Last November, the second Nokia Game went live. This strategy thriller took place online and involved 600,000 players from more than 20 European countries. Participants received messages on their phones, via e-mail, and had to watch TV and check newspapers for clues. Chat sites sprang up as players exchanged clues, swapped cheats, and criticised Nokia when the marketing overtook the entertainment. All in the spirit of Nokia's endline, "Connecting people".

Nokia's ambitious game is one example of a trend that sees brands increasingly committed to producing their own entertainment. BMW released five short films last year, directed by a diverse bunch of rising stars, including Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie; Bacardi Breezer runs its own club nights called Vivid; a Ford Focus starred as part of an art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

These examples highlight the growing diversity of brand communications, a diversity made essential by the ever-expanding swarm of stimulation that surrounds us. Brands have become more and more visible and more fluid. Their strength lies in this ubiquity and flexibility, but it also places particular demands on the people responsible for directing brands, requiring expertise and judgment way beyond straightforward brand planning.

It is no longer enough to understand the rules of your category, or even more general brand issues. Your competition is everything: football matches, celebrities, films, yoga, a night down the pub. It becomes essential to understand much broader social areas, and to seek inspiration there.

As Julia Goldin, brand director for Coca-Cola and Diet Coke says: "It's myopic to look only within your category...you have to think of share of mind, heart and attitude as well as share of throat." That is, everything else that your audiences might find interesting, stimulating, desirable.

Likewise, Ian Milligan, Camelot's ex-sales and marketing director, didn't just think about lottery tickets and scratchcards. "I spent a lot of time on Big Brother, World Cup and Spiderman....things competing for interest and headspace."

Andrew Harrison, marketing director for Nestle Rowntree agrees. He has seen the competition for chocolate snacks expand massively in the past ten years, to the point where phonecards are a real threat to chocolate's popularity among teens.

At its most profound, brand activity can transform areas of society. Harrison believes the way Sky has presented football over the past ten years has changed not only the way we watch football, but the game itself for the better.

As brands expand so does the required skill set for their custodians. Today's brand directors need to be entertainment experts as well as brand specialists. They need to be able to judge music, analyse film, know about computer games, sports stars and the latest mobile phone trends. The best will have a Simon Fulleresque sensitivity to the variety and opportunities of popular culture.

The role for brands' agencies clearly has to change too, reflecting the dissolution of boundaries. Goldin feels that agencies need to become better at thinking creatively across disciplines. Harrison also feels that many agencies do not spend enough time considering the wider picture, and anticipating the effects of social, cultural and business change. They remain within their tight expertise: making 60 second ads, or producing slick mailers.

The rapid expansion of your competition can be disorientating. For brands and their agencies, it means having to adopt skills that were never part of the original job spec. It means having to seek inspiration from far wider sources. It means understanding much broader areas, rather than simple category or brand issues.

Most importantly it requires greater judgment over a brand's output...understanding the difference between creating something innovative and hijacking someone else's format. For every slickly executed BMW film or compelling interactive game, there will ten examples of clumsy brand stretch or over-logical corporate interference: imagine a tooth fairy video game produced by a toothpaste, or a homecare show created by a washing up liquid.

nick.023@virgin.net

Nick Barham is a director at ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty

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