A few months back at Octopus we thought, wouldn't it be nice if we could look into the future? But, we didn't mean finding out the winning lottery numbers for the next week's draw, or even how England would fare at the World Cup (another Octopus stole our thunder on that one anyway!). We were thinking more about what the future of our industry was going to look like. We're pretty deep, right?

But with so much change going on - changing media landscape, changing consumption models, changing tools - how could we not want to know?  We noticed 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.  

This got us thinking beyond Octopus Towers, to pinpoint some of the new types of campaigns that are going on out there in brand-land.  We decided, with the help of the nice people at PR Week, to create Future 5 a campaign that seeks out the most experimental campaigns and techniques that are ongoing in our industry and celebrates them!  

We had so many fantastic campaigns put forward that our panel of experts had their work cut out trying to decide between one great idea and the next. But somehow they did, providing us with our very own glimpse into the future.

So, being the generous people that we are, we didn't want to keep them all to ourselves. We wanted to share them with you all too. So here they are:

Research and planning: Honda and The Dream Factory

Use of technology: Orange and GlastoTag

Audience participation: Brothers and Festival Cider

Brand partnerships: Deloitte and Twitter Opera

The big idea:  Brewdog and Sink the Bismarck!

But this is just a taster, you can find out more about Future 5 here or you can join us at our VIP breakfast event at Haymarket Publishing's office on Wednesday, September 29th hosted by PR Week's editor, Danny Rogers.

As well as hearing about the outcome of the Future 5 project, it's a chance to meet with other like-minded PR and Comms managers and discuss how you think communication will change, so why not come along? We'd love to see you there.

Jon