There has been an explosion of branded entertainment/content in the UK over the last number of years. There are heavy restrictions on what can be done in the form of branded entertainment on television. However, the online media environment has matured ensuring that there are now many more opportunities to drive branded content at scale in the UK.

However, whilst branded entertainment is produced in its droves, it is a fair observation to make that it is seldom watched, loved, enjoyed and shared. There are few examples of branded entertainment campaigns that can be truly considered to have been successful in culture.

In August 2013 writer Neil Gaiman published a book unlike any he had written before. In fact, unlike any book written before.

It was a collection of short stories entitled ‘A Calendar of Tales’. The stories were based on a series of twelve questions that Neil tweeted to his followers. The tales themselves then inspired thousands of artistic contributions from people around the world. Neil chose his favourite pieces of art to illustrate the stories in the eventual book.

We documented the entire journey, demonstrating how the BlackBerry 10 helped Neil connect with his fans and complete the project.

The videos documenting the project were viewed 6.5 million times and helped to drive 583K visits to the BlackBerry website

The Tweet phase of the project began trending worldwide within 20 minutes with each subsequent hashtag trending either worldwide or in the US.

Over 10000 unique works of art were contributed.

Tracking showed that when people visited the project site, consideration levels for Blackberry increased by 44%.

And not only did we change the way people thought about BlackBerry, we also created a book unlike any other.