brand-e

Boxed in. Man In Box still has – perhaps – seven days left in his box. He could be there for 30 nights in total, together with £30,000. He doesn’t know where he is, but he’s been told his location is ‘meaningful’ to him. You can keep Man In Box company courtesy of live streams from two cameras, and listen to him recount all the places he has been to over the past 35 years.
And you can take a shot at guessing where the box is. Get it right and you win the cash. And Man In A Box – TV personality Tim Shaw – goes free.

By Simon Fuller. Current thinking. Over the last few months we’ve looked at crowdsourcing initiatives, such as Benetton looking for new ad peeformers via an online campaign to BBH utilising crowdsourcing platform Talenthouse. And there are few signs of brands letting up on this, with crowdsourcing campaigns a regular fixture of the marketing landscape.
Current TV is one bunch which should know a thing or two about all this. It’s VCAM – Viewer Created Ad Message – group allows creative types to get involved in producing videos for brands, with big names like Samsung and HP getting involved by assigning briefs.

By Steve Mullins. Market mix. Brixton is really getting into the spirit of pop-up. Earlier this month, we explained how Ogilvy went to this colourful part of South London to set up shop and hand out free advice to local businesses. Now we can let you know that the agency’s store was just one of a score of shopfronts doing good pop-up service in Brixton Village - aka Granville Arcade, a 1930s market hall.
Tenants – among them retailer and artists – began moving into the Arcade at the tail-end of last year on free three-month leases – either to test-trade their wares, or to entertain – among them the Brixton Cornercopia corner food store, the Remade in Brixton Work-Shop for local reuse, repair and recycling, the OKIDO doodle shop for kids, and HERD, a design studio for young creatives.

By Simon Fuller. Movie media. Last week, we took a look at how comms strategy group Naked Comms had set up its own branded entertainment division to roll out engaging pieces like the film The Forest Guard, a documentary following the adventures of a bunch of Californian kids who have invented a device for the quick detection of forest fires
Well, Sony Europe green-lit the film and commissioned it. So we thought it only right to have a chat with Sony about the project, and about why brands in general are beginning to turn to moviemaking to get their messages over to consumers.

By Hugh Jordan. Crowd creative. Crowdsourcing may not sound the death knell for creative agencies, but co-creation could be a catalyst for real change. ‘Adapt or die’ is the message coming from Andrew Needham, who has just launched London’s The Co-Creation Hub, a collaborative resource for brands seeking long-term, meaningful engagement with consumers.
So, what is co-creation and how does it differ from crowdsourcing?

Lab works. Power to the Pixel is looking for folk to come along to The Pixel Lab, a cross-media project open to European media professionals. The Lab has a particular focus on the creation, finance and distribution of cross-media properties to create sustainable European media businesses.
PttP will select up to 40 European participants – 20 producers with cross-media projects, and 20 audio-visual professionals without.

Social savvy. So, just how important is social media to bands? “It’s the fans who are driving the distribution of music,” Susie Moore from BrandRock said at yesterday’s Music 4.5 event in London. … We should embrace it.
“The band will be a total business of people, with maybe a few people working on that band’s music, what that band believes in, its identity and values. It’s like any brand marketing exercise.”