Digital Kitchen breaks brand boundaries with an innovative new campaign to launch season two of HBO's True Blood.

Using a cross-brand collaborative concept, Digital Kitchen have created a series of print ads supported by viral video content that promote real products to the show's blood sucking characters. The various print elements, which see MINI, Ecko and Harley-Davidson lend their names to the campaign amongst others, carefully maintain the brands' personalities, logos and creative approach while toying with the line between reality and the fictional world of the show.

Since last year's campaign for season one introduced the show's fake product Tru Blood, a synthetic blood substance marketed at vampires as a substitute for the real thing, Digital Kitchen decided to continue to develop different product campaigns aimed at the show's characters.

"Our thought was that vampires should be marketed to just like any other demographic," explained Todd Brandes, director of business and production strategy for Digital Kitchen. "The other thing that drove us was the idea of disrupting reality. Disrupt is our internal mantra. Disrupt convention, disrupt reality, disrupt the status quo. This campaign was a natural extension of the way we approach our work."

However, in order to successfully implement the concept Digital Kitchen had to find real brands willing to buddy up on the campaign. "The brands needed to be iconic, big advertisers," Brandes said. "A natural impulse would have been to go after really off-beat aggressive brands like Axe, or Trojan or something like that. But what makes this campaign work is that you are not expecting a twist from these brands. If Axe put a campaign selling body spray to vampires, you probably wouldn't look twice."

Digital Kitchen made a shortlist of brands they thought would make a good fit and then set about contacting them one by one. Bucking their expectations they found they had very little convincing to do.

"There wasn't one brand we spoke to that wasn't interested," Brandes said. "There were brands that couldn't do it because they didn't feel like the R rated nature of the show was a good fit for their brand, but other than that, there was only positive feedback on the campaign idea."

In the end, Ecko Unlimited, Geico, Gillette, Harley-Davidson, MINI and Monster.com jumped on board. For MINI, the decision to get involved was an easy one.

"We were excited to be one of the brands approached to participate in this campaign and we knew from the get-go that there was a good brand fit," said Kate Alini, marketing communications manager. "The True Blood show is fresh, edgy and thought-provoking - a great brand fit for MINI."

As a special project, Digital Kitchen's campaign has opened the door to shared interest campaigns, allowing companies to spread costs among several clients while utilizing mutual brand reinforcements. In an ever evolving industry fighting through a worldwide economic downturn, new approaches to the advertising equation are essential.

"Smart brands know they need to try different things in this economy," said Don McNeill, president and executive producer of Digital Kitchen. "They need to experiment at the risk of failure. So in my mind, the state of marketing today and the current financial climate will create a huge divide between bold and conservative brand behaviour."