Despite a difficult economy for small business, savvy brands recognize the unflagging appeal of the startup. And so more of them are supporting entrepreneurs or associating themselves with the entrepreneurial spirit, ranging from PepsiCo to General Electric.

Lexus wants a piece of that action, too. The Toyota-owned luxury brand has established a contest called Lexus Ignition in which a Facebook app is soliciting votes on eight technology startups, whose four winners will split up to $100,000 in funding from Lexus US. The startups range from a maker of audio speakers out of "eco wood" to the designer of "the world's first pocket-sized video-stabilization case for a smartphone that eliminates shaky video," according to a Lexus press release. Each innovation could have some relevance to automotive technology.

Timing the social campaign, which is now in week two, to the debut of the all-new flagship sedan, the 2013 Lexus ES, the brand wants to "support other creative projects that exemplify this philosophy," Lexus CMO Brian Smith told brandchannel. The digital campaign reflects "our greater focus on multimedia and connectedness in the car," he said, echoing a key theme for automakers these days.Continue reading...

Social innovation is at an all time high and campaigns integrated with social media are the latest incarnation exemplified by the new Mercedes-Benz #YOUDRIVE Twitter campaign, which will let fans help shape the ending. Ever the innovator on digital, Mercedes-Benz is up 10 percent in Interbrand's just-announced 2012 Best Global Brands report.

TV viewers in the UK will ‘drive the action’ of a three-part story about the new Mercedes-Benz A-Class to be shown this weekend during commercial breaks in "The X Factor." A cat and mouse caper features a young music star (played by Top Boy actor Kane Robinson) aided by a female accomplice attempting to secure a secret gig that authorities are keen to close down.Continue reading...

Wikipedia's most valuable brand asset is trust. For the information portal, which turned 10 last year, to maintain its credibility, and its value, it must cultivate trust with its users, and create trust that self-interested parties are not influencing its product, i.e., its content.

So new questions about Wikipedia editors taking money to change content could combust into the greatest threat the brand has seen to date, bigger than waning interest and wooing academia or even rivals vying for its perch. One Wikipedia watcher suggests scandals are already taking a toll on Wikipedia's bottom line.Continue reading...

"Crowdsourcing" was coined in 2006 by Wired's then contributor Jeff Howe, evolving into a marketing tool by 2010 for brands of all sizes — and it's still going strong. Harnessing and rewarding user-generated contributions to your brand or project is no longer a trend but a way of life, as brands large and small embrace the technique for monetary gain, product identity, entertainment and social good. The latest iterations of inviting the masses to weigh in:

• Heineken has launched its second Open Innovation Challenge, asking fans to 'Reinvent the draught beer experience' and employing comedians Adam Fields and Samba Schutte pull it all together. Users are asked to submit ideas and an accompanying ‘elevator pitch’ to the Ideas Brewery website and six finalists will participate in an ‘idea-enhancing’ workshop in Amsterdam in November.Continue reading...

The outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries has been a constant presence for U.S. politicians, pundits, and the H.R. departments as they lay off Americans in recent years. The perception among consumers is that pretty much nothing is made in America anymore. And anything that is, isn’t totally high-quality.

This, of course, is completely bogus. While plenty of jobs have been shipped out of the country, there many companies that do all they can to make quality products and proudly hoist the "Made in America" banner. Those companies now have a major cheerleader in the American Brand Project, a patriotic social startup that rates just how American different companies are in order to help consumers make informed decisions on what to buy.Continue reading...

Auto-insurance companies have already gone quite far down the road toward swapping detailed information about their policyholders' driving habits for premium discounts, using all sorts of onboard devices including GPS and other technologies. Privacy advocates, naturally, have raised some concerns about this practice.

But now, Allstate is taking this discipline at least one step further by enlisting interested employees and agency owners in a massive test of its Drive Wise telematics-based system. Already available in Illinois, Ohio and Arizona, Drive Wise will be rolled out to inside participants in additional states this year to gather still more data that, the insurance company says, will help it "identify the safer driving habits that can earn participating customers driving discounts on their car insurance." The safer the driver, the bigger the savings.Continue reading...

Stockholm Pride, Sweden's national LGBT celebration taking place July 31-Aug. 4, is raising eyebrows with a colorful (to say the least) campaign.

Its 2012 "Time to Be Queer!" campaign is causing a stir from the far left corners of the LGBTQ (the Q is for Questioning) community to the rightest of Christian fundamentalists. A Honolulu-based Pride organization even accused the campaign of setting the gay movement back 20 years. 

"The campaign 'Time to be queer!" tries to convince heterosexuals to become LGBTQ with arguments that can be seen all over Stockholm on posters and on animated banners in the subway system and at the campaign sites: blihomo.nu, bliflata.nu, blibi.nu, bliqueer.nu, blitrans.nu, and blibog.nu," explains campaign manager Soliman Herrera Johansson to Out Traveler.Continue reading...

There's nothing new about crowdsourcing product varieties anymore, but Frito-Lay is bringing an interesting twist to a promotion that it launched today: offering the winner of a new-flavor contest the option of a prize based on sales of the new potato-chip flavor that he or she inspires.

In its "Do Us a Flavor" campaign headlined by actress and restauranteur Eva Longoria and Food Network Iron Chef Michael Symon, the PepsiCo unit invites fans to submit their potato-chip flavor ideas via a Facebook app for a chance to win $1 million in grand-prize money — or one percent of their flavor's 2013 net sales, whichever is higher.

"We [already] have a lot of flavors that would make the one-percent option a bigger payout than the $1 million," Ram Krishnan, Frito-Lay's vice president of marketing, told brandchannel. "We're opening it up so that consumers can have a winning proposition."Continue reading...