Coke reminds fans that March 22nd marks a first for the brand: a live 24-hour songwriting session with Maroon 5, whose lead singer — Adam Levine — above discusses the project, in which he and his bandmates will collaborate virtually with fans on the new track, whech will be written and recorded in a day.

It's all part of Coca-Cola's music-focused marketing in 2011. Below, check out how the interactivity between the band, holed up in a London studio, and their fans will work.Continue reading...

Harley-Davidson's new campaign invites you to custom-design the motorcycle of your dreams. Appealing to "Cage Free Humans," it's appealing to those hidden fantasies and secret dreams to hit the open road. It's also appealing to fans, as the campaign idea came from one: Whit Hiler of Kentucky, to be precise.Continue reading...

Finally, a place where all those doodles on napkins can see the light of day — if the wisdom of the crowd thinks they’re worthwhile enough to help make them a reality.

Quirk represents disruptive crowdsourcing at its best, replacing the standard product design process with "socially developed product."

Anybody can submit a doodle, a.k.a. an idea, for the bargain price of $99. Each week, the pool of submissions is evaluated by the quirky community, and two new product ideas each week get swept into the development process of ideation, design, naming, manufacturing, marketing, and sales.Continue reading...

Cool crowd-driven campaigns are catching on everywhere. Case in point: Vodafone’s partner in Slovenia, Si.mobil, hopes to make its message stick with the recent rebranding of its youth-oriented mobile service provider Orto. The “Live Your Way” campaign features a new medium of youth self-expression: using colored tape to create public art, which the company calls “sticky art.”

Street artists were encouraged to use Orto’s billboards as blank canvases, as well as to create art in public spaces. While most of the works are bright abstracts, one sly piece portrays a dog urinating onto the street with a yellow lake spreading around it. Hey, sometimes you have to take the good, the bad, and the urine when you crowdsource your outdoor spend.

The campaign follows the crowdsourcing trend by getting consumers to create the advertising as well as aligning the brand with underground street art and breaking conventional rules – in hopes of polishing the Orto star among its youthful target.Continue reading...

“Distributed work, refined for your needs,” is the Microtask mantra. The Finnish start-up “loves the work you hate.” (Our alternative suggest: "We Finnish the work you start.")

Its proprietary software standardizes repetitive tasks by slicing them into microscopic pieces which, when stripped of identifiable data about a client or the actual task at hand, get distributed online.

The spot above humorously explains how it works — and even winks at the WikiLeaks scandal.Continue reading...

Google's just-launched tech showcase, Demo Slam, is a weekly showdown between users rising to a simple challenge: highlight and test Google's features in unique and creative ways. This week's user demos include composing a song using Google's Realtime Search results on the fly, and (after the jump) some visual trickery with Gmail video chat.

Other crowdsourced demos in the week-old initiative include artists stealing the Google logo, recreating Mount Rushmore to test Google Goggles, kids testing Google Voice recognition, and conducting a Google Voice search 20 feet in the air.Continue reading...

Philips is crowdsourcing ironing. Specifically, the electronics brand has teamed up with crowdSPRING and issued a call for a new steam generator iron.

The deadline is October 13th to submit ideas. The creative brief:

“Philips is looking for break-through designs which are advanced, distinctive, easy to experience and designed around people’s needs. It must be a true winner in the stores/ shelves. Please remember we are not looking for a ‘re-Design’ of the existing products(s), the awards will be granted to concepts showing a great deal of creativity: which are innovative but also feasible. Your entry should consist of designs for a new ‘iron’ accompanied by the ‘base’.”

More details after the jump.Continue reading...

These days, it seems the best way to grab market share is to create your own brand — or in the case of Asda, the British retailer owned by Wal-Mart, relaunch its store brand.

Its private "Chosen by You" label is getting a $155 million facelift with redesigned packaging and an infusion of some 500 new products. The reason for the investment is that half of all Asda sales are its own brand, according to Emma Fox, the company's commercial brand director, and eighty-five percent of those sales come from "Chosen by You."

Asda says the overhaul is the UK's "largest own-brand relaunch" ever. The collection has been reshaped based on more than 200,000 individual blind taste tests and input, via a customers panel managed by Cambridge Market Research, which taps into some 40,000 consumers (whether Asda shoppers or not).

Over 1,000 products have already been reformulated, and Asda expects the line to expand to a whopping 4,000 products next year.Continue reading...