London's Saatchi Gallery gets G+'d up

As loads of brands continue to try and figure out WTF to do on Google+, the Saatchi Gallery in London is off to a sexy start with their Google Photography Prize.

Leveraging Hangouts and Circles to create live, interactive experiences and better segmentation, respectively, have been some initial brands like Intel and AT&T have taken to differentiate from their Facebook content. 

One of my biggest questions about brand integration with G+ so far is how brands will integrate offers/promotions/contests into their G+ pages, since the main that people fan and interact with brands in social spaces is for special offers.  The Saatchi Gallery and Google+ Photography Prize competition is the best (mind  you, also the first and only) example of that (have you seen any others)??

The Saatchi Gallery in London has teamed up with Google+ to host a global photography competition on Google+, whereby entrants can submit to one of ten categories by uploading and hash tagging their submissions pics.  People can follow the contest by either searching under specific category hash tags or following the official Google+ Photography Prize Page, which will be updated to feature submissions.

The categories are:

Me #megpp

Food #foodgpp

Travel #travelgpp

Fashion #fashiongpp

Action #actiongpp

Street #streetgpp

Sport #sportgpp

Night #nightgpp

Sound/Silence #soundsilencegpp

Point of view #pointofviewgpp

Before you start submitting your face off, note that the competition is only available to students in higher education (18+).  According to the Google/Saatchi, they “decided to narrow the contest to students because we know there’s a very active student photography community on the web who will hopefully be keen to accept the challenge” [via Photography Prize FAQ]

What do you think of Saatchi's Google Photography Prize?? Seen any other great branded G+ interactive executions yet??