Asked for his opinion of Fruit Snatch, Berey sighs deeply. "When I hear ideas like that, I think: What could possibly be the underlying strategy?" he says. "If someone wants health for lunch, they're going to go with something nutritious and health-oriented. What you've described to me has nothing to do with an efficacious, nutritious product." Wham Bam Wake-up Jam also leaves him cold. "Are you a jam consumer that wants caffeine? Or are you a caffeine consumer who's tired of coffee? Either way, I can tell you from 30 years of studying the consumer, there are a lot better places to put caffeine than in jam."

Berey also turns up his nose at the campers' crown jewel: Groove in a Tube, an edible glitter body art. "We have come up with thousands of ideas just like that in our own brainstorming sessions," he says. "Immediately, we get rid of them. There is no purpose in that. Again, this is consumer creativity run amok."

Berey does like one of the campers' ideas: Apres Chow, a liqueur-flavored after-dinner gum. "If the underlying strategy is to have a portable alcoholic taste in your mouth after you leave dinner -- well, then that makes some sense," he says grudgingly. "There are already after-dinner drinks. But maybe you want it to be longer-lasting and slower-taking. I like it."

Of course, one might ask, if Lew Berey is so smart, then why didn't he think of green ketchup? Meeting no conceivable need state, identical to red ketchup in every aspect but its color, it has been flying off grocery shelves ever since its introduction, in October of 2000, by Hunt archrival H.J. Heinz. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, green ketchup was created not by a new-product algorithm, but by a panel of 1,000 kids, who declared that "a new color" was what they would most like to see in their ketchup. And so, Berey's track record nonwithstanding, the Green Ketchup proviso suggests that heretical new-product ideas may be the result not of transfer analysis and the collected works of Alvin B. Toffler, but of, well, consumer creativity run amok. Today, we scoff at Fruit Snatch. Six months from now, it will have replaced Slim Jim as the subversive snack option for today's on-the-go teen.

BBDO's Hunter, for one, remains a true believer. Whatever the outcome of the weekend, he says, it was a profound and moving experience to see a group of consumers engaged so deeply with brands. "They were pretty intense," he says of his sequestered hipsters. "They really got into it. They were struggling. They were investigating ... They didn't have the answers. They were searching." When Brand Camp ended, and it was time for the campers to pack up and head home, "some of them were almost disoriented," he marvels. "They had immersed themselves so deeply in their projects. It was like, 'Oh, we have to leave now?' It was like they were in a daze."

One of the campers, Jeffery Pearson, gently offers an alternative explanation. "We were smoking a lot of pot," he explains. "There were seven of us, all pot smokers. We hid in the honey wagons. I don't think they knew."

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