It's not often that the interests of investigative journalists and brand marketers intersect -- but they do in the five-day "Storytelling With Data" workshops that Maggie Mulvihill, a journalism professor at Boston University, launched in the summer of 2014. "We're all data storytellers now," Mulvihill says. "We've never before - any of us - not only had access to this level of digitized information ... but also to tools to find the meaning in those records."

Most teaser campaigns are more about anticipation than participation, more like looking at a beautifully bow-tied package than pulling the ribbon and slowly unwrapping it. With the multichannel campaign "Reshaping Excellence," electronics company Sennheiser isn't just telling audiophiles that a monumental change is coming to the way they hear sounds. It's inviting them to join in as the story unfolds.

A very close friend is dying from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the palliative care unit of the veteran's hospital in the Bronx. For more than 45 years, he'd smoke a couple of packs of Kools a day. He was so addicted that even after he became permanently tethered to a tank of oxygen, he'd sneak a smoke. Against this backdrop, an ad in The Hollywood Reporter's Sept. 25 issue jumped out at me. "Five hard-nosed reasons to R-rate movies with smoking," the headline reads.

Amaranth is gaining traction as a highly nutritious grain -- due to the very deliberate way Puente a la Salud Comunitaria (Bridge to Community Health) has crafted and tweaked the "pseudo cereal"'s story.

Like many an inventor and entrepreneur over the years, Dan Ikoyan probably could have cajoled friends and maxed out a few credit cards to raise the $50,000 he says he needs to take his TruPosture "smart shirt" to market over the next 24 weeks. Instead, he made a very conscious decision to raise funds through a crowdfunding campaign that launched on Indiegogo this Wednesday.