A digital, blogging, word-of-mouth-style campaign to promote the new Westfield Stratford City shopping centre has kicked off, which is of particular interest in that it harnesses the power of location-based social network Foursquare.

Created by agency Guided Collective, which won the Westfield brief to target East London’s creative community, the campaign has seen the recruitment of influential cultural types, including Tracey Emin and retail expert Mary Portas. (In case you’re unfamiliar with the latter, she’s currently got a series on the BBC in which she blatantly rips off the formula used by Gordon Ramsay in Kitchen Nightmares and instead of targeting rubbish restaurants with a view to turning around their ailing fortunes, she targets shops. It’s actually quite good).

The shopping centre – location-wise, a Cockney version of the Sloanier behemoth that lumbered into Shepherd’s Bush in 2008 – is being developed to cash in on the pre- and post-event frenzy surrounding the London 2012 Olympics. With the likes of John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and an all-digital Vue cinema among the retailers it will open its doors to shoppers in 2011.

Guided Collective is working alongside Studio East, a “cultural initiative from Westfield that was formed to identify local emerging talent”. The campaign is aimed at reaching “out via blogs and venues to art, music, fashion, design and culture communities”.

Phase one of the campaign is centred around the launch today of a ‘pop-up’ Bistrotheque restaurant on the site of the shopping centre – it’s a kind of “arts and culture-themed approach to dining” says the blurb.

Guided Collective is running a promotional giveaway using Foursquare. It lets people log onto the network when they are in selected venues in the East End for the chance to win tickets to the pop-up restaurant. ( I keep writing ‘pop-up restaurant’, not knowing what it means, so just a moment. Ah, a pop-up restaurant is a resturant that pops-up out of nowhere, before popping back down again shortly after: here’s a helpful definition that explains it better than I have).

Foursquare works by allowing users to check-in at venues via a mobile website and post reviews, comments, meet up with friends and collect points. It’s like Twitter’s Twitter Places, but with points.

The chatter surrounding the Westfield campaign has been generated through blogger recruitment and the usual PR channels and centred around the ‘Next Big Thing Awards 2010’, which gives London’s art community the opportunity to create an installation that could be showcased at the Westfield Stratford site when it opens.

The awards are being judged by, among others, those celebrities mentioned before. Bloggers will continue bashing out blurb supporting the campaign. Next, consumers will be asked to judge another completion, called ‘What’s Hot in 2011’, when they will be able to select their favourite creative work from fashion, art, music and design. Those who make nominations will be entered into a draw and get the chance to win tickets to the Bistrotheque restaurant.

Sam Reid, founder of Guided Collective, says: “Our main view was that this target audience easily sidestep interruptive advertising so the ‘digital thing’ we were asked to create didn’t have to be particularly complex, just engaging. Too often technology is used for the sake of it (often expensively) with not enough reflection on if it serves its purpose, so we test ideas via the collective to ensure all round relevance. It’s real-time research which is core to Guided’s method of working.”

He does have a point, a pertinent one – that digital media, particularly social networking, has a pedestrian power that brands and more mainstream agencies often over-complicate; because they’re still too obsessed with the gloss and shimmer of traditional media.

I think I like this campaign. It’s unpretentious (let’s ignore that Emin endorsement), direct, deceptively simple and, I suspect, cheap to run. Whether it works or not is another matter; although its target audience is so niche and switched on to digital media, that I suspect it will.