Hasta La Ideas

Intel and Toshiba have launched a follow-up to last year’s award-winning The Beauty Inside interactive campaign, with another social film, once again inviting viewers to audition to be part of the story.

Conceived by agency Pereira & O’Dell, The Power Inside is a six-episode series, launching online mid-August. As its trailer promises, the somewhat comical story line charts an alien invasion and the human fight-back, with the aliens manifesting as bushy moustaches or monobrows.

Starring Harvey Keitel, the series is directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon, to decidedly block-buster-dimension production values.

Viewers can audition to be in the series via its Facebook page. They can either join the alien ‘Uricks’ through a Facebook facial recognition app that adds a moustache or monobrow to their self-portraits; or they can upload an audition video showing themselves ripping or shaving off fake or real beards to join the ‘Guardians’ who fight against the invasion. The successful applications will be spliced into the final episodes, the first of which airs on August 15.

The film is the third branded and social content campaign from Intel and Toshiba. It follows The Inside Experience in 2011, and last year’s The Beauty Inside, another interactive episodic film by Pereira & O’Dell that allowed users to audition for the main part, and won a slew of Grand Prix prizes at Cannes. Reportedly it attracted nearly 70m view in just eight and a half weeks, with 1.8m interactions via mobile, 96,000 Facebook friends and 8,300 Twitter followers.

What made The Beauty Inside particularly successful was that the execution lived up to the concept, which combined an effectively simple idea with high production values to include the viewer in the project. Going by a brief glance at Facebook auditions so far, there certainly seems to be quite some user interest in The Power Inside – this summer’s blockbuster of branded content, perhaps?

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