Whatever you want to do...Droid Does
An ingenious way to control a billboard with your iPhone
McDonald's launches a campaign in Sweden whereby, without downloading an app, you can play pong through your iPhone on a huge billboard and win free food.
Though advertising is largely dead, sometimes people come up with wonderfully inventive things that make you stand and smile. Often, those people are in Sweden.
Here is just one wonderful example. It is for McDonald's. The bright minds behind this thought it would be, as the narrator of the video says, "extra fun" to have people stand around in a nice square, whip out their iPhones and play digital Pong on a large billboard.
If you managed to last 30 seconds without being defeated, you would get a coupon for something delicious at Ronald's house.
Particularly delightful about this little wheeze was that you didn't have to go through the cumbersome process of having to download some unwieldy app.
Instead, all you had to do was enter a URL in your phone's browser and that sneaky GPS facility that you sometimes worry about confirmed that you were in the vicinity of the billboard.
This isn't the first time that McDonald's has encouraged instant cell phone "extra fun" for those walking the streets with nothing better to do than play and eat.
Here's another interactive billboard that asked the idle and hungry to capture flying food with their cellphones and then prove it by revealing your photo to the nice people at McDonald's.
This one seems a little harder to play. But who do you think created it? Why, the Swedes, of course.
