Mesh-box, a leading blog on marketing cooperations, is conducting a survey on marketing cooperations and their impact in this economic downturn.

The study is mainly aimed at German firms, yet still relevant for non-german firms as well.

I'm willing to be the outcome of the study will show a strong increase in marketing cooperation interest. But then again, I'm a believer.

After all, one of the first things in a downturn to get slashed is your marketing budget.
A marketing cooperation can provide a quantum of solace here.

I went to see the Betagroup.be pitches last Tuesday. Here goes:

My price for the most pragmatic start-up goes to the first Brussels sandwich 2.0 delivery service: Clicknlunch.  Lots of companies on business parks need to have sandwiches & food delivered. This company takes the hassle out of the ordering. Simple, clean & well executed project claiming already 10.000 orders processed.  Nice!

Even geeks are not above herd mentality. Everybody loves Twitter, Apple & Google. 
Everybody likes to bash Microsoft. Microsoft is always too late, too monopolistic, too expensive, too square...Yaddie yaddie da....

Anyway, because I now manage the Microsoft Belgium account at McCann Erickson,
I thought it to be a good idea for McCann to check out the latest Microsoft products.
And we found out it's hip to be square.

Given that we're almost halfwhere through 2009, it's a bit late for our predictions for this year.

But I don't want to be a bad sport, standing at the sidelines when everybody else makes predictions, so here goes:

 Ok, I know, this is already more than a year old. But a little recycling doesn't hurt right?

This is a TV commercial from Toyota that starts with what looks like some normal World of Warcraft in-game action. Suddenly one of the characters summons up a Toyota SUV and starts trashing monsters. Great video, especially because it looks so real.

The nice people from Datanews have featured us in their startup section this week.

You can read the article in Dutch here and there is also a French version here. Sorry, no English.

Mesh-Box is a nice blog on marketing co-operations. It features news, books, and papers on current marketing research in brand alliances, co-branding, cross-marketing and the likes.

Sam's paper on Brand Alliances 2.0 is featured there since Monday. Go check it out!

Some of today's artists are so succesful in marketing themselves, that as a marketeer you cannot but respect them (or the folks they employ).

The first TechCrunch meetup for me personally, and quite an experience it was. IntroNiche presented it's new business model and enjoyed the beauty contest with 15 other Belgian startup companies.

After Mike Butcher treated us to his usual tough love, we continued the party on free drinks in One Agency's cool warehouse office. And we had french fries!

"Why does a $1.7 million car need a deluxe edition?" asks the WSJ journalist quite pointedly. Apparently the customers of luxury carmaker Bugatti expressed a need for more customization of their already pricey toys. Therefore the compancy decided to partner with French luxury brand Hermès to create customized versions of the car, with hand-made leather interior. This increases the price tag to an astonishing $2.4 million.