"This is just plain funny. We saw so much bad viral content this year that it's refreshing to see something that actually makes you laugh." —juror Todd Purgason
"OK, I spent way too much time trying to find all of the ways to mess with this poor guy. It's a great way to kill a few minutes between meetings." —juror Diane Andolsek
Overview: This unbranded interactive video helped create a viral buzz around Sprint's Power Vision high-speed wireless services. Users control a taxi passenger's decidedly unpleasant ride by searching for hidden triggers on their keyboards.
• Roughly 30 video segments
• Numerous Easter eggs
• 3-month development time
• More than 1 million visitors
Comments by Jennifer Zirbel, Brendan Moorcroft, Roger Wong and Guthrie Dolin:
"We wanted to do something that had never been done before on the Web, a fully interactive video. We were inspired by Burger King's Subservient Chicken but wanted to go beyond that; we mapped-out the twenty-plus scenes and integrated them into a seamless experience.
"The challenge was creating something truly entertaining. We had a number of ideas from a surly English hipster dissecting poor music playlists to Fabio playing with Barbie dolls. We ultimately went with a concept that most people could relate to: Being bored at your job and fantasizing about having some devilish fun. Being a taxi driver and bashing your passenger around definitely fit the bill. By the way, even though a guy bouncing around at the back of a cab seems like a harmless activity, we did have a professional stunt coordinator on the set to ensure that the actor wouldn't get hurt.
"In the end one of our favorite (hidden) pieces of functionality is when the user presses the 's' key and a blow-up doll appears next to the actor. The sort of odd part is that we had several blow-up dolls to choose from. That was an interesting task, choosing a blow-up doll for our client."