Virgin is celebrating 25 years in business this year by launching a new advertising campaign. The advert is a nostalgic look back at 1984 with brick-like mobile phones, yuppies, a Rubik’s Cube, the Wimpy burger chain and headlines about the miners’ strike.

The TV ad was created by ad agency RKCR ahead of Virgin’s 25th birthday in June. It shows a glamorous red-suited cabin crew and the pilot walking through a dreary and colourless airport.

Representing the first Virgin Atlantic crew on the inaugural flight to New York in 1984, they walk past 1980s icons to the soundtrack of Frankie Goes to Hollywood classic Relax.

What a fantastic ad! Bouncy, cheerful and pretty daring. A pastiche of all things 80’s.

Virgin are following up this campaign with the soft launch of Vtravelled on 28th February. Vtravelled will be a community site which allows visitors to organise and share their travel plans with friends and family. The public roll out will follow in June.

Vtravelled will certainly be filling a gap in the market- organising you travel plans and finding travel content isn’t always easy. Personally I find it frustrating having to look through multiple websites to filter out the information that I need.

Virgin Atlantic is targeting the site at people who take holidays more than three times a year, with a focus on the UK and US audiences. It will include Trip Pods where individuals can put together their travel plans and then invite friends to the area, share photos, notes and chat.

So far Virgin’s 25th birthday looks pretty cool to me…

A zoo in New York has launched a viral campaign to put pressure on their Governor to keep state funding of zoos and botanical gardens.

In budget proposals for this year, Governor Paterson has cut state funding for zoos by 50%. The zoos say that the cuts will force many of them to close.

So the Bronx zoo is fighting back with a cute viral campaign featuring a porcupine. The video isn’t very slick- but it definitely gets the message across. And who knew porcupines were so cute?

Check out the video here: http://www.wcs.org/ (the video is on the left side below the header labelled “Watch this video and send it to your friends”).

NMA has named Compare the Meerkat as it’s campaign of the month. Ahh…i love this advert…cute meerkats and a thoroughly stupid idea asking me to compare meerkats instead of car insurance providers. What a fantastic idea.

Like all good viral ideas the campaign has translated brilliantly across various mediums. Aleksandr (the star of compare the Meerkat) has 30,000 friends on facebook and 1000 twitter followers. He also has his own website where you can compare meerkats (and it’s all written from Aleksandr’s foreign perspective- which kind of reminds me of the way Lolcats speak).

Anyway- i love this campaign. Like NMA, I would like to see them do something clever with this whilst everyone is still listening- something engaging and cool.