If you're looking to keep up with the Joneses, often you need only drive by their house and check out the post-holiday trash pile in order to determine the next items for your wish list (not that we encourage that sort of behavior or anything). That's the concept behind this simple but well executed stunt by MINI in Amsterdam.

As a longtime Flickr fan and photographer of odd things, I'm excited about a new location-based game that integrates my kind of photography. It's called Noticings and it's all about sharing images of the things around you. Read Write Web calls it a Foursquare for photographers.

Players get points for things like being the first to notice something in a neighborhood or for noticing typos like this one:

It's easy to play along. Sign in with your Flickr account and make sure you're geo-tagging your photos and tagging them with "noticings." There's also a handy iPhone app that uploads your photos for you.

Once you start playing, check out the dashboard for recent activity. Points are calculated once a day at 15:00 GMT.

I love seeing new uses of social media tools out there and all in all, this appears to be a very cool use of Flickr's location API.

When the holidays roll around, many folks in the advertising business can probably relate to this spoof of "A Charlie Brown Christmas:"

Charlie Brown and his weekend-working friends could have used some help from Mother. Their recent take on the holidays has been getting all sorts of attention.

They channeled the Nigerian scammer emails that promise big dollars in exchange for personal information, sending out a similar message to a few hundred people. They promised $10,000 to the first person who emailed back with their name and bank information. One person responded, leading to this video and sizable charitable donation:

Enjoy this creative approach and have a safe and happy holiday season.

Every now and then it actually happens: a useful new product comes together with well executed online and offline marketing efforts to create a perfect storm of promotion. The I.D. Case from Case-mate does just that. Here's what's so great about it:

It goes without saying that the I.D. Case from Case-mate is ultra-slim, adding minimal bulk to your iPhone (added bulk is why I have resisted an iPhone case for so long). But the really ingenious feature is the slot on the back, which will hold 2 credit card sized items. This could be your debit card and your I.D., business cards, cash, etc., making it perfect for any number of scenarios where you might opt to go sans wallet/purse. Check out this video of the product designers (Alex is a Savannah College of Art & Design alum) talking about how they arrived at the final prototype.

The second element of this success story is the promotion, both online and offline. Case-mate did a really good job of identifying a target audience for promoting the initial roll-out of the I.D. Case. The product holds immediate appeal to people who wish to carry as few items as possible when they go out. (Ladies, the little black dress rarely has pockets, does it?) There's even a funny little website called The Complicators which profiles nefarious characters from the bar scene. Check out this footage of the brand's field agents assuming the role of the Decomplicators as they give away free samples of the I.D. Case at the...

The Flyer's Collection is a hilarious fake product line from JetBlue Airways created for those "unfortunate times" when its customers have to fly with the Other Guys. It includes items such as the Knee Jockey, the Full Body Compression Garment, and the Seat Back Beeper. The collection lives on a custom tab on JetBlue's Facebook fanpage and is a great example of funny, engaging content that allows people to connect with the JetBlue brand at an emotional level.