Music, art and fashion are all staples of the advertising lexicon, but it's rarer to see the term "literature" attached to a branded project. It's even less common to see the roster of writers that New York-based creative outfit Idealogue lined up for a multimedia event launching Diesel's latest print campaign in the US.

Created by Wilbert Das of Stockholm-based agency Farfar, Diesel's fall 2008 campaign is a series of suggestively juxtaposed abstract black and white photographs. To kick off the campaign in the American market, the client asked Idealogue to "activate" the edgy works for a New York audience. The creative team then conceived "Flash Fiction", a three-day video art installation that kicked off with a soiree in a $37 million penthouse overlooking the Manhattan skyline on Sept. 24.

To make it all happen, Idealogue partnered with the non-profit Accompanied Literary Society, which sent several authors unbranded images from the campaign and asked them to complete the story by writing short "flash fiction" - extremely brief stories with expansive reach - on pieces of sketch paper. An Ernest Hemingway flash fiction piece included in the creative brief exemplified the personal and stirring responses Diesel hoped for: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Idealogue co-founder Jacqueline Bosnjak attributes the level of interest from top tier talent to Diesel's stance as "patron" rather than sponsor.

"The pieces were inherently connected to Diesel in a subtle way that added context to culture," she says. "Diesel was confident enough to not try to control the process by giving the writers 100% creative freedom and by contributing to The Accompanied Literary Society's mission by funding the commission. Flash fiction is such a blogging and text-messaging-type concept that it felt so right for the moment. People responding to fixed worlds and emotional story arcs is also very much advertising."

The pitch worked, with Idealogue landing nine of the 15 authors they approached: Jonathan Ames, Paul Haggis, A.M. Holmes, Lewis Lapham, Jonathan Lethem, Sloane Crosley, Colum McCann, Jay McInerney and Gary Shteyngart. New York-based PanOptic projected their Flash Fiction pieces on the side of One York Building (pictured) on the night of the launch, which attracted many of the authors, director Michel Gondry, Ames' girlfriend Fiona Apple and several New York society types.

"If you are interested in putting out great content then there's a lot you can do with writers and literature," she says. "It's a huge, untapped space for people to create content."

Check out a video of the installation in the screening room.