Pharrell Williams and Tipp-Ex team up for Social Book

The Hunter & the Bear are back, and this time they’re not Happy. In an unlikely cooperation, Pharrell Williams has teamed up with Tipp-Ex on the “Social Book” campaign. Separately, both Pharrell Williams’ 24-hour “Happy” video, and the “Happy in …” meme it spawned, and the Tipp-Ex “Hunter & the Bear” campaigns have been wildly successful, and this promises to be a development worth watching.

The campaign by Buzzman went live today, but Pharrell Williams trailed it on twitter a few days ago:

The premise of the campaign is that the Tipp-Ex Hunter & the Bear have been put in charge of Pharrell’s new book “Inspiration” until its eventual release, but unfortunately they manage to ‘tipp-ex’ over all the words. The interactive campaign aims to crowdsource every single word of that book again via the campaign site at tippexsocialbook.com. Once completed, the book will be printed and sold, with all proceeds going to “From One Hand to Another” to fund learning programs for “under-privileged kids, to hopefully help rewrite many of their lives.”

Participants can enter via facebook or youtube, and sign up to guess the words, and be credited for the find, and they can do this in multiple languages, including English, French, Italian, Spanish & German.

It is interesting that, like Happy, that the interactivity is taking place off Facebook and youtube platforms and on a dedicated site (albeit with Facebook login). As the chance of getting reach on these platforms gets harder, brands will look to own these community sites again. There do seem to be some issues on tippexsocialbook.com with keeping the content accurate and refreshed (the page needing refreshed regularly to ensure content was updated) and how it will cope if it goes viral.

The campaign may not be quite as humorous as the original Hunter & the Bear videos, or as catchy as Happy, but the gamification of the activity, and the chance to be credited in the book, may well be enough to attract a large audience to the site, and sell copies of the book at the end.

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