*Each Monday, Prophet’s Chief Curator and Provocateur, Andy Stefanovich, or a member of our innovation team* shares a Monday on-ramp with Prophet employees across the globe. We’ll begin sharing them here, and encourage you to join the conversation by answering questions and providing your own comments below. Happy Monday!

MontBlanc, know for its luxury watches and pens launched a marketing contest based on “capturing the beauty of a second.” (Here’s a link to the contest page, and another link to the Timewalker Watch if my Secret Santa needs a gift idea.) Participants send in a one-second video that captures something beautiful. (“To celebrate his invention we (Mont Blanc) challenge you to seize the moment and capture the beauty of a second.”) the company launched the program to celebrate Nicolas Rieussec’s recording time to an accuracy of one fifth of a second - and the birth of the chronograph.

Sure “The Beauty of a Second” contest is a marketing program disguised as a film festival - but from a brand standpoint Mont Blanc is creating an association between its watches and precision time keeping. Rieussec never worked forMont Blanc- He was a French watchmaker that perfected the chronograph in 1822 to measure the speed of racing horses. Mont Blanc, founded a little over 75 years after Rieussec’s development of the chronograph, is creating an association between its brand and the invention of precision time keeping with the celebration. (If not for Wikipedia, I would have assumed Rieussec worked for the German-based Mont Blanc, and given the brand credit for the invention of the chronograph.)

Award-winning director Wim Wenders introduces the contest in a short clip with an intriguing quote, “One of the great things about cinema is how it makes us aware of time. Each film consists of many brief moments of life that all together create a unique new space and time.” The power of visual story telling. Check out the videos, there’s something very intriguing about the fleeting images - one second stories. I’m surprised by how much can actually be captured and conveyed in one second. It might seem like a contradiction, but some of the best creativity can come with the freedom of boundaries - strategic, tactical, or otherwise. Imagine the boundary of one second. What “beauty” might you capture?