official: BMW has been bitten by the fun bug. In efforts to communicate the "drivestyle" that defines its groundbreaking 1 Series and attract its intended target market, the erstwhile "stiff” corporate entity has broken ground with some unique marketing strategies. The lat­est and most innovative of which is the BMW Club 1 Hunt, the recently concluded media edition of which this writer participated in.

At every Club 1 hunt, teams of two Jeff Reyes, Wheels Monthly project manager of this paper, was this writ­er's partner) are made to complete tasks at different locations all over the city (and then some). Each team is given a BMW 1 Series loaded with a full tank of Petron Blaze and a Sam­sung mobile phone loaded with an Addict sim card. The teams are then given tasks with corresponding points. The team with the most num­ber of points at the end of the day wins the hunt. Think amazing race in style and maybe you'll get the drift.

The tasks seemed easy enough. In order to highlight the versatility of the quirky BMW hatch, the tasks were pretty diverse. We'd drive around town, and then we'd have to shop, race karts, work out, jump in front of BMWs on the road and load them up with Petron fuel - you know, life-risking stuff. Best of all, we'd have to pass by as many BMW deal­erships as possible and accomplish some car-related tasks along the way. Now what would the lifestyle media (who comprised half the invited teams) have to take this hunt away from us motoring media folk? Every­thing, apparently. At the end of the day, our Philip­pine STAR team stood as the only contender in the top three among the participating teams. More impor­tantly, we were the only motoring media team to make it to the top three. Ernie and Jenna Lopez of ABS-CBN publishing wiped our sorry @$$es. As did the Philippine Daily Inquirer tandem of Tessa Prieto-Valdes and son Bryan. Of course, we were the only ones, among the top three, not to have any {ahem) outside help. But 1 do sound like I'm mak­ing excuses, aren't I? Heck, the truth is that we didn't really feel like we were outclassed. Or that we lost. Rather, we felt that by the end of the hunt, we understood more what kind of person would want to own a BMW 1 Series. Yep. He's probably the Nike Vi­sion-wearing, Gold's Gym pumping, Tee Box-wearing, California Pizza Kitchen-eating, Palms Country Club and Speedzone-going, fun loving freak. Does that mean that the 1 Se­ries owner is a pretty cool guy (or gal)? Yeah, we'd say so. He's proba­bly also just a wee bit insane. Because during that hunt, just so we could fig­ure prominently in the winner's cir­cle, we knew we were.