At Octopus we're all about change.  We talk about it constantly - on our website, at our Monday team  meetings, when advising clients and of course when pitching to prospects.  There are lots of shifts going on in the industry that are well documented - changing media landscape, changing consumption models, changing tools - the list goes on.  But it's easy to talk about these things in theory rather than in practice.

But, what we've noticed is that we never seem to do the same project twice any more.

Every project has a nuance or a new marketing objective to reach that stretches the old grey matter that little bit further.  It's certainly not for the comfy slippers brigade.   It takes extra time, requires gutsy ideas, new skills and techniques as well as lots of good old fashioned elbow grease.  But it is brilliant.  Why?  Well, finally, we PR people are being asked to do the highly integrated challenging communications projects that we've always aspired to do.  We're getting to try things out and learn new stuff.

All this got us to thinking about elevating this beyond Octopus towers and trying to pinpoint some of the new types of campaigns that are going on out there in brand-land.  So we approached the nice people at PR Week about working with us on a project called Future 5.  They seemed to like the idea, and so here it is officially launching today.

We recognise that we can all learn lots from some of the cutting edge and experimental campaigns and techniques that are ongoing in our industry but that don't find their way into the mainstream.  So the Future 5 project is our way of finding them, celebrating them and trying and add to the conversation about the new trends set to shape our industry.

So if you're a PR or Comms Manager  we'd love you to get involved. Send us your comments, please enter your campaigns/stunts/launches that have pushed the boundaries in some way (even if you don't have rigorous evaluation  metrics we still want to hear about it!), or tried something out from other marketing disciplines, or maybe just approached a problem in a completely fresh way. Or maybe it's just cool and you're proud of it.

You should hear more about it from PR Week or our Future 5 event later in the year, and we'll be blathering on about it constantly as well.  So please stay tuned for progress reports.

Here's to the joy of trying more things out in the future.

Jon