"It's a lunchtime meal in a tube," explains Matt Dell, who helped create the product. "There are two screw-off caps on either end. On one end is a sweet dip. On the other end is a savory dip. In the middle of the tube are chunks of fruit ... We call it Fruit Snatch, because you just snatch it, and go." Also pushing the envelope of inventiveness was the Smoothie Smacker, created by Robin Jull and his Hearty Meal group. "By smacking it, you mix the juice and yogurt together," says Jull earnestly. "Our spokesperson would be a monkey ... Our marketing campaign would focus on 'Spanking the Monkey.'"

Will such emanations from the vox populi revitalize the flagging fortunes of Hostess Frito-Lay? Absolutely, says BBDO's Halliday. "Our campers are sending a clear message that young urban consumers want food that fits into their lifestyle," Halliday bravely contends. "These campers didn't ask conventional questions. They came up with unconventional food and packaging solutions. Our clients are very interested."

I wanted to check with Hostess, Pepsi and Wrigley to find out what they thought of some of these new product ideas. But BBDO said no. "The participating clients are bit nervous," McBride told me. "They're all market leaders in their own right. If good product ideas do come out of [Brand Camp], they want to make sure that information is theirs and theirs alone."

"We've been fairly careful about not going into a lot of detail about the learning," agrees Halliday. "This was an expensive project. There are clients who have paid for this information. We don't want to give away the farm ... What I can tell you is that everyone involved who has had a peek at the findings has had a really good feeling."

That feeling may be misplaced, according to Lew Berey, president and founder of New Product Insights, a firm based in Overland Park, Kan., that has brainstormed new-product ideas for Pillsbury, Healthy Choice and Hunt's ketchup. "I've been doing this for 30 years," Berey tells me. "And I must say, I consider this to be the worst possible approach. New products should be created by new-product professionals."

Asking consumers to come up with new-product ideas, he says, is like "doctors asking their patients to diagnose what's wrong with them. It's construction workers being asked to solve a problem of architectural design ... To think that consumers are themselves going to come up with a solution is really an abdication of responsibility on the part of the marketing professional."

Berey stresses that new-product development, far from being the province of zany creative types, is in fact an excruciatingly precise discipline. "There is a whole system devoted to this," he says. "We have a mega-brand model that we use. It involves something we call 'transfer analysis,' which looks deeply at brand architecture. We use video scenarios. There's some work we've done with Alvin Toffler."

But surely Berey doesn't dispute BBDO's top-line finding: that young urban consumers are looking for food that is "nutritious, convenient and packaged to be environmentally friendly"? The new-product maven scoffs. "When you talk to consumers, you need to have proprietary ways to get inside their mind, so that you get more than just, 'I want food that's convenient,'" he says. "I would never let my staffers accept that kind of high-level definition of need."

At New Product Insights, "we don't talk about convenience," Berey says. "We break it apart into 'makes life easier,' or 'saves time.' Then we start thinking about what possible ways to express 'makes life easier' exist in a particular category. And those insights can transfer very easily into new-product direction."

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