While traveling the NYC subway system last night, this collaborative advertising campaign caught our attention. It displays a piece of a puzzle, the bigger picture unidentifiable on its own. The only clues are a simple graphic of a camera and the Twitter hashtag #undergroundpuzzle. Obviously this is targeting the young and the tech savvy.

After further research, it appears that WPP agency Johannes Leonardo is behind the effort. 40 unique images have been sprinkled across subway stations in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, sending New Yorkers on a hunt for an undisclosed client. According to Creativity, the final image is explicit, this is an interesting way of getting around the restrictions of the mainstream media.

The campaign assumes that the target audience is wielding a camera phone and uses Twitter. For anyone without Twitter, this ad is irrelevant. Through these tools and the collaborative power of the web, the puzzle will be solved. Advertising agencies are experimenting with this idea of the hive mind, or swarm intelligence, pushing brand engagement via mass problem solving. Johannes Leonardo's website explains, "we harness the energy of the masses by creating ideas that acknowledge them as the medium, not just the destination."

In the May 2009 issue of Wired, Lost's J.J. Abrams discussed new puzzle design with this opportunity in mind. In a world of Google, problems are sometimes too easy to solve, and for those creating alternative reality games, it is assumed that tools like Twitter and Facebook will be put to use. This was the idea behind the red balloon experiment, where DARPA tested the way social networking can help users solve a large-scale, time critical task. 10 balloons were released across the United States, a group at MIT was able to locate them within nine hours.

With the #undergroundpuzzle campaign, print media becomes part of a larger digital strategy. It is the path to mobile presence. It goes to show that digital is not killing print, but rather freeing up physical media to play a different role, one that our mobile phones will be part of. With this emerging mindset, agencies look at consumers as users, mobile users with the power of connection.