The Idea Bounty Blog in Stuff About Ideas

Im sure all of us have our favorite brands - these might be brands that provide products or service you appreciate and enjoy or it could just be the entire package including the way the brand speaks to its consumers. One of my favorite brands falls into the latter category purely for their seriously clever and more importantly consistent communications with their consumers. The brand - Durex 

Durex in my mind has always had some of the most constant and on brand communications out there. They have also often been ahead of the curve - exhibit a) The Durexhibit which was a crowdsourced poster campaign then held way back in 2008. With an emphasis more on the message than the product the project was launched and hosted on a microsite Durexhibit.com and basically invited 16-24 year olds to create posters that would 'Persuade other young adults to think twice before risking unprotected sex"

To me what made this project even better was the way the brand tied the project into National Condom Week in the UK. This imidetinaly put Durex in a good light and added their voice to those of educators, government officials, health care professionals, and NGO workers have been trying to get the message out for years - its a plus that it becomes a giant plug for their own products! The winners were decided by an online vote - there were 19 runners up and one winner who took away £500 cash and £200 in Durex products - that was out of a final pool of 500 submissions

The above posters by Samuel Michael took the ultimate prize but there were tons of other fantastic designs submitted - see below. What really struck me about this project is the way Durex managed to keep their brand image intact while getting young people to talk about safe sex and in the process get highly aquatinted with Durex products. By letting young people "do the talking" they managed to get some great work out of their consumers and keep their young brand image alive… and that was way back in 2008. Pretty cool eh?

This is perhaps the funniest and coolest crowdsourcing projects I have come across in weeks. Wozela is a site dedicated to investigating different ways in which the Vuvuzela, one of South Africa’s greatest sporting artifacts (and controversially noisy instrument) can be used or ‘reused’ after you have annoyed the living daylights out of people. 

From watering cans, bangle stands, irrigation systems and even a muzzle for Mel Gibson, visitors are allowed to post any suggestions they may have a benefit to society at large. This is a great crowdsourcing platform even it if is full of fun and sometimes silly ideas. Having said there is always the chance that someone will come up with an idea that uses the Vuvuzela in a entirely suprising and beneficial way. If you have an idea about how to make use of your Vuvuzela throw you idea into the pot - there is a prize of R10,000 to the person who comes up with the best idea! 

New technology is an interesting thing - often in the early days of a new technologies life there is an all out battle for setting standards and becoming the ubiquitous brand or product used - probably the most well known of these battles were the 'browser wars' of the late 90's. Currently the big battle for domination is in the mobile phone arena where domination over the smart phone market is being sought. The two big contestants - the iPhone and BlackBerry. 

Recently I have noticed that BlackBerry seems to be doing very well amongst the younger and less business orientated market. One of the reasons for this shift seems to be because BlackBerry has this amazing little service called BlackBerry Messenger or BBM for short. Basically BBM is an instant messenger service allowing you to chat, send photos, or share voice messages with other people who are also on BlackBerry. BBM has definitely helped capture a particular demographic of smart phone users and the networks have taken notice with some even tailoring their Blackberry offerings with a focus on BBM or as the UK provider O₂ calls it BlackBerry PING

I must say I really like the way that O₂ has taken BBM and almost rebranded it so it looks almost like an exclusive service - clever. Now they have taken it to the next level and added in a dash of crowdsourcing to the mix by launching the O₂ PING t-shirt competition. Basically they are on the search for a unique PING t-shirt (and slogan) design, an awesome move which will only serve to tether PING and BlackBerry to O₂ even more - clever again. 

The competition is being run off the O₂ Facebook page where you can download the competition rules and guidelines as well as check out some of the entries already submitted. There will be ultimately be ten designs selected - 5 by popular opinion and 5 by a panel of judges - and each finalist will win themselves a BlackBerry phone. There will also be one ultimate winner that will emerge from the competition after a judging panel has picked what they deem to be the best submission. Over all an awesome little crowdsourcing project from O₂ and a really good way to plug into the ever growing BBM (or should I say PING) community. 

Im sure you have heard me say this a couple of times on this blog - LEGO is awesome. As a kid I played for hours with the stuff and I hope one day if end up with kids of my own they will play with it too. Having said that LEGO aint just for kids anymore and nothing proves this more than the release of their Architecture series - you almost wonder why it look them so long. 

The Architecture series follows hot on the heals of the Landmarks series which featured buildings like the Seattle Space Needle and the Empire State Building. The Architecture series launches with the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection which will apparently have six sets in total - the first two to be launched are the Guggenheim in New York and Fallingwater, the iconic cantilevered waterfall house in Pittsburg Pennsylvania.

The sets are more of a collectors item than a kids toy - apparently each set includes: specially printed landmark name plate and a inspiration booklet containing: facts, architectural significance and points of interest. Some of the set apparently have more than 2000 pieces and instructions book more than 100 pages long. These sets are defiantly for the older LEGO fans, like this one who decided to make a stop motion video of the assembly of the Fallingwater set…