I don't know about you, but I make excuses all the time on why I'm not more creative. I officially have one less excuse with the upcoming launch of Pixel Farm's new content site, peoplelovebrands.com. Hopefully, you'll have one less excuse too. I'm looking forward to sharing some of my braindoodles with you and hope to see rightous and fearless stuff from you too. Who knows, you might even win our grand prize of having your next big idea produced by us! For FREE!

UK agency DLKW recently launched code organ. Just type in a url and the code organ translates the site's body content into music... which is cool for approximately 8.5 seconds. Of course, this 8.5 seconds also made me search out their website, check out their goods and blog about them. All in all, a nice example of simple branded content.

www.shockingbarack.com

A few months ago, Crispin started a project for a small electric bike company with no money and an ambitious idea, let's give one of these bikes to our president. What followed was a grassroots campaign that gives us all a sneak peak into the future of advertising. If you study the site, you can see they were very smart about how they asked (and didn't ask) for people's participation. In fact, the design of the site made it very easy for someone to watch content and pick how they wanted to help and immediately be on their way to doing so. This success was evident in the amount of free press and free boarding these dudes got along the way.

I was talking about this campaign with Bill Kruse, our executive producer, and he asked if I thought this kind of thinking would replace broadcast for big brands. The answer is simply, no. Big brands are big for a reason, and the way they need to pound chest and engage in conversations will always involve flagship pieces like a Superbowl spot. But social components will play a bigger role in future years. Eventually, social will be a part of every marketing campaign and will start to be the lead piece for a lot of brands. Like a print ad of past eras, social will be a mandatory, but in the form of branded content and empowerment pieces. This type of thinking will result in a lot more niche marketing that puts a high demand for action (or attention) on their audience.

This worries a jaded ad guy like myself because momentum is a precious commodity. As more and more brands start asking people to "join the cause," social clutter will rise, which will cause this type of branded empowerment to be tuned out. Especially if people start getting mistreated by selfish brands, making them think twice about future causes.

Extrapolating this theory to the dank recesses of pessimism, imagine a world where people are too jaded to care or help. What a horrible thing it would be for positive movements worth fighting for. So dear ad agencies and clients, no, you don't always need money to make connections. But please be careful how often you use the compassion-and-collective-good-will card. Like all good things, there's a limited supply.