My Google Map Blog

A few weeks back, Adidas launched a creative advertising campaign to promote a collaboration between Adidas as LucasFilm, based on the popular Star Wars series of movies. Using StreetView and Google Earth imagery, combined with some IP address geolocation, the death star "blasts" your house with a giant Adidas logo.

Here is my neighborhood at the end of the ad:

You can try it yourself here.

While this was a creative campaign, they didn't quite think it all the way through. According to a story on Fast Company, they caused quite a ruckus in Japan:

As it turns out, the geo-detection system in Japan traces many IP addresses back to a large central server--a server that was located right next to the emperor of Japan's palace. Barbour's Death Star app had spent the night blasting away at the palace--a promo trick totally lost in translation. Soon, Adidas's customer service center was inundated with calls from confused Japanese citizens.

Oops.

The execution of it somewhat reminds me of a promotion that Porsche did earlier this year where you could "test drive" a car using Google Maps and StreetView. They drove the car through an auto-generated ad that featured snippets of the route that you asked it to take.

What other creative promotions have you seen that use Google Earth, Google Maps or Street View?