One of the strangest twists on Branded Content I’ve seen for a while: “Let’s drop any pretense of story and just make two guys do tricks around the product”. Still, those dudes got mad pogo skills.

This branded content piece for Nissan presents beautifully animated metaphorical days in the life of beings who thrive (and fade) based on their level of energy. Interesting 3D combo of CG and stop-motion. Directed by Tsuneo Goda (creator of Domo-kun). Part of Nissan’s larger Planet Zero campaign.

This piece by Saatchi & Saatchi, Italy, was done not to promote Rovio’s Angry Birds, but instead to help promote T-Mobile’s smartphone network. Seems a bit off-brand to mooch so heavily from an awesome game with only a tenuous tie-in to T-Mobile, but if pro sports players can appear in ads, why not giant ballistic birds?

Regardless, the impact on the crowd shows that it succeeded on at least some levels.

From Cha-Ching Pictures, Olivia Wilde, Zach Galifianakis, Alexis Bledel, Billy Crudup, Julianne Moore, FOD Team, Chuck Liddell, Sgt Slaughter, Tony Hale, Laz Alonso, Joey Kern, Henry Rollins, Alan Tudyk, Vinnie Jones, Josh Simpson, and Kat Bardot. As seen at FunnyOrDie

British company Cravendale Milk finds a fun way to put to rest their usage of characters brought to life by Belgian animators, Pic Pic André. With branded content. Using Randomness, with a capital R.

In anticipation of the supposed 1/26/2011 rollout of the next episode, here’s an oldy but a goody using nothing but sticky notes directed by Bang-yao Liu.

Very fun branded content from Intel to build buzz around their i5 CPU

More excellent branded content. This time, a stop-motion piece from Lego.

Here’s another by the same artist:

Like several other clips here, I found this via Devour. I hate to keep mooching sweet links from them but until more of you submit more, it’s proven to be a great place to check out. If you know of something that doesn’t suck, please pass it along!.

The above short film, Porcelain Unicorn, was the Grand Prize winner (as selected by Sir Ridley Scott) in the Parallel Lines film contest.

The piece below, Baby Time, was the People’s Voice winner (based on votes).

As you may be able to see already, it wasn’t just any film contest or crowd-sourcing campaign. No doubt inspired by BMW Films and others, Philips invited film makers to produce short films. They kicked things off by sponsoring 6 short films which shared the same fairly abstract, poetic dialog:

What’s That?
It’s a Unicorn
Never seen one up close before
Beautiful
Get away, get away
I’m sorry.

All contestants were required to use the same dialog in order to “Tell it their way”.

To see the original 6 films and many other contestants, it’s best viewed at YouTube in HD since Philips did a somewhat annoying thing by shrinking nearly all the films in their channel to play inside a cinema-proportioned 21:9 Philips TV with glowy ambient light effects.

While I’m sure it achieves a more tangible brand objective by illustrating that such a tv would be cool for watching movies, it does so at the price of distracting from the quality of the films that competed in the contest. The irony doesn’t stop there — the grand prize winner was done at the more standard 16:9 ratio.