unlike any other experience, which is exactly the feeling that Apple wants.

This, and other inside details of Apple were recently revealed in an advanced copy of Adam Lashinsky’s book, Inside Apple.

According to the book, Apple has a secret room that is accessible only by security badges that is dedicated to hundreds of different kinds of prototype product packaging options for Apple products such as the iPad.

“To fully grasp how seriously Apple executives sweat the small stuff, consider this: For months, a packaging designer was holed up in this room performing the most mundane of tasks – opening boxes,” NetworkWorld’s iOnApple blog quoted from Lashinsky’s book.

Apparently, packaging designers open every prototype box to test the positioning of the invisible stickers stuck to the top of iPod boxes. Lashinsky explained that the invisible tape must be placed exactly every time.

Late co-founder, Steve Jobs, who passed away in late 2011, took packaging very seriously because he wanted Apple customers to have the complete experience with the product and wanted customers to feel a certain emotion upon opening Apple products to add to the Apple mystique.

Unlike other technology companies, Apple’s package design have sophisticated utilization of white space. MacRumors quotes Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, from Walter Isaacson’s bio on Steve Jobs: “You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”

Be sure to check out this video courtesy of Mashable:

Source: http://www.mashable.com

Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey has always had a bottle design that sets them apart from the rest and I think it is safe to say that many people can instantly associate the distinct package design with Jack Daniel’s. When Jack Daniel himself first entered into the business, he wanted to have a package design is unique and Mr. Jack said he wanted “a square bottle for a square shooter,” because he was a square shooter himself.

I have always been a fan of the aesthetic appeal of the Jack Daniel’s brand whiskey bottles, from the classic style to the Tennessee Honey and now, their newest bottle design is no exception. Jack Daniel’s recently released their newest bottle design for the Jack Daniel’s Winter Jack Apple Punch. The drink and bottle are a special edition winter drink from Jack Daniel’s that was originally made for the German market, and hopefully it will keep you warm this winter.

The bottle and design continues to embody the classic square bottle with fluted neck as it always has while featuring a wintery feel. Since Mr. Jack first introduced the eye-catching bottle, the Jack Daniel’s brand has continued to carry on his legacy by issuing decorative bottles from time to time. The bottles have come to either represent Mr. Jack’s accomplishments or to “capture the spirit and style of the time they represent,” which is exactly what Jack Daniel’s Winter Jack Apple Punch has done.

Sources: The Die Line,  Jack Daniel’s

Package design is about what catches our eye and what doesn’t, and many companies have come to recognize that nostalgic packaging is one effective way to sell products. Nostalgia has the ability to make us yearn for a past time or in other words, has the ability to bring us back to “the good old days.” Nostalgia can be triggered by many different things such as a scent, touch, a song, or an image and generally brings the individual back to a happier point in time and a longing to go back.

Packaging designers have understood that nostalgia in packaging can play a large roll in how well a brand sells and how that brand associates with customers and have even come up with the term “throwback.” In the past couple years even we have noticed that many popular brands were going back to their roots with “throw back” designs on their packaging that they had used years before. Nostalgia is a hard feeling to replicate, but when a packaging designer has the ability to give a new packaging the same exact look and feel as the old packaging the product is given a legacy that can be very valuable to the consumer.

Check out these brands that used a nostalgic “throwback” package design in their campaigns! “Everything old is new again.”

Doritos

Hershey Candy Products

Source: www.candyblog.net

La Société Parisienne de Savons

Pepsi and Mountain Dew

On January 18th, many Wikipedia and thousands of other internet websites blacked out their pages in efforts to protest SOPA and the censorship the bill entails.

SOPA was first introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors on October 26th of last year. Since then the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has gained momentum in the form of public protest. Some of the internet’s most influential websites and browsers (Twitter, Google, Reddit, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Zynga, Facebook and more…) are going dark in protest of the anti-piracy bill.

In short, SOPA is an anti-piracy bill that has been working its way through Congress, that truly aims to sensor your internet with serious ramifications. The idea behind the bill sounds very reasonable, stop online piracy and the illegal downloading of products without payment or permission. The issue now though is that SOPA and PIPA have become designed to make it possible for companies to block domain names they felt were responsible or encouraged copyright infringement. This would be bad for practically everybody because this does not necessarily prevent privacy and sites can still be accessed through its IP address.

Below is an overview of how SOPA would work, provided by CNet News.

How would SOPA work?
It allows the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted offshore Web site that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear. It’s kind of an Internet death penalty.

More specifically, section 102 of SOPA says that, after being served with a removal order:

A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order…Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within five days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

Much of the Internet industry and a rather large percentage of internet users are against SOPA. Here is a current list (PDF) of those opponents.  On November 15,  Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, stating that SOPA poses “a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.” It is also reported that Yahoo quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the organization’s enthusiastic support for SOPA.

Not only would the potentially infringing website be affected but so would all their sources of funding, which means that any other companies that are doing business with the infringing companies site would have to stop. This could mean that all advertising, links to search engines, or any other listings would be stopped and removed.

Gizmodo does a perfect job in explaining exactly what and how SOPA will affect the internet and you.

“The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there.”

Check out the rest of the article here: http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa

In all, if passed, SOPA has the ability to affect every facet of your internet viewing and may change the internet world as we know it.

For more information, please read the exact content of both the SOPA and PIPA bills.

Sure, USB drives (also called flash drives) have been around for some time now, but now, more than ever, they are becoming a business. There are so many things that companies are able to do with flash drives that make them more appealing than before.  But what makes a flash drive more appealing than a CD? As CD’s begin to fade out, flash drives are coming in to take their place. There are many advantages to using a flash drive instead of a CD. And although CD’s do have some benefits, those benefits of the flash drive outweigh the benefits of the CD.

Yes, CD’s are produced at a cheaper rate than flash drives are, but as bloggers for USB Flash Drive Tips states: “Yes flash drives cost more but that’s like comparing a piece of paper to a computer. Yep computers are more expensive, but you can only use a piece of paper once!”

For company purposes, a CD is never really good for more than a one time. Think about it, you are only able to burn a presentation onto the disc once, you can only label the disc once, and once the content is viewed by the consumers, it is likely to be thrown away. Yes, there are CD-RWs, but most often, they have a limit of three to four uses before there are quality issues. The CD therefore has no more value because the material on the disc is not needed anymore and is only seen online brochure.

A flash drive, like the CD, has an external logo and a preloaded presentation, but unlike the CD, there is extra memory and storage that is accessible to the user. It is like a portable hard drive and with flash drive memory you can add, erase, and modify data as many times as you would like. A customer is now able to use and reuse the flash drive for their own purposes, which gives the product more value. A flash drive is also a strong marketing tool. Every time your customer pulls out the flash drive you provided to them after viewing the presentation, they will be looking at a customized flash drive with your companies logo whenever they attach the flash drive to the computer.

For tomorrow and today, investing in flash drives will be of more value to you and your company.

When working with flash drives, there are a lot of ways to customize the flash drive with your companies brand or make them your own, and these drives are no exception. Here are 5 crazy USB drives that we found while surfing the net.

Budweiser Beer-filled drive

With the popularity of flash drives on the rise, Budweiser couldn’t help but resist in creating their own promotional, customized USB device. Each promotional flash drive comes complete with a tiny drive filled with beer and white foam to cap it off. And although the amount of beer inside the drive probably isn’t enough to ensure a good time, it’s still a unique idea.

Swiss Army Knife drive

Victorinox recently unveiled a Swiss Army knife with a USB flash drive that holds up to 1 terabyte of data. USB knives have been in the companies line of products for a while, but this new and improved project  comes with new and improved features: it connects to eSATA II/III as well as USB 2.0/3.0 with a single connector, it has a monochrome graphic display showing what’s on the drive and it supports 256 AES encryption. Data transfer speeds are 220 MB/s for reading and 150 MB/s for writing data, and the available capacities range from 64 GB to a whopping 1 TB.

In classic fashion, the knife also includes a blade, scissors, nail file that includes a screwdriver tip and a LED/laser pointer. If you are a frequent traveler, no need to worry, the drive can be interchanged to be flight-friendly and can come without the sharp, pointy stuff.

Check out some more Victorinox flash drives here!

Sushi Roll drive

What’s better than sushi? Better yet, what’s better than a USB drive shaped like sushi? If you love sushi, you’ll be sure to love these sushi themed drives

Teddy Bear drive

Normally when we picture a teddy bear, we think about its cuteness, but this teddy bear drive features what looks like a decapitated teddy bear as the device to store all of your data on.  It almost looks as though its head got jammed into the USB port.

This website even gives you step-by-step instructions on how to make your very own teddy bear USB drive. Teddy Bear USB Flash Drive (USBear?)

Thumb drive

It’s a little creepy how realistic these look, and some of these even include fingerprints!

Check out this bizarre story about a guy who has a prosthetic finger made out of a flash drive — Computer programmer from Finland has lost finger replaced with USB drive