This fall, the final, hundredth iteration of the reality-television theme comes not from the coolhunters in network programming, but from BBDO, one of the world's largest and most profitable ad agencies. Over the weekend of Oct. 13-15, acting at the behest of large institutional clients Pepsi, Wrigley and Hostess Frito Lay, the agency staff convened the first BBDO Brand Camp, in which 20 young visionaries were dispatched to a loft in Toronto, Ontario, for a weekend of deep thinking about brands. In a predictable twist, the 48-hour lockdown was videotaped, with portions broadcast live over the World Wide Web.

Clients loved it. "Some even expressed an interest in attending personally," says Aaron Hunter, who helped organize the event for BBDO. "That, unfortunately, was not possible. It would have been a little spooky for our campers to realize they were being watched by 20 men in suits."

According to Neale Halliday, senior vice president and head of brand planning for BBDO Toronto, Brand Camp was born out of a disillusionment with traditional focus groups. "The older I get, the more I need to connect with these young urban consumers in a very high-quality way," he told me. "We do not always consider focus groups to be a high-quality form of interaction." In search of a deeper connection, Halliday and his colleagues began to experiment with other modes of observation. "We've done all kinds of observational research," he says. "We've messed around with accompanied shops. We've gotten people to do diaries ... Then there's the option of moving into their homes. But two things mitigate against brand planners actually living with people. First, it's not practical. Second, they usually won't allow it."

Meanwhile, his packaged-goods clients were growing restless, demanding fresh intelligence from Gen X and Gen Y. Clients such as Wrigley and Hostess are "extremely interested in young urban consumers -- 20- to 25-year-olds," Halliday says. "But [these consumers] are notoriously mobile and itinerant. They don't have addresses. They can't be contacted by focus group recruiters ... Yet these are the people that set the food trends for the rest of the population." Just when BBDO was despairing of ever reaching these sought-after snackers, "along came the whole 'Survivor'/'Big Brother' phenomenon," he says. "And we thought, well, wait a minute. How about getting these participants into a space, a confined space, so that we can spend quality time with them in a way that can actually be recorded for client validation?"

In contrast to the jejune insights of the typical focus group, the snack-cake epiphanies from Brand Camp would be deep, fertile and genuine. "As planners, sitting behind that one-way mirror, we tend to get a little bit detached from the real relationships with brands that consumers have," says Hunter. "We don't want to be detached, which is why we undertake a project like this. To actually reach something authentic."

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