What's a motoring writer doing at an organised art heist from a gallery in Barcelona? There is an explanation, says Michael McAleer.
It's hard to come up with an original marketing idea in the car industry, but MINI seems to have managed it. Barcelona's broad thoroughfares and narrow sidestreets provided the set for an innovative "whodunnit" mystery loosely based on the classic movie, The Italian Job.
This time, however, it was real life action and investigation. The international sleuths also got the chance to race around Spain's second largest city in the Mini Cooper S hunting down clues.
The storyline centred on the theft from a Barcelona art gallery of six valuable collages painted by American artist Peter Halley. A mixture of fiction and reality blended through the writing of an international novelist, a renowned abstract artist, 84 intrepid sleuths from 17 countries and 121 MINIs, bedecked in the national colours of each team.
And that was before the international press arrived.
In a world of product placement we have become immune to the principle of originality. It is therefore to the credit of the "creatives" in MINI's parent company BMW, and the Avant Garde agency, who came up with the idea of taking product placement one step further and commissioning their own crime novel with the MINI as a central feature.
There's nothing new in this, you cry. True, best-selling author Fay Weldon did pen a novel sponsored by the Italian jewellery firm Bulgari - with a requirement in her contract for at least a dozen mentions of its products.
However, this time MINI blended crime fiction with quasi-reality. The open-ended novel was written by author and former Sunday People editor Val McDermott and set the scene, introducing the characters and leading readers to the crime scene. However, there it left us.
Next stop we're standing in the gallery attending the press conference after the raid. An emotional gallery owner is revealing details of the robbery to the international part-time detectives and the full-time press.
And so begins 36 hours of intrepid investigating which took the teams, including the three Irish contestants led by TV3 presenter Lorraine Keane, around Barcelona interviewing some of the 35 actors who were hired to play out the various roles.
Reports and the gossip mill were in full flight as the competition got underway. Did the Japanese really hire a real private investigator to seek out the solution and give their team an added advantage?
Then there was the story of a southern hemisphere team spotted driving up a pedestrian street on Saturday afternoon, sunroof rolled back and the music blaring, obviously choosing to scare the guilty party into submission.
IN the end, and to no great surprise, the determined German team, led by TV detective Rufus Beck, solved the crime. However, our own sleuths held their own, coming third in the running.
Organisers say they received more than 25,000 entries worldwide, 490 in Ireland. The lucky three were flown to the Catalan city earlier in the week, where they underwent driver training, including how to do 180-degree turns and complete a slalom course even with two flat rear tyres - no mean feat but made a lot easier thanks to Goodyear's latest advance in tyre technology that let's you run flat for up to 90 miles without destroying the wheel.
Thankfully, they did not put these skills to the test on the busy streets, at least not to our knowledge.
The competition is due to run again next year. How they will conquer the originality challenge remains to be seen. But that is for another year. The recognition for originality comes not just from us.
MINI marketing and corporate communications teams have won their respective annual industry award ceremonies this year. The MINI marketing team swept the boards at the Marketing Week/Chartered Institute of Marketing Awards and the Media Week Awards, while the MINI corporate communications team won out at the Institute of Public Relations Awards and last week's PR Week Awards.
It's good to see there's life in the old marketing poodle yet.