Swedish winters require a rugged car. Volkswagen made a “winter-adjusted offer for a winter-adjusted car” to stir interest in its 4Motion four-wheel-drive feature. DDB Sweden put the car on a billboard plunked in the middle of a frozen Swedish lake. Once the ice melted and the billboard sank, the deal was over.

TV, print, in-store and banner ads all highlighted the billboard, which was streamed live so people could follow its Titanic-like destiny. A contest to guess when it would sink was a natural fit for social media. The billboard submerged April 14, after two months of live entertainment. Sales rose 38% in the first quarter of 2011 from the year-earlier period.

The iTunes-like StarHub Music Store in Singapore combined music and fashion — two ways young people often express themselves — by attaching radio-frequency identification chips to clothing in stores. When a piece of clothing was taken into a fitting room, it triggered an RFID speaker to play a music track in the dressing room matching the garment’s style. Then a text was sent to the shopper’s phone, offering a free download of the song he or she was listening to. The music and corresponding clothing were divided into 16 genres, including hip-hop, punk, rock pop, folk, ballads and reggae, totaling more than 10,000 songs. The RFID chips were used in eight fashion brands in 42 stores. The effort by StarHub and DDB Singapore had an average click-through of 84% and boosted paid music downloads by 21%.

Tok&Stok, an Ikea-like retailer in Brazil, used Twitter manuals to demonstrate how easy its furniture is to assemble by shortening instructions to a series of 140-character tweets. Customers who bought a piece of furniture just had to find the corresponding hashtag, displayed on stickers on the furniture and product boxes. Besides driving home the point that this furniture is easy to assemble, the Twitter manuals caught the attention of a younger audience buying their first items of furniture.

Tok&Stok and DDB Brasil also took the easy-to-assemble message to much odder media, like a Tok&Stock business card that turns into a little paper chair if you follow the instructions. And a puzzle, with the same number of pieces as the item purchased, that shows you how to “make” the furniture as you put together the puzzle.