Army on Everest (http://www.armyoneverest.mod.uk/)
I love this site. Why? Because it is a great example of how you can provide a real insight into what it is like to work for a company, with just a little bit of lateral thought. You can smell the brief – increase the number of applicants to the army by showing that life isn’t all guns. You know the drill, the site focuses on the ambitions of a young team of recruits to climb Everest. We can watch them training, trace their progress using modern mapping technology and even read their thoughts through blogs and vodcasts. But note – the site embraces technology in a way that is relevant to the site, as opposed to using technology for technology’s sake.

Even though the team keeps failing to reach the summit, the site has succeeded achieving three things:

• in raising the profile of the army,
• in increasing the number of applicants and,
• (a relevant but ne’er mentioned ambition of the army), in irritating the recruitment teams at Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.

Microsoft Imagine Cup (http://imaginecup.com/)
In the coding world, you are either a Microsoft .Net developer, or you are not. It’s very black and white. So how could Microsoft increase the number of .Net developers in existence without actually having any power over the education choices of the target audience? The answer is the Microsoft Imagine Cup. Capitalising on two fundamental tenets of coders (the inherent need to be right and an even stronger need to be better than everyone), Microsoft created a competition that gets coders to review and fix lines of code; competition winners then get put forward to regional, national and international variants of the competition. The Olympics for coders, as it is now being positioned.

Dull as dishwater, you may say. But it has had a huge impact on the development of sites using Microsoft technologies (which was in a freefall back in 2002, when the campaign began), has had a massive impact on the perception of Microsoft as a company and is a classic example of a cleverly thought out campaign that is based on a deep and insightful understanding of the target audience.

GCHQ targets spy gamers (http://media.guardian.co.uk/advertising/story/0,,2193224,00.html)
Not a game site, unfortunately, but an interesting campaign. GCHQ, the UK Government’s intellectual hotbed of information gathering, has decided to use in-game advertising (commonly referred to as advergaming) to attract new, web-savvy recruits. They have chosen to advertise in populist games like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent and Quake Arena. This is despite having previously stated that working for the government is nothing like the successful BBC drama ‘Spooks’…

Cheddarvision.tv (http://www.cheddarvision.tv/)
Has to be a contender for the dullest site on the web. But it has attracted a steady host of fans who wish to do nothing more than watch a round of cheddar mature… there is a lot of focus on the site at the moment because the owner has claimed that, since placing an England rugby ball on top of the cheddar, England hasn’t lost a game. Hmmm. Prophetic or pathetic? You decide.