BBC News US & Canada just posted a very interesting feature on its website explaining some of the latest developments in advertising. Using the example of product placement, the reporter demonstrates how brands are becoming part of the story.

As TBWA’s Worldwide Director of Media Arts Lee Clow observed in a recent interview: ”Brands did advertising: they talked at people; they bought television commercials and held you captive. Now they must interact with their audience in a multifaceted but coherent way.”

Some of the world’s most inspiring brands have proved that delivering content and becoming part of peoples’ lives is not only possible, it also drives success. This is because they do not distract audiences from the content they love. Instead, they create original ideas that people want to experience.

Check out how Gatorade and TBWA\Chiat Day LA initiated the Replay idea. Or how Absolut Vodka became part of the plot of “Sex and the City” by introducing the Absolut Hunk.

One of the latest examples of disrupting the rules of product placement comes from Germany, where McCafé has launched its newly developed brand idea as a key storyline within the German telenovela “Anna & die Liebe” (“Anna and Love”). Skillfully utilizing both digital and physical media, the campaign was developed by TBWA in Berlin.

Instead of interrupting the audience with commercial breaks, McCafé’s brand belief “Alles Gute beginnt mit einem guten Kaffee” (Everything good begins with a good cup of coffee) is brought to life in a popular TV show featuring fictional Berlin advertising agency Broda&Broda.

McCafé does not appear in the show through conventional product placement – but via campaign placement. Broda & Broda develops the campaign “Everything good starts with a good cup of coffee” while pitching for the McCafé account. Over several episodes, the audience sees how the claim was conceived, how the “first kiss” moment was shot and, finally, how Broda&Broda wins the pitch.

Many other aspects of the campaign will take place simultaneously, giving the audience a chance to interact with the brand both digitally and physically. For example, on the “Anna & die Liebe” site, fans are redirected through banners (in the form of recruitment ads for a new creative director post at Broda&Broda) to the McCafé Facebook fan site. Here, they are invited to upload their very own stories of good beginnings. And to reinforce the brand experience for the audience, the first real poster in the campaign will actually be seen in Berlin four days later, blurring the borders between virtual and real, fictional and actual.

For any comments or suggestions, send an email to Ulrich Proeschel.

McCafé launched today a virtual McCafé advent calendar – a special calendar used to count the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas. The calendar is a location-based marketing campaign using Facebook Places. Based on McCaféʻs central idea “Alles Gute beginnt mit einem guten Kaffee” (Everything good starts with a good cup of coffee) the campaign rewards McCafé guests in Germany with digital gifts that change every day.

The campaign has been made possible with a location-based service developed by TBWAʻs Digital Arts team in Berlin. The web-service unloqable® makes content available only to users who prove their location via a smartphone or a location-based service like Facebook or Foursquare.

McCafé is the the first brand to use unloqable® as part of its marketing activities. Starting today, all McCafé guests checking with Facebook places in one of over 700 McCafés in Germany will be rewarded with free downloadable digital gifts like animations, films or music.

Unloqable® is a web-service that offers location-based accessibility of digital content (music, pics, coupons, codes, etc). The objective is to make this content available only to users who can prove their location via a smart phone or a location-based service like Facebook Places or Foursquare.

Digital content is stored on the Unloqable® server with a web based management tool. The management tool is the heart of Unloqable®: it offers the possibility to set up campaigns, to edit existing campaigns or to evaluate campaigns from a statistical point of view.

In addition to simply setting up a campaign using the combination of a digital content with a geo-data, there is also the possibility to constrain the campaign time or quota basis. For example, some content can be rendered “Exclusive” and accessible only for a specific number of times before expiring.

Users are notified about the existence of a campaign either actively – in nearly real-time by so-called “Checkins” – or passively via e-mail, fan-pages or ads.

The notification contains a link to digital content that has to be unlocked through one of the above-mentioned mechanisms.