Chalkbot

Why it works

Fans at the Tour de France have long painted messages on the road for the riders. For Nike's Livestrong cancer campaign during the 2009 race, Wieden+Kennedy Portland let anyone in the world add one from a phone or keyboard. Messages sent by text, Twitter, web banners or the campaign site were queued for Chalkbot, a truck-towed printing rig built by Pittsburgh's Deeplocal and Standard Robot, which sprayed them onto the route in yellow, water-soluble paint. Each sender then received a photograph of their words on the tarmac, tagged with its GPS coordinates. It is studied as one of the first campaigns to turn social posts into physical objects and hand the proof back to the people who wrote them, a loop that made a global audience feel present at the roadside. Metro reported more than 36,000 messages over the race, thousands of them printed across 13 stages. It won the Cyber Grand Prix at Cannes in 2010.