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. Creative fame. What happens when brands offer crowdsourcing initiatives which focus on the ad itself? Well, you get something a bit like TV channel Current’s online VCAM group.
The VCAM – or Viewer Created Ad Message – group works like this: brands post their ad assignments through the Current website, where prospective ad designers can flick through a number of work briefs. For each brief, the creatives have a month to give it their best shot before all submissions are handed to the brand, with the best four ads being aired on Current TV – that’s Sky channel 183.

By Simon Fuller. Clothes cast. Benetton wants you. If you have a style all your own, that is. The Italian clothing brand has rolled out a casting competition, It’s:My:Time, in an effort to find a score of people to become its faces of tomorrow. So, it’s inviting those who think they’ve got personality enough to upload photos and videos to the Benetton site and to YouTube – summing up their look in the process – with site users then voting for their favourites in typical crowdsourcing fashion.

By Steve Mullins. Marketing movies. There’s nothing new in putting together an alternate reality game to promo a new movie, but while much energy has gone into developing ARGs for the sci-fi, fantasy and comic-book genre, drama’s been pretty neglected. Cue the marketing for Bollywood blockbuster 3 Idiots.

By Steve Mullins. Ad advancement. “Advertising professionals are now the second least trusted professionals in the world after politicians.”
Who says?
David Smith, executive creative director at Baltimore-based ad agency Carton Donofrio Partners.
What else does he have to say for himself?
“Advertising simply isn’t working as well as it could because the social contract – the implicit agreement advertisers and consumers have established to support a productive exchange – has been violated.”

Teen teasers. Coca-Cola has come on board the MIPTV Content 360 ad competition and is looking for new ideas to engage with teenage audiences. Briefs need to integrate the brand into content, be it a TV show, a web movie series, a mobile app, a game, or a social network activity.