If you’ve ever had a great idea that got buried alive by a picky client—that is, if you’ve ever worked in the advertising and/or creative industries—the folks at Blurb have a treat for you.

Blurb—the custom, on-demand book publishing service that produced more than 300,000 unique titles in 2008 alone—operates under the principle that anyone with a good idea should be able to have that idea put into a book for mass consumption. They also understand that not every idea comes to fruition; this is especially true for creatives whose livelihoods rely on keeping clients happy.

So, as a loving tribute to all the ideas that never saw the light of day, Blurb created “Killed Ideas”—a competition in which rejected campaigns are submitted by users, a curator (AdRants publisher Steve Hall) sifts through the entries, and the cream of the crop get put into a book entitled Killed Ideas, Vol. 1. Voila—the idea you thought was six feet under is lovingly revived for posterity. Qualified killed ideas can include advertising, marketing, PR, media, viral, online and print campaigns; as they say at KilledIdeas.com, “you name it, we want it.”

As of this post, you’ve got one day, six hours and 50 minutes to submit your killed idea for consideration; the contest ends at midnight on April 7

In tough economies, we tend to recycle more and live more frugal lifestyles. We pass down clothing, lend and borrow movies, and buy used cars. But now it seems we are even recycling ideas and literature, as with the new book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

The Author (or perhaps "Inserter" would be a more appropriate title), Seth Grahame-Smit, changes Jane Austen’s classic into a scene of comical terror. The writing and storyline are significantly unaltered, but through textual insertions and deletions, Grahame-Smit tells the story in a zombie-ridden England, where a plague of the living dead has infected the pleasant countryside with mayhem and chaos.

Here is the opening of this gripping novel:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is occupied again?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not and went about his morning business of dagger sharpening and musket polishing—for attacks by the unmentionables had grown alarmingly frequent in recent weeks.

The writing still has the tone of the beloved classic but now zombies seem to be a little more important than the anguished love between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. And although some may feel that he defaced a classic, all Grahame-Smit has really done is make the classic more appealing to a new audience.

And so, this new version of Pride and Prejudice showcases a new literary trend— recycle, rework, reuse—and proves that there is always a fun way to recycle.

One thing I'm often struck by these days is how some brands have a real disconnect between what they do offline and what they do online. And then if you just look at their online approach, there can also be a disconnect between a brand's website and their social media presence.

A recent campaign in the U.K. for a car insurance brand is trying to avoid all of these disconnects. Compare the Market is doing this by bringing their furry brand mascot, a meerkat named Aleksandr Orlov, into each part of the campaign. His TV ads remind people that the Compare the Market website is not the same as the Compare the Meerkat site. The friendly meerkat is also interacting with more than 10,000 followers on Twitter and more than 320,000 fans on Facebook. What's even more impressive on Facebook is that the brand is consistently getting hundreds of comments and likes. It's not just something people become a fan of and never revisit.

According to Mashable, the integrated campaign is proving to be successful and has real, tangible results to support it.

In the first 3 days of the campaign over three quarters of the monthly quotes target had been achieved. The year on year uplift in quotes was 45% and vitally, over 50% of the site traffic in the first week was going directly to comparethemarket.com. Finally, the number of quotes is up by 90% on the same period last year.

Amelia Torode, who was involved with the campaign, writes on her blog, "This example further strengthens the fact that interesting creative ideas take on a life of their own when they emerge in the Social Media world. Social Media is not a replacement for a great creative idea or for a TV commercial. TV adds mass awareness and acts as a catalyst for the Social Media activity, but it’s on the likes of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook that in my opinion the real fun and conversations are occurring."