Where is the boundary between “mission-driven journalism,” as GOOD prides itself in doing, and social activism, which is something journalists have traditionally stayed away from? Is that boundary obsolete?

Having a mission isn’t the same thing as having an agenda on an activist front. Most magazines have had mission statements that they strive to fill and for us that’s definitely true.

When GOOD was founded in 2006 they sought to occupy a media space between social justice do-gooder media, the mainstream media and cool-hunting or hip kids media. GOOD is a creative and social good-oriented magazine, but it’s also high quality and playing the same game as more established media.

Being mission-driven makes people understand what it’s all adding up to when they come to your site or read your magazine. It’s not that we are covering a geographic area or industry. We’re sort of illuminating a point of view on the world and creating a body of work for people who share a similar approach to the world.

During your SXSW panel you mentioned that even though your title is Executive Editor, you spend half your time talking to the sales team. And your title does seem to indicate that you straddle both sides of the Chinese wall. So is your role content-oriented, business-oriented or both?

My number one responsibility is to make good media, so it’s content-oriented. That means supervising the team that makes good media and also, realistically, ensuring that we are able to continue to do that, which means also working with the sales team.

I’m frequently surprised that media survived as long as it did with such a strict wall between the editorial and business sides. This is not to say that GOOD is exemplary at every level in terms of how we negotiate this.

Every partnership we forge is different and essentially our entire business model is built in a grey area. What that really requires is a lot of trust from the folks who are outwardly representing what we do to clients and partners. It’s also important that those folks understand enough about what we do to really respect the lines we draw and for us to all be on the same page about what we want to make.

GOOD Corps is a strategic creative consultancy that helps brands "transform the values at the core of their identity into actionable solutions that improve their business and the world"

Speaking of business models, how does GOOD make money?

Really what we sell against is brand. We do sell banners and use e-mail sponsorships and other things that are closer to the realm of traditional advertising. But we also have a really awesome creative services team that makes custom content for partners.

Much of that appears without the GOOD brand on it but they are purchasing our brains and our sensibility, which in a way is much more of a hybrid agency model along with a traditional sales team.

We’ve also seen a lot of success with our existing editorial series. For example, we do a weekly feel-good feature called “People Are Awesome” which is our version of everyday heroes, and partners will help us underwrite this material.

It’s much easier to inhabit that grey area if all partners are paying for is profiles of people, or if their sponsorship is helping us do something that we’ve always done. We don’t have to worry about stepping on any toes because we’re partnering with a client in one area to underwrite content in another area.

GOOD Maker is a tool that helps individuals and organizations fund social action

Like lots of media brands, GOOD has branched into the event space. I think the way you put it at SXSW is that “events are just another way of consuming GOOD.” Can you unpack that?

This is sort of something that’s in GOOD’s DNA. In the really early days, instead of trying to do direct mail or a lot of traditional magazine approaches to gaining subscribers, they threw parties. We still host a lot of parties related to magazine issue launches, we also do things that are a little more action-oriented.

For example, we created a human infographic in downtown L.A. to raise awareness about traffic issues. For that we did some work with the city and partnered with an ad agency. It was an attempt to say, “okay, if you read GOOD you probably care about people getting around the city and transportation issues and are also interested in getting out of your house and physically being a part of something.”

The staff is not huge here so we’re always thinking about ways that we can also enable people who are into the idea of doing good things that make sense with our brands and we can support them and then have them sort of run with it.

GOOD is a print magazine as well as an online platform. What’s the relationship between the two products and how do the conversations that take place on the website inform the print edition (and vice versa)?

The print magazine definitely has a quarterly vibe; it comes out four times a year, the stuff in it is longer and it’s always more in-depth explorations of stuff we write about day in and day out on the website. So inasmuch as those daily and weekly discussions are informed by our community, they trickle up and inform the feature assignments we make and how we form our print magazine.

Then there’s the feedback loop, where once the magazine is on newsstands and we put all the content from the print magazine online we get people weighing in on it.

For example, we have this 12-page infographic explaining the U.S. economy that we put online after the issue was on newsstands and I actually think it will pay dividends in a long-term sense.

When we write about things that are economy-related we can take portions of that infographic, we can link to it; it becomes this base of knowledge that we can build on with our online community.

We’re huge design geeks at Sparksheet and one of the things you guys are known for – and have won awards for – is design. What’s the connection between your obvious emphasis on good design and GOOD’s mission?

What’s really important about GOOD is that we fill the ‘social good’ role that could easily tend to ‘boring’ or ‘eat your vegetables.’ Design is a really important way that we live out the creative, innovative part of that mission and brand identity.

Practically speaking, as a journalist, working in close collaboration with designers is totally essential to making reported work come to life in a meaningful way.

We have a team of designers who really think the best use of their skills is making narrative, reporting and all things related to helping people understand the world better.

The economy infographic that I was discussing is also a collaboration between me as an editor and reporter and the designer who worked on it.  I didn’t just write it and then hand it off to a designer. There was a whole discussion about how best to convey this complicated information visually.

And that’s in the DNA of how we work. It all comes back to brand identity. We want to be a space for creativity and fun just as much as we’re a space for learning and social good.

A portion of GOOD's infographic on the U.S. economy

Commerce and creativity have always been interlinked. From Shakespeare and Edison, to Dylan and Jobs, the history of art, culture and ideas has been defined by debates about authenticity vs. selling out, populism vs. purity. As content creators, marketers and entrepreneurs we’re faced with this tug-of-war throughout our work lives – consider mixed-message titles like “Executive Creative Director” and “Chief Creative Officer” or terms like “show business” and “brand storytelling.”

In his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer lays out various examples of creative genius in business, art and entertainment, including an enterprising 3M engineer’s invention of masking tape and Dylan’s game-changing composition of “Like a Rolling Stone”. As far as the brain is concerned, Lehrer says, there’s no difference between creating for the sake of commerce and creating for creativity’s sake. Both masking tape and musical masterpiece are products of the same neurological apparatus.

Still, it seems clear to me that as a culture we tend to value seemingly “pure” examples of creative pursuits over those driven by commercial interests. Yes, Steve Jobs’ ingenuity has been equated with Albert Einstein’s and John Lennon’s, but Jobs isn’t just vaunted for founding the world’s most valuable company, but for doing so despite the fact that he famously “never did it for the money.”

To help us unpack the complex relationship between creativity and commerce, I reached out to a cross-section of designers, musicians, filmmakers, writers and marketing types, asking them how they strike a balance between commercial and creative thinking and if these two pursuits have ever come into conflict in their work. I was surprised to find that their answers fell more or less neatly into three categories: those who see creativity and commerce as perfectly compatible, those who strive to broker a compromise between the two, and those who cultivate decidedly non-commercial outlets to satisfy their creative needs.

“Creative thinking is commercial thinking”

Cindy Gallop

Cindy Gallop served as Chairman and President of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty before reinventing herself as a web entrepreneur with projects like Make Love Not Porn and If We Ran the World. Gallop is decidedly in the “no conflict” camp when it comes to the relationship between commerce and creativity. In fact, she thinks many content creators sell themselves short on the commercial front.

“I am a big believer that everyone should realize the financial value of what they create,” Gallops says. “I feel this particularly strongly because my background is theatre and advertising – two industries where ideas, creativity and hard slog making those ideas and creativity come to life are massively undervalued, including by the creators themselves.

So my creative thinking is commercial thinking. The consultancy work I do for clients is designed to build their brands while making money, and my own ventures are designed with clear business models at their core from day one.”

Andrew Davis

Like Gallop, Andrew Davis sees creativity as the essential ingredient in successful client work and insists that “the more creative it is, the more successful it is.” Davis is Chief Strategy Officer at Tippingpoint Labs, a Boston-based branded content agency. Before that, he worked on the Muppets brand at the Jim Henson Company.

Davis says that the key to creative freedom within a corporate context is understanding what your client stands for. “It’s only when we haven’t understood their core values or when they can’t express them very well that we’ve been shot down in flames,” he says.

For example, Davis’ agency once pitched a campaign to GPS manufacturer TomTom that involved staging a “zany road trip across the United States.” The idea was to demonstrate that if your GPS can take you to the “World’s Largest Ball of Paint” (it exists, in Indiana), it can get you anywhere.

But it turned out that TomTom wasn’t interested in highlighting TomTom’s handiness for the holidays; the brand wanted to promote the technology’s usefulness in everyday life.

“The meeting ended with this awesome creative idea that we would never leverage,” Davis says.

“Art that doesn’t require compromise becomes self-indulgent”

Reanna Evoy

Reanna Evoy is the Art Director for ALDO, the global shoe brand. At first she seems to join Gallop and Davis in seeing commerce and creativity as complementary. “I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive,” she says. “If it looks good and it is on brand, ultimately the customer/client will have a positive reaction.”

But Evoy also introduces another element to the commerce vs. creativity conversation. Compromise. She acknowledges that there are occasions when the two pursuits come to a head and suggests the solution is to find a middle way.

“There have been countless times when business decisions have outweighed my artistic direction,” she says. “Call it ‘make the logo bigger’ syndrome. It happens all the time. Even straight-up budget considerations can put pressure on a project.”

Helen Klein Ross

As someone who straddles both the agency and literary worlds, Helen Klein Ross has mixed feelings about the idea of compromise. Ross is a former creative director, widely read blogger, and the unofficial Twitter voice of Mad Men’s Betty Draper (a role that she’s parlayed into a boutique agency called Brand Fiction Factory).

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Ross says. “We’re always writing in the service of something, no matter what platform we’re writing for… the creative and commercial always have to be pretty much linked.”

But in her literary life Ross seems less compromising. For instance, she once wrote a poem that contained a four-letter word. Several editors offered to publish the poem on the condition that she drop the profanity, but she felt that doing so would weaken the poem.

“I had to decide which I wanted: a published poem or a good poem. I left the word in. And the poem was published.”

Frederic Bohbot

Lucky for Ross, she didn’t have to compromise her vision in the end. But for Frederic Bohbot, an independent filmmaker who produces feature-length documentaries for the CBC and other Canadian broadcasters, compromise is “the name of the game.”

“As a producer, the balance that I need to find is between the director’s creative vision and the broadcaster’s generally less creative desires,” Bohbot says.

While Bohbot is critical of “broadcasters who fear that at the first instance of demanding thought, the viewer will change the channel,” he concedes that compromise isn’t always a bad thing. “I do think that most art that doesn’t require compromise becomes self-indulgent, which we have been the ‘victim’ of as well.”

“Living in two worlds means I don’t have to compromise either one”

Jay Vidyarthi

Jay Vidyarthi is at a crossroads. Last year he left his full-time gig as a User Experience Designer at Yu Centrik to pursue a graduate degree at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology.

Since then, he’s made a name for himself as a design expert at TEDActive and as the creator of Sonic Cradle, a unique synthesis of music, meditation and technology. The project earned him an invitation to exhibit at TEDActive this year, which he says led to potential investors.

With his studies winding down Vidyarthi plans to send applications to what he considers the four leading institutions in his field: MIT, Stanford, Google and Ideo. You’ll notice that the first two are academic institutions that will allow him to pursue his creative impulses unimpeded by commercial interests, while the second two are commercial brands, albeit notoriously creative ones. In other words, Vidyarthi finds himself at the intersection of creativity and commerce.

To Vidyarthi, creative and commercial pursuits aren’t perfectly compatible, nor are they opposing forces that necessitate compromise. Both are vital, but each in its right place and time.

“Think of it like a wave moving back and forth,” he says. “You don’t want to be in the middle, you want to go with the flow and make sure the creative and commercial sides of your practice are up to date but not overshooting the equilibrium.”

Ron Tite

In addition to his design work, Vidyarthi is a prolific musician. And while he says he’s been able to “maintain that equilibrium” as a designer, he’s had a harder time balancing his creative instincts with commercial ambitions when playing in rock bands.

“I immediately get shot off balance whenever I’ve tried to commercialize my music. Maybe it’s too close to me to let go of. But the minute I start thinking about growing an audience, I lose my creative spark.”

That’s why Ron Tite, a former Executive Creative Director at Euro RSCG who now works as a consultant, moonlights as a standup comic. In fact, it’s why so many of us – from cab-driving novelists to saxophone-playing politicians – have side projects (or, to use a less pretentious term, hobbies).

“When I simply want to express myself creatively with no regard for commerce, I do a comedy show,” Tite says. “I do it to do it and don’t care whether there’s money at the end of it all. Living in two worlds means I don’t have to compromise either one.”

The relationship between commerce and creativity is at the heart of C2-MTL, a global conference that takes place May 22–25 in Montreal. As an official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you exclusive content before, during and after the event. 

You went to journalism school and identify yourself as a “caffeinated” journalist on Twitter. How does journalistic thinking infuse your work as a designer?

I have been a journalist for nearly my entire life, with my first newspaper job in fifth grade. However, I have been a designer throughout my 10+-year professional career.

I came to web design via communication and information design for print newspapers and magazines. I fell in love with working on the internet the moment that I realized that writing code is designing information.

Both news designers and web designers are burdened with the same things: organizing information so that it is discoverable as well as rationally arranged, illustrating ideas that deepen the understanding of content, and working within a set of constraints.

Miranda Mulligan with NPR's David Wright at SXSW 2012

You and Dave Wright from NPR began your talk at SXSW saying you wouldn’t talk about “above the fold.” But I have to ask: Is there a “fold” online? Does it matter?

Most of the terminology used to describe web design stems from print-focused design, i.e. “canvas” and “above the fold,” and it is time for us to let it go.

The web is an infinitely flexible medium opposed to print, which is finite with absolute measures, and a definite beginning and end. Language matters and words used should be appropriate to the medium.

How closely do you work with the sales department in determining ad placement on the site?

Currently, we are not running any advertorial content on BostonGlobe.com. It is a subscriber-supported site, so we have not tackled any of the design challenges that arise around advertorial just yet.

That said, the Globe is a collaborative work environment, so when there is a business need for new advertising positions, the design team works with the sales and operations team to develop a solution.

I should also mention that last fall, our design and development teams prototyped and ended up running some responsive advertising creative across the top of BostonGlobe.com for a month. It was kind of fun, getting to invent something for one of our clients.

BostonGlobe.com's responsive web design

How closely do you collaborate with the print design team at the Globe? Would you describe the newspaper’s approach as “digital first,” or are you still essentially translating a print project to the web on a daily basis?

The Globe’s presentation team is comprised of both digital and print designers and a few programmers. By and large, we all sit next to one another and the digitally focused team members primarily take the lead on training the print designers to work on the portfolio of digital offerings.

The Globe has been publishing web-first for five or so years now. The newsroom cultural transition happened well before my time in Boston, as I have been with the Globe for a little over a year and a half.

Jeffrey Zeldman once told us: “Content informs design; design without content is decoration.” How would you characterize the relationship between content and design in the editorial world?

Well, I am not sure anything is different in the editorial world, per se, though I have been known to liken the relationship of design and content – as well as the relationship of visual design and development – to the popular sand ceremony often performed during weddings.

In this ceremony, a couple pours various colours of sand into a vessel symbolizing their union. Like the grains of sand, once combined the relationship between content, design and development is very difficult to separate.

By now, I would hope that we have all learned that designing in a vacuum is a big “no-no” and design systems defined without real content tend to fall flat.

There was lots of talk at SXSW about designers playing leadership roles in newsrooms, acting as bridges between silos and departments. I believe you used the term “power brokers” during your talk. How do you see your role as a designer within your organization?

The work of the web designer goes well beyond pixel-pushing beautification and rare is the project that has no need for a designer. At one point or another, nearly all departments cross paths with the design team in order to execute a project, and the most successful ones engage the designer from concept to completion.

Therefore, a designer is uniquely positioned to be one of the most informed people in an organization, knowing most of the idiosyncrasies of all the moving parts. As an aside, this is also the reason that I think web designers make really powerful product managers and project managers.

Newspaper websites have been around long enough that certain design elements and practices have almost become cliché (as your co-presenter David Wright put it, “We’re passing around these coding and UX habits like a dirty needle”). What are some common editorial design tropes that need to be purged?

Oh wow, where to start?! Dave and I both like to talk about how many design decisions get made following the determination of advertising positions.  Occasionally we bemoan that, as an industry, we refer to these positions as “requirements.” This, like in the “above the fold” question, is something we inherited from print.

On top of that, since the industry also needed a system that could be standardized for advertising networks, we created a design pattern that includes “the right rail” and “banner-blindness” problems. We cheapened our own products.

In terms of designing stories, specifically, editorial web designers depend far too heavily on software (i.e. Flash). Learning to write real code is not magic, it’s just hard work.

Also, I feel strongly that web design needs more editorial designers, especially in key positions at medium- to large-scale publishers. The best editorial designers are good at enhancing, often deepening, readers’ understanding of stories and published content.

Thanks to decades of establishing best practices and relationships with writers and editors, their strength is in the additional value added to content when the written word and visual design are skillfully and strategically combined.

More on The Sparkbeat: Miranda Mulligan explains how BostonGlobe.com’s cutting-edge responsive design affects the newsroom. 

Responsive web design is close to our hearts at Sparksheet. Since last summer our own website has been 100% responsive, meaning that it adapts to whatever screen or device you consume it on.

The beauty of responsive design is that publishers don’t have to design from scratch every time a new gadget or operating system comes out, saving time and money. It also means that content consumers are treated to the optimal experience, whether they’re on the train or in their living rooms.

The Boston Globe introduced their responsively-designed website last fall. The site contrasts sharply with the old Boston.com site, which used to serve as the Globe’s primary web destination. Earlier this month the Society for News Design named BostonGlobe.com the “World’s Best Designed” news website:

The Globe’s responsive design is remarkable and deserves to be noted as one of the key moments in media design history, akin to USA Today’s embrace of color and graphics. Its impact will affect a generation of digital journalists and is an example of what’s possible when smart design and rich content is balanced with a focus on being standards compliant and future-friendly across all platforms.

In an in-depth Q&A with Miranda Mulligan, The Boston Globe’s Digital Design Director, Sparksheet asked Mulligan how the site’s responsive framework affected the editorial and design process at the paper. Here’s what she told us:

The single biggest challenge is the necessary culture shift for the entire digital business. From the developers, to the designers, to the editors and content creators, to the business-money-making side, everyone has to change their thinking and process. And well, change is hard. Here are some of the challenges that profoundly impact editorial:

• Designing and building interactive information graphics and practising data visualization storytelling relies on a significant change in the design and development process.Traditionally, most newsrooms have relied heavily on Flash to execute interactive stories and data visualizations. Since Apple’s iOS and Flash do not play together nicely, finding another way to tell these stories is paramount. Also, designing interactives and data visualizations for mobile has, by and large, been an afterthought. Now, designing for mobile must be the first thought.Also, this design process relies heavily on rapidly prototyping and creating the visual design within the browser. The process is smoothest when the experience has been designed and coded using mobile-first techniques, and then designing and enhancing for wider, more fully featured browsers. It seems awkward at first, but gets more and more conformable with practice.
• One significant upside for content producers and site editors: Character counts in headlines become less of an issue because there is no way to know the exact (to the pixel) location it will be on the page for the user. Letting go of pixel-perfection is quite freeing.
• Most modern news websites rely heavily on third-party relationships: i.e. advertising networks, a video management and serving relationship, events and calendaring solutions, games, obits, etc. However, the code served from these vendors will most likely not play nicely on a flexible grid unless it has been specifically written to do so.
• Flash movies/games will not play on iOS devices. There are a variety of techniques around handling and crafting experiences with this type of content. However they all involve some significant hands-on haranguing.

Is there a difference between creating for the sake of commerce (like 3M) and creating for creativity’s sake (like Bob Dylan), or is it fundamentally the same process?

It’s fundamentally the same process, especially from the perspective of the brain. I think that’s why the brain is an interesting avenue with which to pursue some of these questions.

The brain is a category buster and the brain doesn’t respect differences between when I’m working on an assignment or when I’m working in my spare time.

Simply put, creativity is the invention of something new that’s useful. Obviously we could spend the rest of our lives debating the details of what exactly new and useful mean, but I think we know what creativity is when we see it.

Your book talks about the importance of form in creativity but you present conflicting views. First you say that “You break out of the box by stepping into shackles,” but then you quote Milton Glaser: “To have a style is to be trapped.” Should we see constraints (even budgetary ones) as good for creativity?

We need the right kind of constraints. Look, for example, at the history of poetry. There’s a reason why poets always stump themselves with poetic forms. Those very intricate forms force us to come up with truly original lines. They force us to dig below the obvious clichés and associations.

So sometimes constraints can be essential in a very real way, because creativity is not our first mode of thinking. We really have to be forced into it. In that way, constraints can really unleash our creativity.

Of course, the wrong kind of constraint is just a trap. That’s what Milton Glaser is talking about. You develop routines, or just develop this standard approach that is rooted in efficiency. It makes your life a little bit easier but it also reduces the realm of possibilities that you consider.

This is the leading theory for why creativity drops off as we get older. People develop styles of thinking. They develop habits, routines, and all those routines get in the way.

That’s why those who stay creative throughout their entire career or life constantly risk reinvention. They always experiment with new products and new problems. They’re always trying to find new ways of attacking the problem. In a sense they’re always looking for a new set of constraints, and that’s the healthiest way.

Milton Glaser (right) at work with Walter Bernard at WBMG in the 1980s. Image via miltonglaser.com

You talk about the importance of focus in the creative process, but you’re also cheerleader for daydreaming. How should we find the right balance between focus and distraction?

I think the first step is to recognize that creativity isn’t a single way of thinking, that the creative process goes through these phases where sometimes you will have epiphanies, but afterwards you’ll have to work it out. You’ll need to go through draft after draft, edit after edit, iteration after iteration.

You really have to diagnose the problem that you’re working on and try to figure out whether what you need is a moment of insight. Do I need an epiphany? Do I need to take lots of hot showers, or do I have a feeling of knowing? Do you have a sense of making progress, in which case you should just keep putting in the work and drink another triple espresso.

Do you think it’s possible to replicate the “serendipity” of face-to-face interactions (which you credit for the creativity of brands like Pixar and industries like Broadway) on digital platforms? Is that where social media come in?

When you go back 15 years, there was this sense that the online world would somehow replace the analogue interactions of real life. That hasn’t happened at all. We need these real world connections, meetings in the flesh, more than ever.

In terms of imagining online exchanges that will foster the serendipity of real life, it’s tough to say. At its best, Twitter makes it possible, but what you often get with Twitter is people obeying the self-similarity principle. They seek out people who are just like them, so you end up with a set of people you’re following who share your interests, your sensibilities, your attitudes, your political leanings.

We certainly do the same thing in the real world. We seek out people who are just like us. But when it comes to maximizing creativity, you really want that friction. You really want that tension in the room. You want some fresh and strange and weird voices too because they’re the ones that are going to unleash your creativity.

Pixar's Headquarters were designed to encourage employee interaction. Image by Joe Wolf via Flickr.

Do you think IP laws have hindered creativity? You write about the importance of “recombination,” of building on old ideas (Shakespeare is the prime example in the book). Is the web’s culture of curation, linking and mashups bringing that culture back?

It’s a very difficult line to draw. People have been trying to figure out how to draw this line ever since intellectual property was invented back in Elizabethan England. In Lincoln’s phrase, the purpose of intellectual property is to add fuel to the fire of genius.

It is an important motivational force, but at the same time, one also has to recognize that there’s a tension there because, as Steve Jobs put it, creativity is just connecting things. It’s finding new connections between old ideas.

You have to give people access to those old ideas, you have to allow the future Shakespeares of the world to rip off plots and to steal lines. Dylan described his process as one of love and theft: First you fall in love with an idea and then you steal it. Then you make it your own.

We have to make it possible for people to steal the right way.  It’s not about theft so that you can watch it on your laptop. I’m talking about theft so that you can reinvent it. I think too often copyright laws make it too hard to recombine, too hard to mash together old ideas in new ways.

Bob Dylan in 1966. Photo by Barry Feinstein via Flickr

Where does the editing or refining process come into play? Is that still part of the creative process?

It is. When you talk to creative people they begin by telling these romantic stories about how they had a big epiphany in the shower, but if you keep pressing them they’ll confess that even after that big epiphany they still had to go through endless drafts.

Look at Beethoven, the definition of an artistic genius. The guy was going through 70 drafts of a single musical phrase until he found the perfect one. Editing is an essential part of the creative process.

This kind of work doesn’t seem as romantic or grand as the light bulb going off when we least expect it, but it is just as important. There’s nothing glamorous about it, it’s quite dismal in fact and may even make us a little depressed, but it’s how we make our ideas perfect.

The larger point is that creativity is damned hard. If it were easy, if it were just about finding ways to relax and going on vacations, Pablo Picasso wouldn’t be so famous.

What about your own creative process? Do you browse the academic literature to find a narrative, or do you start with an idea and build from there?

I start with the mystery. I start with something I want to know more about. In this case it was the mystery of the moment of insight. Figuring out where these ideas come from when they arrive out of the blue just struck me as totally befuddling. I wanted to learn about it. That’s where I began.

Then, of course, I go to the peer review literature and the science. The hardest part is finding the stories that bring the science to life, that will let you make the connections between the abstract experiments in the lab and the creativity in the room.

Jonah Lehrer will be speaking at C2-MTL, a global conference that explores the relationship between commerce and creativity. As a media partner, Sparksheet will bring you exclusive content before, during and after the event, which takes place May 22 to 25 in Montreal.

Case in point: Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign. In just five days, the cause marketing video reached 100 million viewers, making it “the most viral video of all time.” And that’s despite being 30 minutes long (an eternity in web time) and about an emotionally difficult subject. In other words, it’s not your typical viral hit.

Invisible Children's website provides a downloadable "action kit" with posters and flyers.

Founded in 2004, Invisible Children uses video campaigns to raise awareness about the infamous guerrilla faction LRA and its leader, Joseph Kony. Earlier this March the campaign exploded, thanks to the release of a 30-minute documentary describing Kony’s atrocities and providing a call to action.

Read Write Web’s Alicia Eler put it this way: “By the end of the video, Kony’s face is burned into our brains – we fear him, we hate him, we want to make him famous and then murder him.”

Cause marketing lessons

It’s hard to deny Kony’s impact on the digital (and real) world. As Eddie Reeves wrote in the Huffington Post, “The Kony 2012 campaign is, quite simply, one of the most significant marketing promotions in recent history, ranking alongside the likes of Philip Morris’ introduction of the Malboro Man and Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl spot.”

Invisible Children has 414,263 followers on Twitter, 3.1 million likes on Facebook, a Tumblr page and YouTube channel with nearly 86 million views of its documentary. #Kony2012 trended globally, with celebrities, politicians, and activists getting in on the discussion.

PLEASE go to t.co/E4GvJifH Even if its 10 minutes… Trust me, you NEED to know about this! #1LOVE

— Rihanna (@rihanna) March 7, 2012

Thanks tweeps for sending me info about ending #LRAviolence . I am aware. Have supported with $’sand voice and will not stop.#KONY2012

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) March 6, 2012

Good to see such strong interest in #stopkony – a key step to helping those most vulnerable.

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) March 8, 2012

A Kony 2012 poster in Hong Kong. Image by Chun Lam, via Flickr

Content marketing blog iMedia Connection argued that the video’s weakness (at least according to critics) is also it’s greatest asset: simplicity.  The video was easy to watch (well – produced), easy to understand (plain language) and easy to respond to (with a click of a mouse you could donate, download posters, or write to a political official).

Social Media Today notes that one of the keys to the campaign’s success  (after the slick content) was that they targeted celebrities to act as brand advocates for the cause. The eruption on Twitter might not have happened had Justin Bieber not tweeted about it.

Invisible Children urges people to contact "Policy Makers" and "Culture Makers" via Twitter through a direct link on their homepage

Australia’s Marketing Magazine provides some lessons of its own, suggesting that the consistency of the campaign across channels made it easy for people to understand what the campaign was all about. They could jump from Tumblr to YouTube to Facebook and would see the same message.

The beauty of social media is that it lets brands keep the conversation going. In this case, when the conversation turned skeptical, the organization was able to respond immediately and across channels.

They provided links on their site directing users to more in-depth content, they pointed people to their budget, they aired YouTube videos addressing the concerns and they encouraged conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskICAnything.

And the campaign isn’t over yet. Expect to see a Kony 2012 Part 2 video released in the very near future, and much more conversation as the story unfolds.

The Frost Bank Tower (aka "The Owl") lights up the Austin skyline

As we noted last year, SXSW is huge. At any given moment there are dozens of panels, meet-ups, keynotes, showcases, “core conversations” and branded events going on throughout Austin.

That means that no two experiences at SXSW are alike, and that it’s nearly impossible to distill five days of sessions and spectacles into a handful of tidy trends.

But as Robert Scoble noted during a conversation about – what else? – the future of events, SXSW is a good indicator of where things are headed over the next year in the digital space. Here are my top five takeaways.

We have the tools we need

It may have something to do with the chilly rain that dampened the first two days of the conference, but SXSW 2012 had a more sober feel than last year’s edition. (Figuratively speaking – there was no shortage of free booze flowing as per usual.)

At SXSW 2011 the Arab Spring was still fresh, the iPad 2 was flying off shelves for the first time, and nearly every session brought up those viral Old Spice ads that were supposed to change the face of online marketing. But this year I can’t think of a single news event, technology or viral campaign that set Austin abuzz.

The closest thing was Kony 2012, a 30-minute film about the former Ugandan warlord, that reportedly drew as much as 100 million views this month, but is already facing a backlash for oversimplifying a complex world issue.

Ogilvy Notes presents visual summaries of SXSW keynotes

That no so-called “game changer” emerged this year is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, as digital research superstar Danah Boyd mentioned in her talk on “The Power of Fear,” the Arab Spring turned out not to be a quick social media fix of that region’s problems.

Meanwhile, 2011 buzzwords like gamification, localization and paywalls (remember how everyone was up in arms about The New York Times?) were nowhere in sight on this year’s schedule.

So perhaps the lesson here is that we have the tools we need. Or, as The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston put it in his inspiring keynote, it’s time to “marry the creativity of the tools with the story.”

When it comes to media, it’s all about the brand

Google erected its own "village" on Rainey St. near the Austin Convention Center

I focused on web journalism trends in my SXSW 2012 weekend review, so I won’t dwell on it here. But one of the overriding (and encouraging) lessons from Austin this year is that we’ve officially entered the age of the media outlet as brand.

Yes, media outlets have always been brands. Print magazines like The New Yorker and TV shows like Dr. Who have understood this for years. But for the past decade most online publications have operated as commodities, focusing on “clickable” content that will attract “eyeballs” for their advertisers.

I don’t think I heard anyone use the word “eyeballs” or even the word “traffic” at SXSW 2012. Ann Friedman, Executive Editor of Good, whose motto is “for people who give a damn,” explained how Good is all about catering to a specific “affinity group” through web content, videos, and events.

France's knitted booth on the trade show floor.

Good’s “mission-driven” brand is an “easy sell” to advertisers, Friedman said, because running ads on the site “is about having a point of view, not just buying inventory in space.”

Similarly, The Office star turned web entrepreneur Rainn Wilson invoked the “B word” in a funny keynote about Soul Pancake, a website that seeks to “de-lamify” spirituality by fostering conversations around religion, philosophy and creativity.

With regular spots on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and a TV pilot in the works, Wilson proudly proclaimed that “Soul Pancake is becoming a brand.” And so is Rainn Wilson, it seems.

Design is everywhere

Last year in Austin there were lots of discussions about content and lots of discussions about design. But at SXSW 2012, content and design were treated as two sides of the same coin, as they should be.

The Boston Globe’s Miranda Mulligan and NPR’s David Wright

One of my favourite SXSW sessions, “Journalism’s Got 99 Problems: Design is #1” (the title is a nod to rapper Jay-Z, who performed in Austin the night before), saw NPR’s David Wright and the Boston Globe’s Miranda Mulligan hold court in a room full of designers, publishers and advertisers.

Wright complained that “too many journalists think designers are people who colour in for a living,” arguing that design thinking needs to be brought into strategy sessions from the get-go.

In a panel called “It’s Not News It’s Business,” former Washington Post digital director Justin Ferrell suggested he’d like to see more designers, developers and programmers in executive positions at newspapers and magazines (they’re already calling the shots in Silicon Valley).

What’s clear is that the next generation of media websites is going to be heavily inspired by social news startups like Flipboard and Instapaper, which everyone seems to agree are at the vanguard of editorial design.

Latin America is hot

It was nice to see more non-English speaking markets get attention at SXSW this year and one of the hottest topics was the emerging Latin American consumer.

Austin-based Dell put up a plexiglass wall in the convention center that attendees could sign

In a fascinating talk on Brazilian youth, researcher Carla Albertuni characterized Brazil’s young influencers as “bridge youths” who use a combination of online and offline social networking to reform (but not necessarily “disrupt”) the country’s traditional class system.

In another session, “Have Latin American Media Become Social?” Mexican editor Valdir Ugalde explained how media brands in different Latin American countries are embracing the web.

In Colombia, according to Ugalde, user-generated content is hot. Argentinian newspaper Perfil publishes an online magazine called “140” all about trending topics on Twitter.

Chilean outlets rely on Faebook for generating traffic, while Mexican broadcasters use Twitter hashtags to generate online conversations on air.

Events are platforms

If you follow Sparksheet on Twitter, you’ve probably already heard bits and pieces of the lessons above. That’s because, along with a huge chunk of the estimated 24,500 SXSW 2012 attendees, we tweeted live throughout our five days in Austin.

Robert Scoble, Brian Duggan and Loic Le Meur fielding questions during the session "Events are Now Platforms"

Twenty four thousand is an incredible number. But when you factor in everyone who followed the conversation online, it’s clear that SXSW is much more than a face-to-face event. It’s a platform for quality content, delivered in real time. At least that was the lesson of a “core conversation” with Loic Le Meur, founder of Europe’s biggest tech conference, Le Web.

Le Meur said that his small organization spends roughly half a million dollars a year on video and live streaming and that the Paris-based conference (Le Web will be branching out to London this year) is “just a studio” where the content is created.

In other words, without a sales and marketing team, Le Meur relies on this year’s content to promote next year’s event.

Of course, what the online audience doesn’t get are the face-to-face conversations, unexpected connections and real world relationships that only a live event can deliver. And that’s why you can count on finding us back in Austin next March.

The Austin Convention Center

Over the past decade or so the formula for success in online publishing has been something like this:

Post a lot of content.

Keep it short.

And do it fast.

The assumption here is that people look to the internet for simple, snackable content in “real time.” And with its reverse chronological template, the web’s first indigenous news medium – the blog – was designed to deliver just that.

But over the course of the weekend here at SXSW, this model has finally been challenged and it seems as though fast, short and abundant may be giving way to slow (read: thoughtful), long (read: in-depth) and scarce (read: quality over quantity).

Curating quality

Maria Popova and David Carr

This web publishing paradigm shift became apparent to me during a Saturday morning session entitled “The Curators and the Curated,” featuring an all-star panel with David Carr, the curmudgeonly New York Times media critic, Mia Quagliarello, content curator for digital magazine app Flipboard, Max Linsky, co-founder of longform.org, Maria Popova, a blogger, and Noah Brier, co-founder of brand curation tool Percolate.

Although the panelists failed to see eye to eye on the monetization question (Carr: “I’m so glad you’re all here to repackage and repurpose me. By the way, that’s how I eat!”), they agreed that content should be judged on relevance rather than timeliness.

Popova decried what she called the “newsification of the web,” while Carr lamented “the tyranny of the new.” Lansky insited that “new stories and old stories get clicked on the same amount” and claimed that his site experienced no decrease in traffic when they scaled back the number of daily posts (although this wasn’t mentioned in the panel, that squares with Salon’s recent revelation that the online magazine’s traffic actually increased after they committed to posting less, but better, content).

SX-Men: Gawker vs. Slate

The old and new paradigms of web publishing came head-to-head in the form of two simultaneous sessions Sunday morning (I managed to catch about half of each, running from the Austin Convention Centre to the Hilton next door).

The first session was a live Q&A with Nick Denton, the founder of mega-popular blog network Gawker Media. Denton, who doesn’t so much court controversy as seduce it, defended Gawker’s gossipy, nouveau yellow style of journalism, summing up Gawker’s philosophy as “don’t consider too much before you put it down on the page.”

Prompted by interviewer Anil Dash to reveal the contents of a voice message by Brian Williams (Denton recently alienated the veteran news anchor by publishing a snarky email Williams had sent him), Denton joked, “I’m not getting page views out of this so what’s the point?” Which sums up Gawker’s editorial mandate pretty neatly.

Dr. X and Magneto playing Chess in X-Men film

The second session featured David Plotz, the editor of online magazine Slate, in conversation with Evan Ratliff, a contributor to Wired magazine and the editor of mobile publishing platform The Atavist.

As Plotz explained in a Sparksheet Q&A last year, Slate sees itself as a bastion of long-form journalism on the web and encourages staffers to spend months reporting on pet projects that manifest themselves as multi-part, print magazine-length pieces.

The session was dubbed “140 Characters vs. 14,000” words, but Plotz said that “it would be a mistake to think of social media as the enemy of long-form.” On the contrary, Plotz argued that by satiating our thirst for quick news and pithy headlines, Twitter was “driving out” what he called “commodity news” and “aggregation journalism” (Plotz didn’t say where Slate’s own news aggregation site, The Slatest, fits in to all of this).

Although Plotz didn’t call out Gawker by name, my guess is that he would put Denton’s content in the latter category. As I tweeted during the session (in a geeky nod to X-Men), Denton and Plotz are sort of like the Magneto and Professor X of web journalism, two very different sides of the same coin. Only time will tell whose vision for the future of web content will win. But I guess it’s pretty clear which one we’re rooting for.

Jeff Jarvis speaking about his latest book, "Public Parts." Image by the American Library Association, via Flickr

Professor, media consultant, prolific blogger, social media advocate and public speaker. It’s safe to say that Jeff Jarvis wears many hats.

This February, the acclaimed internet intellectual came to McGill University in Montreal to speak about internet privacy, an area he has been thinking a lot about lately.

The talk, Protecting our Tools of Publicness, summarized the major points from his recently published book, Private Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live.

An ardent defender of an open internet, Jarvis spoke about his worry that government regulation could stifle the web’s potential to improve our lives. As he explained: “We need to protect our great tool of publicness because we don’t know what it is yet.”

Even the terms “public” and “private” mean different things in the internet age, said Jarvis. This, in part, is because the web is changing the way we share information. But as Jarvis suggested, government regulations don’t reflect this shift.

He explained that we’re moving in the direction of complete transparency, so fighting to limit the ways information is shared is akin to sticking tires on a horse-drawn carriage. Society has moved on.

Here comes the revolution

Offering Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press as an analogy to enforce his argument, Jarvis explained that thanks to Gutenberg a lot more people became literate and a lot of political fallout happened as a result.

Sure there was bloodshed, but as the story goes, the printing press also gave rise to the middle class, public education, and unprecedented cultural self-awareness.

But no one really appreciated the impact of the invention until much later – at least one hundred years later.

Fast forward five centuries and here we are, at the cusp of another information revolution, said Jarvis.

As he explained, where once there were clusters of experts who wrote books on highly specialized topics, now there’s a network that enables instantaneous information flow. Everything is linked. Knowledge isn’t hierarchical anymore, but is instead remixed, curated and most of all, open to the public.

Throughout the talk, Jarvis emphasized that for better or worse, the internet has transformed the way we think about information, meaning our norms are changing, too.

These changes are pushing us towards a new kind of public, of which Jarvis is a fierce evangelist. “We should be open by default, secret by necessity,” and that’s true for government, corporations and our personal lives.

So instead of trying to limit the technological potential of the web through regulation, Jarvis argued that we should focus on how people and institutions choose to use that information.

For Jarvis, we’re only beginning to appreciate the implications of our changing norms. From governmental transparency (check Sweden’s national Twitter feed for proof) to social corporations, the curtain is being lifted.

Like it or not, he concluded, publicness is the new social norm, and limiting technology through regulation is akin to stopping the presses.

Image from mediabistro.com

You’ve been an art director at Time for the past 15 years, which may have been the most transformative period in journalism ever. How has your role changed over the years? 

Certainly, the digital landscape has dramatically changed our industry over the past few years. It’s an exciting transformation that shifts virtually every day and gives visual journalists an entirely new set of tools with which to tell their stories.

Fortunately, what hasn’t changed is the importance of clear, concise and impactful storytelling. Time’s founders set out to do just that more than 80 years ago and it continues to be our mission today, no matter how our content is delivered to our millions of weekly readers.

Time was one of the first magazines to launch on the iPad in 2010. Do you have the same designers working on the print and digital editions?

I’m proud of the fact that the same art directors who produce the weekly print newsmagazine also design Time’s multiple tablet editions. So as they’re conceiving layouts for the magazine, they’re also thinking about how those layouts will translate to the tablets. And they’re working with our photography and video editors to integrate multimedia content.

Time magazine as viewed on iPad

The shiny new thing in the web design world these days is responsive design. Do you see Time moving in a direction where, instead of building a bespoke app for each platform, you have one responsively-designed website that works on all screens?

What’s great about Time is its openness to smarter ways of producing and delivering our content. Responsive design is relatively new and we’re certainly testing it in theory to see whether it makes sense in our current workflow.

You may be the only person ever who has made the jump from sportswriter to Design Director.* What has your background taught you about the relationship between content and design?

Ironically, I tend to view them as the same. In both cases, the challenge is to take the reader through a story – whether as a college basketball and PGA Tour beat writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or as an art director involved in some of the biggest news events of the past decade. It’s all about the story – whether written or designed.

I spent more than 10 years as a writer, so I still tend to approach each story from that perspective, even though my primary focus is to make it visually appealing for the reader.

Time is famous for its iconic and sometimes controversial covers, with their striking portraits and distinctive red borders. But how important is the cover of a magazine in an age where content is often consumed out of context?

It’s even more important now. It’s no surprise that our lives are completely bombarded with information clutter every second of the day. When a brand I trust can sift through that immense amount of information and deliver it to me in virtually any form I want, it’s refreshing.

When you strip all that noise away and discover a place that makes you smarter, it’s invaluable. That’s what Time and the red border is for me.

You’ve art directed more than 150 Time covers, including the 9/11 anniversary issue, the last two Person of the Year covers and the deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Steve Jobs. But a magazine cover is the product of both design and editorial decision-making. Can you give us a window into this delicate process of collaboration?

That’s the fun part! The cover of Time, as you would imagine, is an extremely collaborative process with everyone given a chance to have their opinion heard.
We do some advance planning, particularly on non-news cover stories, but most weeks the process kicks into high gear on Tuesday (we close the cover Wednesday afternoon). It’s not uncommon to have a dozen or more concepts to choose from each week.

In addition to your print, iPad and international editions, Time has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr. How do you maintain a consistent brand across these different platforms, some of which are more customizable than others?

Actually, these sites are more customizable than you think. You may not be able to change the designs of each one, but that’s not what’s really important here.

The customization comes in the curation. Each social network that Time joins will reach a different set of readers. (We are on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr, but we’re also on Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest.)

Our Facebook following is quite international compared with our other social followings. We post more foreign pieces than we would on Pinterest, which caters more to women in the U.S. We’re able to embody Time on all of these networks because the brand is so versatile.

D.W. Pine will be speaking at the 2012 Custom Content Conference, which takes place March 21-23 in Washington D.C. Sparksheet readers are entitled  to the member rate discount by registering with promo code “sparkDC” 

*Editor’s note: I stand corrected. Writing on the American Copy Editors Society blog, Charles Apple points out that are actually a lot of journalists who have made the transition from sportswriter to designer. Thanks, Charles. Feel free to continue calling me out on “dumb comments”! 

Sharp-eyed Sparksheet readers may recognize the cloned feline in our latest Feature Article “cover image” as Maneki Neko, the “beckoning cat” whose ceramic likeness is seen in restaurants and shops around the world. They may also be wondering why we used a Japanese icon to illustrate a story about China’s copycat brands.

It turns out that the so-called “lucky cat” is frequently mistaken as being Chinese in origin due to its popularity in Chinese communities. But, of course, we’re worldly enough at Sparksheet to know a Japanese cat when we see it. In fact, our adoption of Maneki Neko for this story was no accident at all. Here’s the story behind the cover image, from the mouth of Sparksheet Creative Director Charles Lim, who created it:

So when we first take a look at illustrating a Feature Article, it’s important to have some idea or concept before attempting a visual execution. Pushing pixels around without any solid idea often results in the ultimate shame: banality.

For this piece, we looked at the word “copycat,” and eventually honed in on the Lucky Cat (Maneki Neko). Yes, we were aware that the cat’s origin is Japanese, but it made sense within the context of counterfeit brands, and how Chinese communities adopted the sculpture to the point where it’s frequently mistaken as the original. We turned the cat into a repeating background, and gradually degraded the quality and alignment until it looked like a bad photocopy.

Choosing a suitable type is always informed by the article’s content, so in this case we used a trendy condensed Franklin and used its industrial-ness to contrast with the humanity of the Pigeon font underneath. To reinforce the copycat theme even more, we offset the type using a slighly greenish neon yellow and a warm magenta, which vaguely recall China’s national colours – but not quite.

Check out the article: Shenzhai: China’s Brand Copycats.

Corner of Huaihai and Liulin, Shanghai. Image by beltzner, via Flickr

“All war is based on deception.”

— Sun Tzu

After spending several days in the small towns of Liaoning, a province in China’s northeast, I was looking forward to my night at the Shenyang Marriott. The wide main street that snaked through the city was lined with Chanel, Versace, Gucci and Louis Vuitton boutiques. Our taxi drove past the Kempinski, the Sheraton and pulled into a glittering, golden atrium. My eyes fell upon a brass plaque: It said ‘Welcome to The Marvelot.’

It was nearly 10 p.m. and I was hungry. I dialed room service. Practically nothing on the menu was available at that hour. I went down to find the waiters at the Chinese restaurant cleaning up after what appeared to be a lavish banquet. It took them nearly 90 minutes to present a simple pasta meal; the room service boy was trailed by a sheepish manager with a basket of fruit. I was left marveling at a lot of deceit.

Marvelot Hotel, Shenyang

As the number of millionaires in China’s second and third tier cities grows faster than in the top tier cities, they are demanding expensive-looking brands and services, authentic or not.  No wonder local automakers such as Geely are designing cars that make no apologies to resembling the Mercedes-Benz Gullwing. A concierge in a big city hotel would sneer if you drew up in a Geely Gullwing, but not at the Marvelot!

Copycats

Over the last few years, several commentators have written about the Shanzhai (copycat) phenomenon. Shanzhai companies were known to target less developed areas and tier three and tier four cities with mobile phones called Nokir, Samsing and Anycat, and food brands like Haagon-Buzs, Pizza Huh and Buckstar Coffee.

Since major companies ignored these less developed regions, the Shanzhai companies faced a strong demand for their products. Lower price levels, regionalized features, an in-depth understanding of local markets and a higher responsiveness to evolving markets helped the Shanzhai companies gain market share and exploit growth potential.

Image by Caveman Chuck Coker, via Flickr

The result: a market shakeout. In the initial stages, Shanzhai operators attempted to take their products online, hoping that consumers, especially those living in smaller cities, would be gullible in the new shopping environment. They were disappointed. Eagle-eyed buyers complained, compelling Taobao, China’s largest online retail platform, to find ways of cracking down on vendors selling fakes.

Now, there are far fewer fly-by-night operators than before. But those who dreamed and planned big ­have survived. It’s a policy that seems to work for all businesses in China, and the deceivers are no different.

The Marvelot Hotel is a great example of reaching high. The National Games, to be held in Shenyang in 2012, has chosen the Marvelot as its official hotel, serving as a badge of honour assurance for most guests (barring me, of course). Any slip-ups in service could be excused, blamed on a stray staff member. This hotel had the government’s support, after all.

A visit to Fashion Town

Through the following days of my stay in Shenyang, I realized that the brand imitators in second-tier Chinese cities had taken their game to a whole new level. Three years ago, they were fly-by-night operators happy making copies of Olay cream and calling it Oily, imitating Avon and calling it Avoid. But now, there was a “Hiyatt Boutique Hotel” rising 20 floors high.

Image from myopera.com

The next day, I visited 0101 Fashion Town in the heart of the city. Shop owners and salespeople asked us not to take pictures (but I surreptitiously did). It was easy to understand why. I could see brands like S-Squared (a knock-off of D-Squared). The audacity of “Jack Walk” was stunning – they had a store right next to Jack Jones.

There were Rabex watches, and they weren’t cheap. Rosht and Manjaz chronographs proclaimed their Swiss origins, while Ederbo, an apparel brand, was all about ‘England Style’ since 1901. I’ve known Horacio Pagani as a specialty Italian automaker, but it was news to me (as I’m sure it would be to him) that he had diversified into menswear in China.

In the central square a vendor sold knock-off iPod shuffles for 30 kuai (less than $5). I kept my eyes peeled for a Dolce & Banana store – I had seen a picture, but couldn’t find it.

Brand authenticity and consumer education

In the end, the Chinese brand copycat phenomenon is a lesson in brand authenticity. In emerging markets like China, consumers are looking for greater meaning and sincerity from the brands they choose.

This search is fuelled by a desire to connect with things that feel safe, certain and unambiguous. At its heart, authenticity is about practicing what you preach; being totally clear about who you are and what you do best.

Established brands must make the effort of educating lower tier Chinese consumers about the true meaning of brand authenticiy. For a brand like Hermes, that would mean thinking about creating experience zones; showing consumers the craftsmanship of a bag, not just on Shanghai’s glitzy Huaihai Road, but also in a humble Shaoxing or Shenyang shopping mall.

Editor’s Note: Yes, we know the ”beckoning cat” in the image up top is actually Japanese in origin. Get the back story on The Sparkbeat.

On its surface, last week’s inaugural Dx3 event was a coming-out-party for Canada’s thriving internet-based industries. But it turned out to be more of a fond farewell to digital itself.

Yes, you read that right, and no, we’re not about to turn in our laptops and fire up the printing press. I’m not saying that digital is dead – far from it ­– but in 2012 we may have finally reached the point where digital is no longer the next big thing, the bleeding edge or the Great Disrupter. Digital is the new status quo.

Plastic Mobile had more than eye candy at its booth

So long, silo

The most persistent (and counterintuitive) lesson of Dx3 was that digital no longer lives in a department or silo of its own. Whether they were referring to social media, web publishing or online retail, speaker after speaker delivered a version of this message.

In a session called “Selling Social to the C–suite” that outlined the worldview of the current generation of top-level executives (from their college days in the ‘70s, through the dot-com era and the 2008 financial crisis), Forzani’s Duncan Fulton explained (paraphrasing Facebook’s Steve Irvine) that “if it’s not social in real life, it’s not going to be social online.”

Similarly, in his second-day keynote, Retail Prophet Doug Stephens noted that “we’re not going to focus on technology for technology’s sake.” Meanwhile, in a discussion about “Social CRM” (or how brands are leveraging social media in customer relations) ­Twist Image President and digital thought leader Mitch Joel explained that “social CRM is just CRM.” In other words, social is the new black (which also happens to be the only colour Mitch wears).

Or as our colleague and columnist Arjun Basu put it (in his session with Sparksheet publisher Raymond Girard), “content is platform agnostic.” It doesn’t really matter if a product, strategy or piece of content is digital or not. As long as it works.

TV host Amber Mac conducted interviews on the trade show floor

Welcome to the real world

Digital has leaped out of its silo, and it’s landed in the real world.

In his retail keynote Doug Stephens argued that the line between the online and out-of-home worlds are becoming obsolete as Facebook becomes the world’s biggest marketplace, and everything from our fridges to our washing machines are connected to the internet (platform inter-connectivity was also a major trend at this year’s International CES, as we reported earlier this month).

Stephens used the much-YouTubed example of supermarket chain Tesco’s virtual store in a South Korean subway station as evidence that “we’re on the cusp of a digital landgrab” and that brands both online and offline should “start thinking about brick and mortar as a media point.”

Louis Vitton gets creative with QR codes

Place still matters

So it’s clear that the digital and real worlds are converging, but that doesn’t mean the planet is one big monolithic market. On the contrary, Dx3 demonstrated that place is as important than ever.

In a session on Jaguar’s success with location marketing, the company’s Canadian marketing manager explained how the venerable British car brand used mobile apps, QR codes and highly-targeted airport ads to cultivate a new generation of drivers.

Another international brand with location-specific lessons at Dx3 was Yelp, whose brand ambassador, Crystal Henrickson, offered session-goers lessons on how brands can engage customers – and respond to negative reviews – on the popular user review platform (“different audiences mean different cultures”).

But once again, when we talk about “place,” we’re not just talking about geographic locations.  In a session called “Is your brand game?” Patrick Scissons of Grey Canada explained how video game makers (whose audiences can range in the 15 million range – see “Call of Duty”) are monetizing through in-game billboards and virtual goods.

Digital marketing agency BNOTIONS held an app development battle...in a wrestling ring

The old media are new

This relates to our first lesson, the silo thing. Digital isn’t just about so-called “new media.” It affects all media. Doug Stephens talked about how TV is being “brought back into the loop” in the retail world. For instance, some providers are partnering with eBay to recommend products related to the TV shows people watch.

The Spafax guys talked about how brands like Benetton, John Deere and Michelin continue to leverage print in their content marketing efforts. And speaking of content, Dale Hooper of Rogers Media explained how the telecom giant uses its various print, online and broadcast channels to deliver audiences to advertisers.

As he put it, “it’s not an intersection between commerce and content. It’s a traffic circle.”

Another example of QR codes that are "more than a footnote," as one presenter put it

We’re only human

Here at Sparksheet we’ve been talking about the humanization of brands for years. At Dx3, this lesson related to everything from hospitality, to retail to Twitter.

In his social CRM session, Mitch Joel revealed how he once asked his favourite Toronto hotel for an extension cord so he could plug in his phone at night. They’ve had one waiting in his room at check-in every time since. Is it really so hard for hotel brands to keep track of their customers’ preferences?

Ultimately, the human element was what made this maiden event such a success. At its most basic level, Dx3 was all about getting people together for two days to meet, learn and do business face to face. It turns out digital is even more powerful in person.

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy interviews Radian6 Marketing Director Jon McGinley

Sparksheet is Dx3 Canada’s official content partner. As part of our Sparksheet Events content services we launched a micro-magazine called the Dx3 Digest filled with original content about digital marketing, advertising and retail in Canada. Check it out at dx3.sparksheet.com

Update: Check out our Sparksheet review of Dx3, Digital De-Siloed: Five Lessons from Dx3 Canada 2012, plus photo roundups from Day 1 and Day 2 on the Dx3 Digest.

The Sparksheet team is heading to Toronto this week for Dx3 Canada, the first-annual trade show and conference about Canadian digital marketing, advertising and retail. The event takes place on Wednesday and Thursday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

As Dx3’s official content partner, we launched a special micro-magazine – the Dx3 Digest – filled with original think pieces and Q&As with top execs at Canadian brands like Roots, The Bay, Freshbooks and Casale Media.

Sparksheet will also have its very own booth on the trade show floor where you’ll find us shooting video interviews and promoting our Sparksheet Events content services. We’ll also be covering the full slate of awesome Dx3 conference sessions, which were expertly curated by our good friend Ron Tite.

The trade show floor is open to all so if you’re in the neighbourhood make sure to stop by and say hello (you can register for free online).

Sparksheet readers are also entitled to a discount on Dx3 sessions: Use promo code  “dx3sparksheet” when you sign up.

For topic-by-topic breakdowns of can’t miss sessions, check out our Dx3 Session Guides.

And to get to know Dx3’s big name exhibitors, speakers and stakeholders before the show, visit dx3.sparksheet.com

Fast-forward several years later to 2007.

Who Has The Biggest Brain? was the biggest thing to hit Facebook since the newsfeed, so I decided to get in on the action. Little did I know that my mathematical ineptitude would come back to haunt me as a result.

Congratulations! You have the same brain size as a monkey! Would you like to share this information with your friends?

Um, no thanks.

My mathematical incompetence aside, social games like Playfish’s Who Has The Biggest Brain?, and Zynga’s FarmVille are revolutionizing the way people spend their time online. Instead of endlessly stalking friends or ex-lovers, people have turned to games to kill time ­– and maybe even solve a problem or two – while on their favourite social network. And brands of all stripes are starting to play along.

Last year the social gaming industry passed the $1 billion dollar mark, fueled largely by brands integrating social games into their marketing strategies. From in-game advertisements to entire games built around name-brand products, engagement through games takes on multiple forms and presents unique opportunities for marketers – on and off the computer.

Layers of integration

Brands that want to get into the gaming – er, game – need to decide on a level of integration.

Light brand integration involves the brand incorporating advertisements, or even selling branded items, within a pre-existing social game for a limited amount of time. This is most popular among Zynga’s bevy of Facebook games, from FarmVille to FrontierVille.

For example, to promote its recent DVD release last summer, the folks behind The Lincoln Lawyer secured a sponsored link on FarmVille. When the link was clicked, a pop-up window would appear with the film’s trailer playing above, along with three simple questions. By participating in the quick click-through survey, players were rewarded with two free units of “Farm Cash,” FarmVille’s virtual currency.

Medium integration is the least common, but is quickly gaining footing among marketers and game developers. This method involves brand promotion within existing games, generally through a targeted mission that deviates from the normal course of play.

These short-lived campaigns tend to coincide with the release of a film, DVD, or recording album.

Last year gamers were challenged to find Rango through a quest in Zynga’s FrontierVille, promoting the eponymous animated film in the days before its theatrical release.

Before the release of her latest album Born This Way, Lady Gaga teamed up with Zynga for GagaVille – a themed game designed to promote the album. Canadian crooner Michael Buble also showed up in CityVille around Christmas, offering players exclusive access to his new music video.

Deep brand integration presents the biggest gamble for marketers. Developing a full branded game is a major investment, and there is little guarantee of success. These games can be found through Facebook advertisements, and even traditional media like TV and magazines. They generally live on their own branded micro-sites.

One branded game that took the web by storm is Magnum Ice Cream’s Pleasure Hunt. In this interactive game, the player controls the “Magnum Woman” as she collects candies around the web.

On her journey Magnum Woman visits a number of brand “websites,” including Dove, Saab and Samsung, though these frames are actually flawless mockups of the real sites. The idea is to show that the Internet is full of pleasures to be discovered. Pleasure Hunt is truly deep brand integration at its finest.

Real-life gaming

Some brands are drawing users away from their computers by creating challenges that require real-world participation.

Facilitating these endeavors are popular apps such as Foursquare and SCVNGR that are bridging the online and offline worlds by applying game mechanics to their social location-based platforms, otherwise known as gamification.

Last March Foursquare revamped its popular check-in app, introducing a more extensive points system aimed at “putting some fun back into the game element of the service” by creating better stakes for active users.

Now, players and merchants alike are cashing in on the game by offering discounts and promotions to users who frequently check-in at their locations, leave favourable comments, or drive traffic through their social networks.

While Foursquare is not exclusively for game play (it is first and foremost a social networking platform and crowd-sourced review service), SCVNGR is “a game about doing challenges at places,” according to the app’s website.

Players can earn points towards online and real-life rewards – that is, badges and discounts – by participating in photo and check-in challenges at SCVGNR-registered businesses and institutions, such as restaurants, stores and museums.

For its Happiness in Numbers game, Coca-Cola teamed up with SCVNGR to engage teens through mobile-based challenges at various sponsored locations – malls, amusement parks, and concert venues – around the United States. Players can compete in photo-taking and check-in contests to earn points towards free gift cards and Coca-Cola swag.

Also flexing its geo-location software muscle is Nike with its Tag game feature for the NIKE+ GPS iPhone app. From the app’s home screen, runners can invite friends via email or through their social networks to join them in this high-tech version of the schoolyard favourite.

Each willing participant must run (with their iPhone in tow) within three days of the invitation to avoid being “it.” Through GPS tracking, ‘it’ is determined by who ran the slowest, the shortest distance, or came in last out of the pack.

Gaming for good

Some brands have taken the cause marketing approach by investing in branded games that support charitable organizations.

Since 2008, GamesThatGive has created custom, for-charity Facebook games for major brands, including Pepsi, Quaker and MasterCard.

Khaki kingpin, Dockers, enlisted GamesThatGive to develop a Facebook game benefitting Respect!, an anti-violence organization. For every minute played, Dockers donates up to 10 cents to the cause. To incentivize players, a message reading “Reach level 3 and you’ll receive a special offer” appears when you first start the game. There is also a prompt for players to invite friends and share their scores – a move that increases both brand exposure and money raised.

While it’s still early days for social gaming, 2011 was an undisputed gold rush for the industry. As applications for social gaming continue to expand – from improving math skills to selling albums – no matter the level and means of integration, brands should take the whole gaming game seriously. Social gaming is more than a buzzword; it’s a business opportunity.

The CBC’s audience is incredibly diverse. How do you strike the right tone so that your content speaks to everyone from tech geeks to my Luddite grandma?

One of the things we learned early on about doing an audio show on technology is that focusing on just tech can make the show both difficult to explain and boring. So we really try to recess the nuts and bolts of it and focus on the human dimension. I think that’s part of what allows us to speak to those two communities.

We’ve also tried to develop things like our Twitter and online presence as a focus for people who want to engage more deeply with those questions. On Twitter, we can link to more material, answer more questions and participate in more of a dialogue with community members that may be into tech.

We can also facilitate conversations where there are no time constraints, so the conversation can get as woolly or as technical as people want, whereas on the air, we have a tight constraint of an hour a week.

The other thing we do is post almost all of our full-length interviews online. So we try to have a really tight and narrow conversation that can live on the audio version of the show, and then the conversation can get longer, more in-depth and more technical in the longer form.

You’ve mentioned having a love-hate relationship with technology and with what you call “armchair sociology” – how so?

I’ve been interested in technology for a long time; I even did my master’s degree in issues around the philosophy of technology.

But what I often find is missing is critical discussion. It’s an area that so routinely devolves into technophobes and technophiles, or technology determinist versus technology neutralists, whereas I think the reality is that it’s much more nuanced.

There are also things I love. I love playing with new software, I love looking into how new technologies have historically been introduced into societies and I love learning about the impacts they’ve had. But I often feel like our thoughts on the daily impacts of technologies are totally starry eyed.

The hate really comes from this idea that it doesn’t need to be discussed in a political way, because it really does. Right now, the pace at which technology is evolving is clearly outstripping our political and legal institutions’ ability to address [its impact]. Look at how difficult it’s been to even get any kind of discussion going on about copyright issues.

At Spark, you talk about everything from privacy, to publishing, to education, to copyrights, to robots. Are there subjects that come up again and again?

Every season seems to have a subject that always comes back. The first season, we always ended up talking about the virtual meeting the real, the blurring between online and offline. The difference between artificial and human intelligence and our human relationship to artificial intelligence and robots also comes up a lot.

We’ve done a few stories that have had to do with grieving and online communities, and they’ve provoked a lot of reactions. I think those stories aren’t covered too often because they kind of seem antithetical to each other in the same way that technology and spirituality do.

But they really aren’t. I actually think there are ways in which they can be paired really well.

You recently did a show about “gamification,” which has become quite the buzzword lately.  Do you think it’s just hype or are we seeing game mechanics playing a bigger role in how everything from content to retail gets monetized these days?

There’s already a bit of pushback on the term, but I do think that it’s a real thing, and that game mechanics are way too powerful. It actually kind of scares me.

There’s something very Skinner box about it and ethically, it has the potential to be really dubious. I sometimes create game mechanics to try to motivate myself or break a bad habit, and it can definitely be effective, and I do think we’re going to see it spread out to more and more areas. But it’s not a trend I’m super comfortable with.

You’ve been at the CBC since the 1990s. How do you think the station’s approach to digital content has changed since you started there?

I think that the CBC is focusing a lot right now on the importance of getting content into people’s hands however they want it. Even as a listener, I’m aware of how that’s changing things.

For example, there’s more community-based content in areas like the news, where I think it would have been pretty unheard of five or 10 years ago. But I don’t think I have a good enough sense of what the CBC is generally doing to really speak to that one.

How would you say the Spark community has evolved over the last four years?

It’s certainly changed in the sense that the practice of engaging with social media has really taken off. When we went on the air, things like Twitter were pretty fringy and geeky – most people just weren’t engaged in content creation. But I think that using things like Facebook got people used to the idea of posting their thoughts about stuff.

Now, we have a Twitter community made up of casual CBC fans who probably follow Spark along with a ton of other CBC shows. We also have those who are very passionate, very intensely focused, and another big chunk of people who just dip in and dip out whenever something strikes their interest.

Getting a handle on your community and understanding how you can better serve their needs is a big challenge for any kind of content creator today.

Would you say the show has changed as well?

The show has changed in that the way we even think of “the show” is changing.

I think that we’ve moved in a direction where it really becomes a conversation that then becomes distilled into this end product.

A big part of that comes from the sense that we have an ongoing relationship with the broader Spark community.

On behalf of the Sparksheet team, a heartfelt thank you to all our readers, contributors, advocates and friends for your support and engagement over the past year.

2011 was the year that Sparksheet evolved from an upstart marketing blog to a truly multiplatform magazine and it couldn’t have happened without your think pieces, Q&As, columns, comments and (of course) likes, tweets and shares.

So thanks again for your support and we’ll see you in the new year!

In 2007 she launched AdBroad, an AdAge Power 150 blog covering her corner of the advertising industry. Then, at SXSW 2009, she coined the term “brand fiction” to describe her unique hybrid of branded entertainment and fan fiction and launched a boutique content agency, Brand Fiction Factory, shortly thereafter.

The idea behind brand fiction is to give brands a life of their own on social media channels, growing the brands’ mythology along with their number of followers.

Her unofficial, Webby award-winning @bettydraper Twitter feed tops out at 31,000 followers, illuminating the inner life of the fictional 1960s housewife in AMC’s Mad Men.

Other Mad Men characters have Twitter profiles as well (some voiced by Ross, some by other fans), creating an ongoing conversation that draws on the show’s plotlines. This develops their personalities while giving new and die-hard fans something to chew on between episodes.

But “Mad Men on Twitter” extends beyond Twitter. Klein Ross and her cohorts even put together a Twepisode titled “Don takes Sally to the Beatles” that imagines how the characters in Mad Men would have experienced the legendary Beatles concert at Shea stadium if Twitter were around in 1965. There’s also a blog, Welcome to the Drapers. (Mad Men’s creator, Matt Weiner, and AMC have given their blessings but declined to officially endorse the project.)

During this year’s StoryWorld Conference in San Francisco, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Helen Klein Ross, who explained what brand managers and TV producers stand to gain by bringing some fiction (and fun) to their brands.

Twelve months ago American Muslims were fired up with optimism that the moment had come for U.S. brands to embrace them.

In a struggling market, 7 million Muslim consumers with an estimated spending power of more than $170 billion seemed to have come of age at the very moment when brands were in greater need than ever of new growth opportunities.

But 12 months later brands still appear ambivalent despite the open arms with which Muslim consumers are inviting them in. So why are brands hesitant to commit themselves to serving this powerful demographic?

It’s been a tumultuous year. The controversy over the mis-named “Ground Zero” mosque grabbed headlines around the world. Media-baiting Pastor Jones threatened to burn the Qur’an. Osama Bin Laden was killed. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 came and went.

And then the Arab Spring turned the Middle East upside down, igniting fears that Islamic governments with hostilities toward the West might sweep to power.

With this political backdrop you can hardly blame brands for being nervous about speaking publicly to Muslims and welcoming them into the bosom of their marketing strategy.

Friends in need

Despite the events of the past year, American Muslims continue to remain optimistic about their place in American society.

In a Gallup poll released in August of this year 60 percent of American Muslims said they are “thriving.” Dalia Mogahed, the director of the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center which published the report, added that Muslims “feel a greater sense of belonging in their country” than they did in 2008.

What this means is that brands need to demonstrate commitment to the idea that that the Muslim consumer market is valuable. Muslim consumers recognize the political climate within which brands are operating, and appreciate them sticking their necks out. The response is loyalty, pride and collective endorsement. Friends in a time of need are not forgotten.

All-American Muslim

The "Happy Eid Al-Adha" image on a Best Buy flyer sparked controversy, but ultimately won customers. Image courtesy of TechCrunch

Last year, U.S. consumer electronics retailer Best Buy prompted a backlash when it referenced the Muslim festival of Eid in a holiday flyer. Best Buy stood by its decision, winning the support of Muslim consumers in the process.

This year’s marketing campaign by health food supermarket chain Whole Foods to promote Saffron Road halal foods during the month of Ramadan also faced criticism. They too held firm, sales of Saffron Road products went up 300 percent, and Whole Foods acquired a new segment of customers.

Just last month, TV channel TLC began airing an eight-part series called All-American Muslim, which follows the lives of five American Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan. The pilot episode pulled the second-highest ratings of the station’s reality TV shows, beaten only by Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

Predictably, the show has stirred controversy but TLC has kept it on the air and it continues to gain ratings. From a brand perspective this kind of courage is proof that addressing Muslims can and does pay off, and that mainstream America is ready and willing to watch.

But other Muslim-centric content has fallen foul of the political climate. A new superhero cartoon series called The 99, based on the Islamic idea of God having 99 attributes, was bought by a mainstream American channel. With the inflamed political backdrop, the channel has shelved it indefinitely. This is a case where courage is much needed.

From kosher to halal

There is great precedent for American brands reaching out to segments that are part of the fabric of American life, even in the face of objections. In 1911, Procter & Gamble was the first company to advertise that its vegetable shortening product, Crisco, was kosher.

Saffron Road halal product

In 1915 the New York State Legislature enacted the United States’ first Kosher Food Law, which was to serve as a model for all subsequent kosher food legislation. This law has been challenged again and again by those who claim it is unconstitutional, but it has stood the test of time.

The U.S. kosher market has grown today to an estimated $12.5 billion, but only 25 percent of kosher consumers are actually observant Jews. Other consumers believe simply that kosher food is healthier. Muslims believe that halal food will have wider appeal than its core target Muslim consumer for similar reasons.

Courage and rewards

The lesson from these examples is that courage and investment in communities pay off. Muslims will respect and show loyalty to brands that support them in the public space. They are not asking for political or media support. In fact they want brands to avoid the political discourse and treat them as mainstream consumers with mainstream needs.

The events of the last year indicate that companies will need to demonstrate courage in embracing this strategy. The good news is that Muslim consumers recognize this and the reward from them is loyalty and public devotion.

It may seem spurious to place a car company among the legion of activists and non-profits that have driven the decades-old environmental movement, but judging by Prius’ third generation advertising campaign, Toyota wouldn’t protest if we did.

Toyota has been working since 1997 to situate itself on the leading edge of corporate environmental reform – to achieve “harmony between man, nature and machine,” as the Prius tagline goes.

In 1997 Toyota made a bet. The car company produced a hybrid vehicle when the market wasn’t ready. Fourteen years later it has paid off: The Prius is the world’s bestselling hybrid and Toyota topped this year’s list of Interbrand’s Best Global Green Brands.

While numerous multinationals have orchestrated similar brand reputations, few can boast of marketing green products before consumers were interested.

But what makes the Prius story remarkable is the message that dwells in the subtext:

With today’s proliferation of green marketing and eco-friendly products, brands aren’t just reacting to the environmental movement – they’re driving it.

Green marketing or greenwashing?

As advertising agencies and the brands they represent tune in to demands for social and environmental responsibility, green jobs, green products, and green revenue are increasing – even as what “green” actually means is up for debate.

The term “greenwashing,” coined in 1986 by environmentalist Jay Westervelt, refers to advertising claims that deliberately mislead consumers about a brand’s environmental track record.

While its prevalence is unmistakable and a bevy of guidelines and green certifications exist, the line between dubious greenwashing and legitimate eco-marketing remains blurry.

Some labels are more legitimate than others. The middle row is made up of unverified eco-labels; the ones in the bottom and top rows are official.

The jury is also out on whether greenwashing actually works. An Ipsos study found that consumers are increasingly sceptical of self-proclaimed green brands. Other reports, however, indicate that people generally think favourably of brands advertised as green and can’t distinguish between FTC-approved advertisements and blatant greenwash.

Even if brands cross the greenwash threshold, some experts argue that eco-marketing forces accountability. Writing in Grist magazine, Auden Schendler, VP of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, suggested that “[p]ainting a business green inevitably steers it toward improved practices.”

True or not, it’s clear that green marketing has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, thanks in part to some unexpected advocates.

From picket lines to product lines

The Body Shop makes extensive use of eco-marketing

In a 2005 article in Ethics & the Environment, sociologist Anne Marie Todd argued that consumers have begun to care about environmental issues in part because of marketing campaigns.

Call it a kind of corporate environmental education: As more brands adopt environmentalism, according to Todd, so too do consumers.

The article zeroes in on three personal hygiene brands: Tom’s of Maine, Burt’s Bees, and the Body Shop. These brands have wholeheartedly embraced an “environmental aesthetic” (both in terms of how the products are manufactured and how they’re marketed) that locates the value of nature in its beauty.

The products are packaged with recycled materials and are made of organic ingredients. So, if we value the environment for its beauty and biodiversity, and if a product’s brand and production reflect those values, then we in turn align ourselves with that environmental ethic when we sign on as customers.

As Todd explains, consumers are encouraged “to make the connection between ethics of production and the aesthetics of the… products, which fosters an understanding of the relationship between consumer choices and environmental beauty.”

Essentially, Todd argues that we’re learning about environmental stewardship through our toiletry kit.

Customer demand or corporate reform?

So here’s the chicken-and-egg question: Are brands teaching consumers to care about the environment, or are consumers demanding environmental responsibility, pushing brands toward green marketing at best and greenwashing at worst?

During the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer of the UN climate effort argued that governments can’t force restrictions and costs on their citizens when citizens aren’t demanding them.

Toyota Prius

As summarized in Harvard Business Review, Boer argued that business leaders should “spend more time on delivering attractive, low-cost, low-carbon solutions, and less on waiting for some documents to be signed.” In other words, brands should take it upon themselves to inform customers about greener alternatives and make environmentalism matter to them.

HBR contributor Nicholas Eisenberger suggests that not only is it possible to educate consumers about best environmental practices, but that it makes good business sense to do so. Just ask Toyota.

It always comes back to the polar bears

Toyota isn’t the only brand that has learned the value of creating a market for sustainability.

During the UN conference Coca-Cola and Unilever presented a joint manager’s guide to addressing climate change, emphasizing that the consumer goods sector “has a depth of expertise in understanding consumers and in inspiring them to change their behaviour.”

In practice this means making environmentally friendly products available and then using content to teach customers how to use those products to change their habits (as Unilever did in Turkey with its Cleaner Planet Plan).

One benefit of green marketing is that Unilever, Coke and Toyota can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to raise environmental awareness, unlike most non-profits.

It’s true that perception and performance don’t always align. We need only look as far as Toyota; despite its success with Prius, the company’s fleet-wide fuel efficiency rates have actually dropped since 1985 due to increased truck and SUV sales.

It’s also true that many brands spend more on marketing themselves as green than implementing sustainable practices.

But there’s no denying that the environment matters more to consumers than ever, and if it’s thanks in part to Coke’s cuddly polar bear ads, maybe that’s even better than the real thing.

I’ve been working in this digital storytelling industry for over 15 years now so in my perspective, it means the same thing it did 15 years ago. It’s just the new word for it. What I like about transmedia is that it’s not about duplicating content; it’s about sticking to the essence of a story and expanding it to different platforms.

Coming from a public broadcaster angle at the BBC [editor’s note: Allimonos left the BBC last month to pursue a career in branded content], where we’re not purely concerned with profit, I see transmedia as the new art form of this century.

You’re known for developing BBC’s “mythology engine.” Can you explain what that is and how it’s being used?

As BBC’s multiplatform drama commissioner, I wanted to create this transmedia repository for everything to do with Doctor Who. The show is about to celebrate it’s 50^th anniversary, and it being the longest running science fiction show in the universe, a huge mythology has been built up around it.

So we constructed this reusable framework that we could apply to Doctor Who and to another iconic program, EastEnders.

Essentially, the mythology engine is a video-rich transmedia Wikipedia for TV shows with great mythologies. What’s great is that there are a few predetermined pathways through the stories, but the audience can still go in and play around like they would on the web.

Are there any stories that don’t work well across platforms?

With the BBC, I was mostly involved in fictional programs and figuring out how to extend them across the web, mobile, IPTV, etc., in a way that would reach millions.

Being public broadcasters, BBC needs to create content for everyone, so we try to avoid the niche. We’ve done a lot of experimental broadcasting but over the last few years, the BBC has been trying to ask, “what are the shows and moments that are really going to capture the attention of the nation in a non-TV format?”

That’s why we focused on Doctor Who as well as EastEnders, which deals with a lot of important social issues through drama.

For EastEnders’ 25^th anniversary, I got together with TV execs to create a spin-off drama, E20. It starts in the main program, where the drama centers around a community of people, and then it moves online for a couple of weeks until the characters move back into the show. So we had to help audiences navigate the content and move from one medium to the next seamlessly.

Was there an interactive element? 

We’ve created a Facebook following and some E20 characters are on Twitter. But it’s hard, because the tweets have to be really high quality and only one of the actors was really good at it.  Unlike the Mad Men characters on Twitter who aren’t associated with the show, this came directly from the actors.

If you’re going to extend a show in any way, you have to figure out what its DNA is, what its essence is as a brand. Then you can carry that over to different platforms and decide if there is anything new to be added to the mix.

With EastEnders we wanted to attract younger viewers and nurture young talent. So we did summer schools with young people, had young people writing the show and rejuvenated the cast.

Any other lessons about what works and what doesn’t from your tenure at the BBC?

A few of the more practical things we learnt were the dos and don’ts of online video. For instance, avoid appointment to view. We experimented with that early on and it never really worked; VOD (videos on demand) is the way people watch videos online.

Another is to acknowledge the medium. The Guild, an amazing Felicia Day series about gamers, is an example of that. Each of the episodes starts with her addressing the audience and camera, then moving into the drama.

I think what it says on a semiotic level is, “we’re not embarrassed of being online. This isn’t lower-production-value content, this is a genuine form in its own sense.”

An additional really good lesson is to avoid leaving multiplatform to the end and to be involved right from the conception stage. I think it’s about orchestrating and architecting an experience for the audience. It’s what you do before, during and after the TV moment and how you bridge the gap for audiences between episodes.

An example of what worked is Being Human, a drama about a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf who choose to share a flat and try to figure out how to live as humans. I was involved with that brand from the conception stage and we came up with a really great formula.

Beforehand, we answered the ‘how the characters came to be’ question by releasing prequels, then we released the show and then we captured the chat that happened around the broadcast through social media.

We also had a blog that went into how the series was made, and then we released the prequel, which was the bridge to the next series. I think that way of pushing the audience along timelines works well.

How do you navigate the various silos (and budgets) that are involved when you’re working across platforms?

There are a lot of dotted lines and different parts of the BBC, so my role is really to cut through the silos as a translator.

I learn and speak the language of the TV commissioners and execs, and then bring mobile, tech and R&D together with the TV partners to make transmedia that works.

I do have a separate budget, but no decision is made without the dotted line being involved, and without bringing the whole business together.

Is transmedia a niche product or can it have mass appeal?

Having worked for a very large broadcaster who, each week, would broadcast to millions of people, I think transmedia has the opportunity to go mainstream and massive.

With Doctor Who, we had four million gaming downloads within weeks, which basically matches what a regular episode would get. With Being Human, half the audience came through heavily marketed TV channels and the other came through our iPlayer and catch-up services.

I think transmedia is a great opportunity because brands really want to have an intimate relationship with their consumers.I’m excited that brands are seriously getting into commissioning content and that there are amazing international collaborative projects breaking through and reaching millions.

However, according to a collaborative study released by The Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism earlier this week, news organizations have yet to maximize Twitter’s potential. Instead, they’re using it as a promotional tool to draw users to their websites.

Researchers analyzed the main and subsidiary Twitter channels of 13 national and local news organizations (broadcast, radio, print, and online) and 13 of the most followed journalists  over the course of one week in February 2011, revealing their (mostly subpar) Twitter habits.

The self-proclaimed first-of-its kind empirical study of Twitter usage found that “news organizations use Twitter in limited ways – primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material.”

93 percent of the tweets included a link back to the outlets’ own websites and the most popular topics on their Twitter feeds mirrored the headlines on their own platforms.

In terms of prompting user responses, of the 13 outlets studied, only 2 percent of the total tweets solicited information from followers, and just 1 percent were retweets from sources outside of their own organizations. The hashtag function was also deployed minimally, with an average use rate of 20 percent.

So what outlet uses Twitter best? Apparently Fox News, despite tweeting a paltry 48 times. That’s small potatoes compared to top tweeter, the Washington Post, which topped out at 664 tweets in the same timeframe.

But when it comes to mastering the Twitterverse it’s not the number of tweets, but the number of followers that counts – and that’s where Fox News is gaining the most ground.

Between February and October 2011, Fox increased its number of followers by 118 percent, the highest of the 13 outlets analyzed in the report.

Fox also happens to use the retweet function most frequently (44 percent of its tweets), is second in its use of hashtags (50 percent of the time), and is most likely to solicit information from its followers (21 percent of the time).

Pew concludes that the mainstream media are treating Twitter as if Web 2.0 hasn’t happened yet. Before 2.0, publishers controlled everything and user engagement was minimal. This, in part, was because organizations didn’t want to lose their audiences.

Now these same outlets let users give feedback easily, exchange content, and find links to other sites; they realize, according Pew, that they have to give users what they want – even if they didn’t generate it.

And so, “it bears watching whether Twitter use for mainstream news organizations evolves in the same way.”

The bottom line: Major media outlets are not engaging with users as much as they could (and should) be. And as Fox News can attest, the more (human) interaction there is between readers and disseminators, the better the chances of Twitter success.

From Sherlock Holmes to Gossip Girl, television has always loved books as source material. But recently it seems like every new cable series is based on a hot novel or literary franchise.

Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead all have their roots in the written word. And most recently, Jonathan Franzen’s masterwork The Corrections has been rumoured to be in development for HBO, with director Noah Baumbach and Anthony Hopkins attached to the project.

Of course, there are deep historical connections between books and television: the popularity of episodic storytelling on TV builds on the tradition of the serialized novel.

But there are a bunch of reasons why books are more popular than ever in TV land.

Fans included

The main reason to adapt a book for television is the fan base – unpopular books rarely go televisual. But it’s not just about numbers.

Having pre-packaged fans means networks get demographic info before the show even airs: they know who will be likely to watch a show based on who’s reading the books.

This makes marketing the series a whole lot easier. You know young women will tune into Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl. 

 Of course, the relationship is rarely one-to-one. The Walking Dead, among the most popular series on cable, has expanded far beyond its comic book audience, as has True Blood, whose ratings have risen dramatically since its first season.

Fragmentation and lowered expectations

With ratings expectations pretty low for both broadcast and cable – though rising for the latter – a book doesn’t need the sales numbers of Harry Potter to warrant a TV show (film studios often call dibs on those massively popular titles anyway).

Networks want guaranteed buzz and audience but they don’t need as many viewers as they once did to consider a show a success. Cable nets like HBO, meanwhile, care almost as much about innovation and prestige as ratings , which explains their interest in The Corrections.

So much drama

Book-to-TV conversions work better for serious content, and despite the much-touted “return of the sitcom,” dramas are still pretty popular, especially on cable.

For the dozens of channels trying to establish their brands in a competitive marketplace, dramas can bring both ratings and critical acclaim. AMC, the once-fledgling cable network behind Breaking Bad and Mad Men, is a great example.

If you’re new to original programming, developing series from pre-existing properties is a good way to ensure some level quality. Netflix recently did this with House of Cards (a British TV series and novel) and so did BET with 8 Days a Week (adapted from The Come Up book series).

Books bring quality

While some may wonder whether the years of “quality TV” are coming to an end – especially with the flood of horrible sitcoms this fall – most networks rely on quality programming, and books are an efficient way to get it.

For decades, Americans perceived British television as better and more serious, and many of those “masterpiece” programs came from Brits mining their literary canon of Austen, Brontë, Christie, Doyle, Eliot, and company.

The notion that books equal quality TV is, if not always true, an enduring assumption. Dexter isn’t Miss Marple, but the basic idea still stands.

Unarrested development

Just as studios fear lackluster box office debuts, networks fear expensive shows that premiere weakly. Brand name titles didn’t help Pan Am (still alive) and The Playboy Club (canceled) this season.

Book adaptations save producers the trouble of convincing executives a series has enough clout to generate headline-grabbing premiere numbers. Network executives, meanwhile, can sell the idea quicker to higher-ups.

It’s the same reason why U.S. television networks have a newfound love for British television series – Prime Suspect, Skins, Misfits, Inbetweeners – and American movies – Teen Wolf, Friday Night Lights, et al.

Are TV series based on books any better? Certainly many of my favourite dramas on-air right now were previously in print. But books also bring challenges, including how to translate beloved print characters to the screen, and how to condense complex stories into manageable lengths.

Unlike books, television series cost millions and can be canceled ruthlessly. Game of Thrones could end up with many more seasons than there are books, but if ratings go down, TV fans will be left without a satisfying conclusion. Who has time to read those novels?

“What a relief to get up here and not have to explain what I do,” Gomez said, and was rewarded with enthusiastic applause and a deluge of retweets.

Billed as the first-ever conference of people engaged in transmedia ­– or multiplatform – storytelling, StoryWorld was a Dungeons and Dragons-meets-TED Talks gathering of filmmakers, writers, producers and marketers devoted to telling age-old stories in exciting new ways.

The spirit of collaboration and creativity in the Parc 55 Wyndham was palpable – no doubt the conference was a success – but I’m not so sure we’ve moved past definitions just yet.

Sure, everyone at StoryWorld agrees that “the story always comes first,” as the oft-repeated mantra goes. But what is the story, who owns it, and how do we tell it in a collaborative, fair, and profitable way?

Jeff Gomez (Image by James Duncan Davidson via Flickr)

Everything is a story (wait, what?)

The word “story” has gone mainstream, as John David Heinsen from Bunnygraph Entertainment pointed out in a Monday morning session. Let’s say a screenwriter, a producer and a brand marketer sit down at a table. Each may think they’re a storyteller. But they’re not talking about the same thing.

It turns out the words “story” and “storyteller” are fluid and their meanings depends on who’s using them.

Another example of how semantics are important (and confusing) occurred later in the day. Toward the end of a breakout session on “building buzz” someone used the word “brand.” Everyone groaned.

The speaker apologized profusely. But that’s essentially what people mean when they talk about a “story world” ­– a piece of intellectual property that has multiple extensions on different platforms. A brand by any other name.

Of course, the problem is that the word “brand” has become a buzzword. And if we’re not careful, the beautiful word “story” will become one too.

Story worlds are not new

Stories have been around forever (since cavemen and campfires blah blah blah) and so have story worlds. Think J.R.R. Tolkien (proudly invoked by Tricia Pasternak and Lenny Brown from Random House), George Lucas or, of course, Walt Disney.

In a Tuesday morning keynote Disney’s design director Orrin Shively noted that story worlds exist in the real world too; Disney has been creating theme park rides that expand on its branded universes (from Snow White to Finding Nemo) for decades.

What has changed is the variety of platforms available for storytelling, as well as their interactive potential.

Robot Heart Stories

Collaboration is key (but so is consistency)

A fundamental aspect of transmedia storytelling is collaboration – both with other storytellers and with the people formerly known as the audience.

We heard countless examples of transmedia stories “co-created” with fans, from Brent Friedman’s branded TV series Valemont, to Jim Babb’s playful Socks, Incorporated. Transmedia pioneer and Monday keynote Lance Weiler even collaborated with inner-city fifth-grade students on Robot Heart Stories.

Transmedia storytellers also collaborate with each other. While creative types often guard their intellectual property like Gollum guards his ring (sorry, two full days with self-professed geeks), multiplatform storytellers are like jazz musicians: happy to jam on each other’s tracks.

Novelist Sparrow Hall, for example, invites musicians, artists and videographers to riff on his short stories, which he packages into transmedia ebooks. Of course, collaboration requires trust, which means content creators are only willing to share their story worlds with collaborators who are on the same page.

A fundamental rule of story worlds is that they must be consistent across every platform and in each iteration. As Jeff Gomez put it in his presentation, storytellers need to “Show me you care about the story world. Show me it’s real.”

The same lesson applies to all (gasp) brands – whether it’s a magazine, an airline, or a TV franchise.

Collaboration is complex (who owns the story?)

Collaboration fuels transmedia storytelling but it’s also what makes it so incredibly hard to pull off.

In a Tuesday session called “Navigating the Silos,” panelists from Bravo, BBC and LucasFilm commiserated about the roadblocks involved with launching cross-platform initiatives within their own organizations (“I can accept that I.T. is a silo but there’s no excuse for Communications,” bemoaned former BBC content commissioner Rosie Allimonos).

So you can imagine how messy it gets when numerous copyright holders, licensers, and distributors are involved. A Tuesday afternoon session entitled “Co-managing in Collaboration with Stakeholders” attempted to navigate these complexities; it sort of hurt my brain (this probably shouldn’t have been scheduled as the last session of the day).

The key takeaway for prospective transmedia practitioners: “Get a lawyer.”

This question of “Who owns a story?” came up throughout the conference. Some, like “brand fiction” pioneer Helen Klein Ross (who has more than 31,000 followers as the unofficial Twitter voice of Mad Men’s Betty Draper) feel that once it’s released to the world a story belongs to the world.

Others, like Blacklight CEO Zak Kadison, insist a story’s creator is its rightful “gatekeeper.” While this question remains open, it made for one of StoryWorld’s most emotional and important debates.

Stories are good for business

In the end, there’s a practical reason for both Madison Avenue and Hollywood to embrace transmedia: There‘s money to be made.

As Innovative Artists’ David Tochterman put it, transmedia “gives buyers multiple ways to say yes.” Or put slightly differently by Universal McCann’s Jeff Bernstein, “If you’re a storyteller you have a tremendous advantage; you can design an experience that’s scalable.”

But perhaps most crucially – this was stated by multiple speakers – mutliplatform is good for business because it’s what audiences and customers expect. End of story.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco. 

Even better, the winning piece (Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps) was penned by none other than Charles Lim, our esteemed creative director. Gotta love a design guy who can write.

The FOLIO: Awards is the largest international awards competition in magazine editorial and design.

Congratulations, Charles. Go team!

You define yourself as a transmedia author, producer and brand developer. How do you go about explaining what you do to someone who knows nothing about transmedia?

I tell people that I create experiences around a story. I’ll share that story with other artists and see if they would like to create an extension of it through their own medium.

I’ve also done the same thing with major brands. Whereas in the past a company might have had a major TV campaign, today they use transmedia: jumping from one media to the next to tell their story – in that case, the story of a brand.

You’ve just released a paperback book that includes music, video and artwork in addition to two short stories. Do you think readers can get a complete experience out of just reading the thing or do they need to engage with each medium to follow the story?

I don’t like experiences where you’re forced to do anything in a specific sequence. I want to be able to move around freely. When I created my type of transmedia storytelling, I wanted each of the elements to really exist on their own.

When I was in college, the movie Trainspotting came out and I heard the soundtrack being played at a club one night. I went out and bought the soundtrack to it, even before I had read the book or seen the movie, so in that way, the soundtrack was a way of letting me into that story world.

The actual book and movie came after for me, but even in that way, they lived separately from one another – they could be absorbed separately. I love books, but they just don’t have anything interesting going on! There’s nothing that takes a book further.

You had mentioned Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris as an example of a film that could be told through transmedia. What did you mean?

Midnight in Paris was a surprise hit; the story was great, and it was incredibly funny. But it also let us go back in time and hang out with these famous artists and writers. It lets you hang out in that universe.

There was an opportunity there, I think, for a transmedia experience. There was an opportunity with the music for a soundtrack that would let us revisit that story. There could have been episodic content online that offers more doors for you to walk through.

I think telling stories through transmedia is the type of thing that studios and advertisers are interested in, since you have stories that are continuing online, and that’s where you can get viewership. There’s a whole marketing system that can be built around that, and ways to generate revenue.

How have you brought transmedia storytelling into your work with brands like Bono’s (RED) campaign, CitiBank and Motorola?

The work that I did with those brands has informed the more creative work that I’m doing for myself. I think when we create our own art we say, “I want to try this out, this is an experiment.” But in advertising it doesn’t work that way, you don’t create something just to experiment. You create something to meet a goal.

You’re probably familiar with the (RED) campaign – Gap, American Express, Armani – all of these big brands had (RED) products. Motorola came on as the campaign’s technology partner and since Motorola deals with technology, we created an online calculator.

You could plug in the amount of money you had spent on a Motorola product and it would tell you how many people have been fed or clothed with the money you spent. It let you see how your donation translates.

We were also collaborating with different artists at that time. They were doing live events that were also awareness generators for the campaign. It was supporting those events, documenting the events with video, creating exclusive content for the Motorola site (download remixes, singles, etc.).

It was taking the (RED) story and telling it in many different ways so that people could connect with it. One of the reasons why the Red campaign was so successful was the transmedia element.

I’m curious about your own personal brand. You’ve been very open about things in your life that have affected your work, like your involvement with Alzheimer’s Awareness. Do you think this sort of transparency is part of what it means to be a “brand” in the digital age?

I think that there is value in transparency, whether you’re an artist brand or a larger corporate brand. Transparency is different for each, though.

For instance, there was a campaign that was created for Ford right after the bailouts that was all about how they were going to have to go back and fix what happened. Showing people what went wrong, talking about it, and being transparent about it, ended up being a year’s worth of content.

Over the course of the campaign, Ford came to be seen as this organic thing instead of a faceless, robotic, awful entity. That’s when a brand starts to transcend the marketplace. What we’re watching there is not a company. We’re watching something that represents ourselves, and that’s the most powerful level a brand can reach.

Sparrow Hall flanked by his collaborators - Photo by Lindsey Bourke

At StoryWorld you’ll be talking about “Managing Rights in a Participative Canon” with Sarah Hinchcliff Pearson from the Creative Commons and other experts. How does this topic relate to your work and how do you plan on approaching it in San Francisco next month?

Transmedia is often a collaboration, so you have to manage those relationships. You have to manage people’s trust in you. The amount of money I spent on legal fees on Two Blue Wolves, my first transmedia story, was more than I spent on any of the production!

That’s the reason why I wanted to speak about contracts at StoryWorld. To talk about my experience in getting those contracts where they needed to be, what that was like, and then helping by talking to the audience about what they should look out for and offering tips, resources, and things to think about as they’re creating their contracts.

What are you looking forward to most at StoryWorld?

I’m looking forward to seeing dialogues form between the brands and storytellers that are coming in from all sides of the industry.

This is the first time we’ve ever had a transmedia conference and it’s the first time for all these different forces to come together. I have a feeling people are going to be making amazing contacts.

It’s going to be eye opening for people that are working in toy companies, game companies, and entertainment companies to connect with people that are thinking on these multilevels of storytelling. I think people are really going to inspire one another.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco. 

The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like a nod to newspapers, but you’re not really a news site. Do you consider yourselves a blog, an online magazine, an aggregator or something else entirely?

The reason we call ourselves an online magazine and not a blog is because we knew that when we launched, the business world was not completely familiar with the word “blog.”

In addition, our site features deeper and richer articles than a typical blog. All of our articles are at least 1000 words. We publish once a day, 24 articles a month, which is essentially the same amount of articles that are in a print magazine.

You’re the first person ever to tell me that we have a newspaper type of name. The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like it’s socially important, it sounds like it’s established and that it’s been around forever.

The site has a particularly memorable look, with its jungle-themed design and cartoon illustrations. Where did that come from?

The site definitely has a unique visual display. Our mascot is this little guy named Scout, named by our user community in a contest during our one-year birthday celebration.

I wanted to have a site that was visually stunning, looked very professional, and that when people came to it they just assumed it had existed forever. In reality, even though we have more than 100,000 e-mail subscribers, we’re only 22 months old.

Many of your headlines include a question, a number (“4 Tips,” “5 Steps”), or a “How to,” making them very SEO-friendly. How much do search engines factor into your editorial process? Do you create content based on what people are searching for?

No, we do not. We only get 15 percent of our 900,000 page-views per month from search. We do not try to make things that appeal to search engines. We don’t ignore search engines, but it’s not our primary focus. Our primary focus is to appeal to people.

I have a background in copywriting so I know what a good headline is. We write headlines that people want to share, that people want to click through on Twitter or Facebook to read.

SME went from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in 20 months, and it’s all from social media. Our articles have titles that are designed to really draw people to the content. We’re about people optimization, not search engine optimization. We’re trying to optimize for the human mind.

In your latest book, Launch, you discuss the “elevation principle,” which goes something like this: Great content + other people – marketing messages = business growth. Why are “marketing messages” subtracted from this equation?

Edelman did a study and found that only a third of people trust businesses, meaning that 66 percent don’t. In the book, I postulate that part of the reason is that people think businesses are just out to take their money.

Everywhere we go, all we see are marketing messages. It’s permeating our culture and people are tuning out.

If you want your content to be received as a gift instead of a lure designed to convert someone into a prospect, then you need to put away those marketing messages. I don’t say “don’t do marketing,” but what I do say is not to embed those marketing messages into your content.

If your content has ads all around it then what you’re doing is sending people away from it, or you’re telling the people that all you really care about is getting conversions, not providing great content.

You practice what you preach because Social Media Examiner is an ad-free space. Of course, that brings up an obvious question: How does Social Media Examiner make money?

You’ll only see one ad on our site, which is for our own events. Once people receive our content and decide to sign up for more via our e-mail list, then they’ve opted into a secondary channel, which I call the backchannel. Through that channel I can embed some marketing messages. That’s how we grow our business.

We send out a daily e-mail blast to 100,000 people, 6 days a week. Inside that e-mail we have a 70-word description of the day’s article with a link. Underneath it we’ll have ads; some are from sponsors, others are for our own events.

Our sponsors are mostly social media-related agencies. Anyone who wants to be in front of social media marketers is the ideal sponsor.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

There’s a sidebar on the homepage where you can input your information. We also have a cookie mechanism whereby first-time visitors are prompted to subscribe with a one-time pop-up.

Chris Brogan says that “e-mail is the golden ticket,” and that’s true because a large e-mail list is more important than followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. People have given us permission to communicate with them. E-mail is still the secret magic bullet.

Many other media brands have made the leap from print to web. You guys have made the leap from web to events. Any plans to extend the Social Media Examiner brand from web to print?

No plans. We’re new media in every way. Even our events are completely online. We don’t do anything in the old media kind of way. For me it makes no sense to go backwards. There’s a place for print, but not in my company.

Awards season is upon us and last week alone Sparksheet received an eye-popping eight nominations – seven for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards and one for the Eddies!

For the COPAs, which are presented by Masthead, we’re a finalist in the following categories (B-to-B division):

• Best Online-Only Site
• Best Web Design
• Best Blog
• Best Use of Social Media
• Best E-Newsletter
• Best Mobile-Optimized Site
• Best Article or Series (for our long-form feature on Cuba’s first branded film)

At the COPAs last fall we won a record four awards and we’d be honoured to do nearly as well this year.

We’re also super excited about our first-ever Eddie nomination. The Eddies are Folio magazine’s awards for international excellence in magazine editorial. Sparksheet is a finalist for Best Online Column or Blog (B-to-B) for our Creative Director Charles Lim’s blockbuster column Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps.

It feels great to be recognized both in our home country and internationally, and for everything from our editorial and design prowess, to our social media chops (kudos to our Community Manager Joey Tanny for the latter).

It goes to show that Sparksheet has become, in just two short years, a truly multiplatform magazine brand.

The 2011 Canadian Online Publishing Awards will be handed out on October 24 at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. The 2011 Eddie Awards will be presented on November 1 in New York City. Hope to see you there.

Congratulations to the other nominees, including our talented colleagues at EnRoute, Experience, Fairmont and In magazines!

Pam Didner at Content Marketing World 2011/Photo courtesy of Content Marketing World

You were a speaker at last week’s Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland. Tell me, what does a company that makes computer hardware have to do with content?

It’s funny you asked. We did in-depth research on how consumers and IT managers view Intel. Words such as “innovation,” “quality,” “performance,” “trust,” “reliability” are used to describe our brand.

Once we start talking about “technology” and “innovation,” there are a lot of stories that we can tell. Imagine the content we can create or stories we can tell through the experiences that technology enables in people’s lives. We have more to do with content than ever before.

Computer chips don’t necessarily lend themselves to great storytelling. How do you weave the many, complicated things Intel does into a compelling story?

It can be very challenging to find the right story to tell. We look to our R&D department, which we call Intel Labs. Not sure if you remember the Intel Rock Star Commercial. We showcased Ajay Bhatt, who is the co-inventor of the USB drive. There are some amazing things our engineers are doing at Intel Labs. The stories are there, we just need to find them.

Intel is a multiplatform company, and it’s also an international one. How do you create content that works across geographical and cultural boundaries? Which platforms work best for which audiences?

I’d like to address that at the B2C and B2B levels. B2B is much easier to scale, especially since our target audience is IT managers, whose challenges tend to be similar across regions. Most IT managers battle similar issues such as security threats, Windows upgrades, downtime, etc.

In addition, IT managers tend to be the no-nonsense type of guys. B2B content and creative are easy to scale.

Cultural differences play a much bigger role in B2C, especially on creative development. During the creative development and storytelling stage, we engage with geographies. From time to time, we customize multiple versions of the same content to meet different geographic needs. For example, for the Intel Rock Star commercial we have a Chinese version featuring a prominent Chinese engineer from Intel China.

Can you talk about how you’ve leveraged social media to promote Intel products around the world?

Social media is part of the overall integrated campaign, especially in North America. We leverage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – wherever it makes sense.

Outside North America, our various regional offices need to make the call on how to leverage local social media. Social media does require subject matter expertise and some regions just do not have the resources to do that.

You were involved in creating Intel’s online IT Manager Game, a simulation of an IT professional’s average day in the office. With social games going mainstream, is it only IT professionals who are getting in on the fun or have you seen other, more surprising demographics participating as well?

IT Manager Game was first launched in May, 2006. We are currently designing IT Manager Game 4.0. The game has more than 120,000 registrants in 16 countries. There is no paid media promoting the game, so it’s been a purely viral success.

We specifically target IT professionals. The player profile: men under 40 working as IT managers or in IT support/Help desk for big, small or medium-sized companies.

You’ve said that marketing and innovation are “BFF”, but that current corporate practices of putting marketing at the end of the process often put them in more of an “it’s complicated” situation. Can you unpack this analogy for us?

All marketers can relate to this situation: A product group hands over an almost-finished product and expects last-minute marketing magic. At Intel, we follow a process called the “Marketing Life Cycle.” We move marketing upstream.

Marketing is engaged with the product group 24-36 months prior to the product release. Our marketing research and branding teams work in tandem with the product groups to provide input on product features, research and brand strategy during the product definition stage. This gives us enough time to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

How can marketers be more like magazine editors, as you’ve suggested?

Social and search are rewriting the rules of engagement. Our audience is out there constantly searching for information and evaluating new technologies, even when they are not purchasing.

We need to engage with them on a timely basis. Most importantly, we need to engage with them on the topics they care about, yet in an authentic way. This requires some level of planning, especially when multiple marketing functions are involved.

The first step is to have an editorial calendar which rallies the different teams. Once you know what topic you would like to use to engage with your audience, the next step is to build a story that’s both relevant to your audience and your company.

In a way, it’s very similar to publishing a magazine. You have the theme for that edition, then you build stories around it.

We chatted about “branded journalism,” the relationship between content and design, and why Sparksheet calls itself a magazine (as opposed to a humble blog). Here’s an excerpt:

Can corporations fund or push innovation in the publishing space while still adhering to journalistic ethics? 

There’s definitely an opportunity for corporations to foster and finance innovative journalism. Of course, they’ve always done this by underwriting radio and TV shows and placing ads in newspapers. In some ways, branded content is just an extension of this. Where do journalistic ethics fit in? It all comes down to transparency. So long as corporations are clear about their role in the content—as well as the limits of what they are willing to cover — I don’t see a conflict.

Check out the interview and stay tuned for Karyn’s forthcoming think piece on Sparksheet!

We’re still really interested in how brands are using content to reach the elusive consumer in transit – the Transumer – wherever they may be. But that “wherever” can be in the air, at home, in the office or anywhere else in the world.

That said, we know that many of you are intimately involved in the airline/inflight media world ­– and we want to make sure there’s enough relevant content out there to keep you inspired.

So as part of our Sparksheet Events service, we’ve launched a special micro-magazine called Sparksheet@APEX built around the 2011 Airline Passenger Experience Expo in Seattle. The site’s mission? To explore the connections between the inflight world, and the content, media and marketing universe.

On the site, you’ll find exclusive Q&As with the airlines, content distributors, hardware manufacturers and inflight entertainment and communications experts who make the industry fly. You’ll also find a bunch of classic Sparksheet stories updated and reframed for the APEX crowd.

Once we land in Seattle, there will be plenty of blogging and live-tweeting from our @sparksheet_apex account.

So if you’re an airline aficionado, check out the site and let us know if you have any APEX stories to share.

If you’re not – don’t worry. The usual Sparksheet and our various social media channels will continue undisturbed. But, of course, you’re welcome to stop by.

apex.sparksheet.com

How do you maintain Playboy’s unique voice, outlook and culture across so many disparate media, from print and video, to Facebook and Twitter?

It’s a challenge to ensure that all of our mouthpieces are aligned in terms of voice, tone and messaging. Back in the day, the magazine was it.

Now we have constant external communications on TV, radio, Playboy.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Ustream, TheSmokingJacket.com and other communications vehicles.

Each of these platforms must stick to the brand’s identity and [they] are constantly monitored to make sure they’re on-brand and in line with Hef’s vision and our editorial director’s ideas.

That said, each platform communicates and publishes differently and may also have separate audiences, so the way they represent/interpret the brand may differ slightly.

What’s the goal of Playboy’s social media activity, and how do you measure success?

We have a number of goals in social media. First, building celebrity for our Playmates and models. Years ago TV was the only way for a Playmate to make the major step from centrefold to household name. Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are prime examples, but since we know that every Playmate with some charisma and a story to tell isn’t going to end up on TV, social media is the way to grow their audience.

Each new Playmate goes through our social media training and is introduced to our fan base (5 million+ on Facebook, 250,000 on Twitter) when her issue comes out. Within days she’ll have a thriving fan base of her own and we’ll work with her to create content and identify digital influencers to interact with. There are over 90 Playmates actively using Facebook and Twitter with a combined following of over 2 million, giving Playboy the sexiest army of digital brand advocates in the world.

Second, increasing engagement with our fan base beyond the pages of the magazine. We create specific content franchises for each platform in order to properly use each channel and not just post content for the sake of having a presence on a certain site.

Third, generating revenue. A few years ago, managing social media for a brand was mainly focused on growth, engagement, listening or some other buzz term. Monetizing was a nice-to-have but certainly not a primary objective.

Now once we reach a certain scale, revenue is a must in order to justify the existence of jobs like mine, right? True success in this space is quantifiable.

How would you describe the quintessential Playboy reader, and have your perceptions of him or her changed as you’ve engaged with readers online?

In terms of our social media audience, it spans beyond just the obvious, which is the guy who appreciates beautiful women.

Some of the other types we see include people that love the brand and its history, women that became fans after watching The Girls Next Door on E!, women who are aspiring Playmates, and people in search of men’s entertainment and lifestyle content.

We all know that Top 10 lists and sexy photo galleries are good for traffic, but Playboy has made its reputation on long-form articles and in-depth interviews. How do you attract eyeballs without sacrificing the quality of your content?

It’s important for us to recognize that there are many different types of people that come to Playboy.com via many different entry points. For example, if someone gets to the site to check out the latest Playmate, how can we make them aware that there’s a great interview or gaming feature they’d be interested in?

Or if they got to Playboy.com from a site that linked to an interview, how can we keep them on site to enjoy the eye candy? The “link-bait” may bring in more visitors, but the “long form” is what will build a true audience for a site.

With the Playboy mansion, you guys were pioneers in extending the “magazine experience” into the real world. Do you think being involved with things like events and nightclubs is an increasingly important part of what it means to be a magazine in the 21^st century?

Absolutely. Playboy allows consumers to interact with the brand and experience the Playboy lifestyle through parties and experiences at the Playboy Clubs. In 2006, we opened a multi-faceted entertainment venue in Las Vegas. More recently, we’ve opened Playboy Clubs in London, Cancun and Macau and look forward to continuing the expansion.

The Playboy brand has always been representative of “the good life” and we have always offered exclusive opportunities to enjoy that good life via nightclubs, parties and special events.

Playboy.com features a mix of free content and premium stuff. Do you think you’ve struck the right balance between the “open web” and “walled garden” approaches to online content?

Playboy has a number of web properties that aim to reach different audiences. Playboy.com includes a mix of girl features, entertainment stories and longer articles.

The Smoking Jacket, Playboy’s safe-for-work site, includes shorter posts, lists, “quick hits” that you’d want to pass along to your friends, and non-nude girl features. Playboy’s subscription sites offer extended girl content.

Our sites aim to attract different readers and viewers; we work to give fans a variety of content, both free and paid.

When people think of Playboy, they obviously think of your founder, Hugh Hefner. How have you brought Hef’s considerable legacy and personality into the online space?

Hef is extremely active on Twitter and it has become a part of his daily routine. People always ask if it’s really him, and it is Hef on his iPad from the Playboy Mansion. A lot of his tweets are answering fan questions, good or bad, so Twitter truly is an engagement platform for him.

Photos courtesy of Playboy

You will author Q&As, write Engagement Checkups and update The Sparkbeat on a weekly basis. You will also be involved in day-to-day editorial stuff like researching photos, navigating our CMS, and researching story ideas.

Because we’re a small team, you’ll also be expected and encouraged to bring your own unique skills, talents and interests to the table. Journalism students, recent graduates, and anyone with relevant writing and editorial experience will be considered. Design skills and social media chops are always a plus!

Think you’re our guy or gal? Here are the details and instructions on how to apply.

It may be too early to tell, but that doesn’t mean the internet isn’t abuzz over this story. Here’s a roundup of some of the commentary from around the web:

Forbes’ Adam Hartung:

Google is now stuck defending & extending its old businesses – search, Chrome O/S for laptops, Google+ for mail and social media, and Android for mobility products. And, as is true with all D&E management, its costs are escalating dramatically.

Gary Liberson in The Huffington Post:

Google just became another Qualcomm. You may not have noticed, but by buying the Motorola mobile phone portfolio, Google can now integrate its Android operating system with Motorola’s underlying mobile phone technology. This hardware plus software change means there is going to be a stronger licensing relationship with companies like HTC and Samsung. Which means Google will be able to collect more of their dollars in licensing fees.

Ben Parr (Mashable’s editor-at-large):

For Google, the Motorola acquisition is a series of gambles. Google is gambling that regulators will approve the deal. It’s gambling that Motorola’s patents will be enough to force a stalemate in the Google-Apple-Microsoft patent wars. And finally, it’s gambling that it has the capability to create the software and hardware for a phone that can truly rival the iPhone.

TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid:

I don’t know why Google acquired Motorola as opposed to simply licensing its trove of patents. My hunch is that it had more to do with fending off a threat from Microsoft than it had to do with Google’s hitherto unforeseen hardware ambitions.

MIT Technology Review’s Erica Naone:

…as people increasingly access the Web via mobile devices, the acquisition could also help Google remain central to their Web experience in the years to come. As Apple has demonstrated with its wildly popular iPhone, this is far easier to achieve if a company can control the hardware, as well as the software, people carry in their pockets.

If we’re working on a Q&A with Roger Ebert, we’ll go find a photo of Roger Ebert. If the post is about sexy advertising in Russia, we’ll use a screenshot of Paris Hilton, of course.

If nothing is readily available, or if Charles has some time on his hands, he’ll cook up something custom – a colourful infographic, a funky Venn diagram, or an image of Kanye West in Twitterland, for example.

But on that March day we were stumped. The image would complement a column by our colleague, Arjun Basu, about the evolution of the term “content.” In the piece, Arjun argues that “we live in the world where almost everything is content,” from Nike shoes to the New York Times, to nacho chips. He calls this “The Content Revolution,” which is what we called the post.

It was an intriguing argument, but it didn’t bring to mind any particular image. If content is everything, and everything is content, then how exactly do you visually represent “everything”?

We tossed around some ideas. Maybe we could create a tree, the Tree of Content, with all sorts of “content fruit” hanging from its branches. iPhones and magazine articles and shoes and stuff.

Or maybe content is a planet, a faraway planet, with a bunch of mini content moons revolving around it.

Then again, the content revolution might take place underwater, in an uncharted ecosystem where different species represent different types of content. The content is the water, but it’s also the fish and the seawood and the anemone (thank you, Finding Nemo). Or something like that.

A slightly more literal idea, which Charles actually sketched out at some point, was to show a file folder with the word “publishing” crossed out in favour of the word “content” (referring to certain industry shifts that Arjun discusses in his post).

The folder would have three sub-folders labeled “print,” “web” and “social” fanning out of it. Or perhaps the mother folder would be labeled “publishing” to show that publishing is now just one of many branches of content (there’s that tree metaphor again). Anyway, that idea turned out to be too hard to realize. And too confusing.

The image we finally settled on is a mosaic featuring all sorts of things – a book, a piano, a crowd of people, some paintbrushes and plane tickets – that might play a role in the content revolution.

It’s an elegant image, but I’m sure we could have done better. What do you think?

Tell us: What does content look like? How would you illustrate content?

James Bond flashing his Omega watch

The next James Bond film will reportedly receive $45 million, a third of its overall budget, from high-end on-screen product placement.

The sum is more than double the previous record for a single film (Steven Spielberg raked in $20 million for brazenly running ads for Guinness and the Gap in Minority Report’s “near future”), and threatens to lethally reduce 007’s latest adventure to little more than a big screen companion to the Sharper Image catalogue.

The Hollywood practice of funding films with advertising dollars is not only accepted, it now borders on a fiscal imperative for big budget flicks. Product placement appears in roughly 68 percent of Hollywood films today, according to several reports. The majority of these movies feature multiple products and, on average, each product is represented on screen in one way or another at least eight times.

Given the slow death of the 30-second commercial spot, ad agencies are happy to pony up huge sums, cognizant of the tweaked adage: You never get a second chance to make a million impressions.

Of course, evaluating whether product placement is classy or obscene is akin to identifying pornography; you know it when you see it. My general rule is that if the appearance of a soda can or an automobile’s insignia pulls me out of the story and leaves me clinging to narrative threads like Indiana Jones swinging from an old rope bridge, there’s a problem.

Carrie Bradshaw with her Macbook

Talladega Nights, a movie branded from green flag to checkered flag, worked because the tongue-in-cheek tie-ins provided a sly swipe at the NASCAR culture it parodies. Carrie Bradshaw constantly pecking at her Apple computer is reasonable; she doesn’t seem like a Dell girl.

But when product placement clumsily works its way into dialogue – I’m thinking of Daniel Craig’s 007 informing a likely conquest that he’s wearing an Omega, not a Rolex, in Casino Royale – I’m ticked.

Television shows used to tout their sponsors openly. Viewers knew they were being pitched because the presenters made it explicit. Even Alfred Hitchcock sardonically prepped his small screen audiences, “And now a word from our sponsors.”

Product placement functions in the opposite manner: Filmmakers hope viewers won’t notice, while brands are banking on them remembering when purchasing their next meal, laptop or timepiece.

In POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock takes the old-school approach to the extreme in order to explore the increasingly complex world of product placement in movies. The documentary tracks Spurlock’s quest to underwrite the very movie we watch unspool, with fascinating and hilarious results.

I sat down with Morgan on my show, The High Bar, where we discussed his self-reflexive new film and the implications of increased product placement on screen, in our schools and even in our dreams.

New Marketing TV is produced by The Pulse Network, which also encompasses Chris Brogan’s New Marketing Labs social media agency and the Inbound Marketing Summit, a two-day conference that we’re looking forward to being part of in September. Much thanks to Bill and his team, who are very much on the same page as us as far as content is concerned!

Part I

Part II

As you know, we’re big believers in making content accessible to people wherever they may be – at home, on the go, or even in the air. So the Sparksheet iPad App is just one more platform for you to access our award-winning think pieces, Q&As, videos and other original and curated content.

Unlike some other magazine brands (you know who you are), we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel with a flashy-but-clunky app that puts design before content, and print before digital. Besides, Sparksheet.com – our newly redesigned website – is already optimized for the iPad and all sorts of different screens and mobile devices.

The Sparksheet iPad App keep things simple, searchable and clean – just the way we like it. Let us know what you think!

Ann Curry @140conf - Image by bjmccray via Flickr

Ann Curry takes her role as anchor to heart. Curry believes that television news anchors are responsible for holding down the journalistic principles of truth and accuracy in a world where the real-time news cycle often leads to error and misinformation.

Opening with a tongue-in-cheek impression of her Japanese mother, Curry charmed the crowd into a tweeting frenzy at last month’s 140conf.

During her 10-minute talk, entitled “Journalism in the State of Now,” Curry boldly declared that today’s journalists find themselves “where no generation has gone before.”

In particular, Curry addressed social media’s role in igniting social activism and spreading knowledge. She said that Facebook and Twitter offer people a platform to express their hopes and frustrations, or what she calls their “beautiful outrage.”

We caught up with Ann Curry backstage to chat about the changing state of news journalism and how she approaches her role as anchor across multiple platforms.

Don’t be dazzled by those flashy iPad magazine apps or digital page-turners. Creating something like the Wired iPad app may get a round of high-fives from print designers, but put it beside the web experience and it becomes decoration more than anything useful.

The mentality with most magazine apps seems to be, “Let’s make it look just like print.” After all, a tablet is roughly the same size and thickness as a print magazine, so users will use it the same way, right?

Wrong.

Technology changes the way we use things

Think about the evolution of the calendar. A printed calendar typically consists of 12 pages: new month, new page, new cute kitten image.

For added convenience, there are also miniature versions of the previous month’s and next month’s layouts, and on the back of the calendar there’s a grid of all 12.

You simply fill the boxes with content, then flip to the next page when the month is through.

Now take that static interface and translate it to a digital device. On a dynamic interface, time can be represented in a variety of ways and the content can be manipulated to suit whatever you’re interested in at that moment.

You can sort by hours, days, weeks, or months. Or you can choose to view only work appointments or your kid’s soccer games or jam sessions with your band. You don’t have to see everything at the same time.

By shifting to digital, a calendar becomes more versatile and useful than ever. And because of alerts, we don’t even have to check it anymore!

Screenshot of Klok, a time-tracking app.

So what does that have to do with magazines?

What makes a magazine is a whole other discussion, but I think we can agree that it’s not about the neat columns and colourful pages. Ultimately, it’s about the content and the experience of consuming that content.

The goal of designing magazines for the screen should be to improve the magazine experience, even if it means breaking some of the rules of print.

While the print reader is forced to move from issue to issue, page to page, column of text to column of text – next, next, next – the web reader scrolls through at her own pace and can fly off to anywhere she pleases.

There is no one direction. If there is a natural “next”, there will be an easy way to get to it, placed right where she’d expect it.

On a touchscreen tablet, swiping is so much fun that designers have started using it as a way to move to the next article (instead of the next page), transforming our conception of a magazine from a series of pages to a collection of articles.

This is a significant shift, but again, swiping is meant to mirror the way we flip through pages in a print publication. It’s still about moving forward. What if we were no longer compelled to move in a single direction at all?

The Wired magazine app includes a sentimental artifact of print design: long texts broken into columns on a screen.

What’s “next”?

The “linear to web” shift that we saw with calendars hasn’t happened yet with magazines, and won’t happen until we rethink the idea of “next.”

From radio to TV to print, the old media paradigm is all about one thing (program, ad, article) leading to another. But the web experience isn’t linear. Instead of a single thread of content it’s, well, a web.

New media already got over this hump a decade ago. A network consisting of linked web pages (you know it as the World Wide Web) really took off when users were able to easily browse and contribute to that network (Web 2.0.).

Now our networked devices weave that content into our daily lives through things like blogs and RSS feeds and cloud-based organization tools (see: Google).

The reason this content is so nimble is because it was born digitally and is semantically formatted, not bound to a series of arbitrary separations like pages in a PDF.

How can magazines catch up? Wouldn’t you like to know!

For starters, design for the medium and stop making magazine apps that simply add a pretty layer of decoration to an existing product. Focus on the content and the experience. And don’t try to make it look like print, just because.

This insight about shifting attitudes toward sex came back to me when I was thinking about the many ways in which emerging markets differ from one another. Generally, the perception is that emerging markets are quite conservative when it comes to sexual imagery.

But the old advertising adage of “sex sells” remains true pretty much anywhere in the world. You just have to get the message right – for both your audience and your brand.

Overtly sexual

In some emerging markets, you can be a lot more direct in your appeal to sex than in many industrialized countries. I remember the market research manager of a Central American airline telling me that the way he got good response rates for his inflight surveys was to have pretty girls in short skirts hand them out.

Depending on whether your Internet filters let you, check out Russian airline Avia Nova’s recent commercial. As a female business traveller, I hate the ad. But it knows its target audience (most business travellers in Russia are likely to be men and, shall we say, not necessarily worried about political correctness) and it certainly has a clear message that differentiates the airline from its competitors (albeit one that the crew may not wish to live up to).

There is no more vivid example of the overt approach than using Paris Hilton to sell beer to Brazilians. In this television commercial for Devassa, Hilton cools herself with an ice cold can in full view of a crowded street, and appears to enjoy the experience almost as much as her horde of onlookers.

Marketers in Africa can get away with a surprisingly overt approach to sex as well, providing certain sensitivities towards STIs and the more repressed role of women are observed. This little gem for condom manufacturer Trust went viral a couple of years ago now, with a cheeky but highly sexual approach.

Subtly sexual

Image via adweek.com

In contrast, China is a more traditional culture where talking about sex overtly is usually considered to be in poor taste. But using innuendo and relying on the audience to connect the dots can be a very engaging strategy. McDonald’s, for example, pushed the boundaries with their Feel the Beef campaign, created to introduce their Quarter Pounders to the Chinese palate. And they got away with it.

Knowing how far a brand can go comes down to understanding the unique histories and nuances of a place. At first glance, India might seem like a highly socially conservative market. But India’s tradition of sensuality (think Tantra) means that it is possible to make sexy ads that are culturally referenced and don’t upset the censors.

Many brands in India are testing the waters, including Wild Stone deodorant with its ad featuring a married woman fantasizing about a handsome stranger. While a direct approach to sex may be taboo in India, fantasy and innuendo fit within cultural norms and beliefs.

Another idiosyncrasy to note is that the same rules don’t always apply to ads from other places as they do to ads from the homeland. For instance, an Indian businessman might want to fly with Avia Nova after seeing the Russian airline’s ad, but doesn’t necessarily want an ad for an Indian airline to look like that.

Similarly, tourism ads can’t look like they promote the country as a sex tourism destination. The perception has to be that it’s all about fantasy (even if it isn’t).

So what’s the takeaway? While sex may sell everywhere, it sells differently depending on where you are in the world. But the real story is still “same, same but different,” because the motivation underneath it all remains universal.

Ann Curry @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You’d think these things would be obsolete by now. But, as I theorized on the 140conf stage in front of 800-plus people (not to mention the thousands who tuned into the webcast), face-to-face events like 140conf have only become more meaningful in a connected age.

As humans, we like to get together to share stories and ideas and conversations with people from around the world. The problem is that as soon as the curtain goes down, all of these stories and ideas and conversations fade into the ether – save for a photo or two. That’s why we partnered with 140conf curator Jeff Pulver to keep the conversation going before, during and after the event.

Before the conference, for example, we caught up with Funny or Die marketing director and conference speaker Patrick Starzan to chat about the online video website’s viral success. We also ran a short think piece by 140conf opera singer Ja-Naé Duane.

Then, while the conference was going on, our “ground team” at Sparksheet HQ was glued to the “backchannel” in order to curate a stream of the most interesting audience tweets in real time. Meanwhile, I shot some exclusive backstage videos with the likes of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Today Show anchor Ann Curry. Stay tuned for those in the coming weeks.

For now, here are some key takeaways from two eclectic, content-filled days:

Cory Booker @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

The web is a big tent

Have I used the word “eclectic” yet? Because there really is no better word to describe Jeff Pulver’s events. In keeping with the micro nature of Twitter, 140conf consisted of about 90 10-minute talks spread out over two dizzying days.

The lineup included everyone from tech-savvy farmer Steve Tucker and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra, to radiation oncologist Krupali Tejura and Newark mayor Cory Booker.

It was an important reminder that when we use terms like “users” and “audience” and “readers” and “consumers,” what we’re really talking about is people. All different kinds of people. Everywhere.

Jeff Jarvis @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Slow down

It’s funny. According to the 140conf tagline, this event was all about “exploring the state of now” and taking stock of what’s happening on “the real-time web.” But one of the main lessons of the conference was that we all need to slow down. Fast.

The problem with the web’s hurried pace is that it doesn’t leave much space for verification. That’s why media scholar Dan Gillmor is trying to launch a “slow news” movement, where citizens join journalists as “active consumers” of the news who approach so-called facts with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Case in point, NPR news curator Andy Carvin recounted how he helped unmask an American activist who spent months posing as a Syrian blogger called “Gay Girl in Damascus.”

The hoax fooled mainstream media outlets for months, but media critic Jeff Jarvis suggested, in a separate talk, that the onus of verification rests on readers as well as journalists. “I’m not asking you to question the article,” Jarvis said, “I’m asking you to question your assumptions.”

Cathy Brooks @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Listen up

While media pundits like Carvin, Gillmor and Jarvis talked about slowing down, several other 140conf speakers encouraged us to put away our smartphones, tablets and laptops  ­­– and listen up. Storytelling consultant Cathy Brooks, for example, began her talk with a tongue-in-cheek spoken-word piece that implored the audience to “shut up and breathe.”

In an informative talk on how to interview famous people, film journalist Warren Etheredge explained that “the first step in having a conversation is preparing yourself to listen.” Etheredge said the only interview question he prepares is the first one – the rest flow from listening to the person’s answers.

Social marketing expert Ted Rubin even coined a new buzzword for the value of listening to our customers and peers: Return on Relationship.

Ian Spector @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You can’t plan everything

Another term bandied around quite a bit at 140conf was “serendipity.” Indeed, many of the presenters had stumbled upon online success (or at least celebrity) accidentally.

Ian Spector, for example, launched a website in 2005 filled with funny “facts” about actor Chuck Norris. To date, the site has received more than 250 million views, and spawned a bestselling book series.

In a different vein, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley spoke of the many unexpected ways merchants and brands use the location-based platform. But the theme of serendipity was summed up best by former news anchor Anita Cochran in the title of her ten-minute talk: “What, I’m a brand?”

The Lupus Ladies of Twitter @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

All good things

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the many speakers who took the 140conf stage to talk about how they are using the web to help people.

From the “Lupus Ladies of Twitter,” who used social media to raise awareness and build support for a groundbreaking new Lupus drug, to Hollaback’s Emily May and her crusade against street harassment, these inspiring people reminded us that the web is about more than ROI or ROE or ROR or any other catchy acronym.

It’s about people from all over the world getting together to do good things. Sort of like 140conf.

Funny or Die features a mix of original videos and user-generated stuff. How do you strike a balance between content creation and curation, and does one type of content inform the other?

Our goal is to always get our best content out there. When we started we were only producing exclusive content, about one video a week. Now we’re doing about 25 videos a month.

Obviously it’s important for us as a brand to be creating content, but the curation is also vital; whether it comes from friends of Funny or Die or our homepage editors scouring the Net on a daily basis to find the funniest stuff out there.

At the end of the day it’s about making our audience laugh and want to come back. That’s not something that can be done solely by pushing our own content.

In the last couple of years you guys have established yourselves as specialists in branded entertainment. Is it a challenge to create content that has to reflect both the Funny or Die brand and someone else’s?

The branded content is a big part of our business and revenue stream. These campaigns are developed by the same team that creates our original content. Depending on the deal with the brand, it’s then featured on our homepage.

In terms of the challenge, it really depends on the brand. Some brands are great and have a genuine understanding of the Internet and its capabilities. Even with guidelines in place, the objective is always to make a funny and effective video.

Other brands are more conservative and put a lot of restraints on the creative process, sometimes resulting in a less-funny video. There is always the challenge of making a suitable video for the brand while maintaining the integrity of what they’ve come to Funny or Die for in the first place.

You’ve said that you’ll work for any brand as long as it’s done transparently and the Funny or Die writers have total creative control. But have you ever been approached by a brand that’s just unspoofable?

For us, there’s no brand that’s unspoofable. In fact, the ones that might fall into that category actually end up being the most spoofable.

When Mini Cooper approaches us to do a collaboration, it’s a lot easier than if, for example, Intuit comes to us. It’s hard to make tax software funny. But there’s never been a case where we’ve had issues coming up with ideas or have questioned whether or not we were the right fit for a brand.

We’ve done a lot of thinking about what makes a video go viral online. Have you come close to identifying the secret sauce?

My caveat would be that if anyone says that they know the components of a viral video then they’re lying. I do, however, think that there are some underlying elements.

A viral video has to have a universal theme, something that everyone gets. The content must affect the viewer at an emotional level. Take Susan Boyle, for example. Otherwise, it has to have a laugh-out-loud or shock element. Ultimately, viral videos are things that people want to discover and share with their friends. People want to be the ones discovering that video. Influencers and people who share videos a lot are those who get the videos quicker, and that adds to the virality of a video.

We have a promotional strategy for all of our bigger videos. Obviously we spend a lot of time developing our social media accounts – Twitter (2 million+ followers), Facebook (900K+ followers), Tumblr, etc. - but we also have an outreach program to bloggers. That helps expose the content to those outside of our community.

A lot of your user-generated content consists of spoofs of advertising campaigns like the much-imitated Old Spice spots. Do you have a sense of how these spoofs affect the brands themselves?

With any successful campaign the next logical step is spoof-making. The people who make these spoofs are looking for attention. There is already a focus on these campaigns, so the best way of drawing attention over to you is by making a quality spoof. I think it’s a smart strategy, especially for young productions teams, and hopefully they have something to follow up with.

I can’t speak for the brands, and I guess it depends on the spoof, but I think that’s something that would continue to draw attention to the campaign. I would think most brands would be excited about that. Imitation is a form of flattery. Brands need to understand that they don’t have control of the online world. Online, the users control the brand.

Funny or Die has a presence on pretty much every digital and social platform. How do you maintain a consistent brand voice across each one?

I have a team of three people and we control all of the social media channels. Our approach to each of the platforms is different because each community is different. We do maintain a consistent voice, but we have different content calendars and strategies for each platform.

The overarching theme is that we always want to be communicating with our followers, having a two-way conversation. We want to make sure that they feel part of the community and that they own a little bit of the brand.

The latest episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis features embedded hashtags that link the video to Twitter. Do you think this sort of cross-platform storytelling is where things are headed online?

I’m really glad you noticed that! We’ve developed a large presence on each of the platforms, but now we’re trying to figure out how to integrate that more with the Funny or Die experience. The embeddable hashtag is one of our attempts to drive engagement.

I actually got the idea from watching TV that displayed a hashtag in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. I would follow the hashtag and see what engagement it drove, which made me think, “why wouldn’t we do that for our own videos when our viewers are actually online?”

It’s a way for us to cross-promote our content on different platforms, integrating the social experience with the content and shaping the conversation.

Funny or Die seems to have become a platform for certain celebrities to relaunch their brands or rescue their reputations. I’m thinking of people like Lindsay Lohan and Chris Klein. What do you think it is about the site that makes it a “safe space” for celebrities to make fun of themselves?

You can look at Funny or Die as an online SNL model. We have access to incredible writers and directors who make the whole process super easy and quick. It’s also a very safe environment. We always operate in the best interest of the talent. None of our videos are ever mean-spirited in tone.

For example, in 2009, Lindsay Lohan was facing a media firestorm. She called us on a Tuesday, we had scripts to her by Thursday, we shot on Sunday, and the video was up on Monday. All of a sudden it seemed to reframe her in the public mind – for that week, at least.

Funny or Die wasn’t always this type of space. We really had to build up our reputation as a place for celebrities to change public perception.

Finally, we can’t talk about Funny or Die without talking about Will Ferrell. How much of a role does he have in the site these days and how much do you think his unique brand is intertwined with that of the site?

Will definitely checks in from time to time. We’ve hired the right people to ensure that his and co-founder Adam McKay’s voices are maintained. They actually brought in our head of creative, Andrew Steele, who was a head writer at SNL for 17 years.

Will’s involvement was super important coming out of the gate, especially when the Internet was still foreign to most people. Will was already an Internet celebrity, so it helped us leverage collaborators. We didn’t start out with people knocking down our doors to make a video with us.

I think that Funny or Die is something that Will is proud of because it has built itself into its own brand. We can make deals now without playing the Will Ferrell card. But the brand itself is still representative of Will and Adam’s original vision.

They started the site as a creative sandbox for all of their friends to play in, and that’s sort of what it’s become and what the attraction is.

Patrick Starzan will be speaking at 140conf, which takes place on June 15 and 16 in New York City. As the event’s official content partner, we will bring you original 140conf-related content before, during and after the conference. Sparksheet readers are entitled to a 25% discount on registration with promo code “sparksheet” - http://nyc2011.140conf.com/

We’re also nominated for Best Digital Design, which is especially exciting on the heels of this week’s big redesign. Our exceptional peers in this category include The Walrus, Toronto Life and OpenFile.

In related news, our publisher, Raymond Girard, will be speaking at the MagNet conference this afternoon about the origins and evolution of Sparksheet. Details here.

Although Sparksheet’s readers and contributors come from around the world, it’s always a thrill to be recognized in our own backyard. If you’re in the Toronto area this week, come by and say hello!

UPDATE: We won silver for best digital design! Much thanks to the judges and to all our supporters.

Our new design will allow us to bring you more content in more diverse shapes and sizes than the traditional (if you can call “new media” traditional) reverse-chronological-order blog format allowed in the past. Here are some of the major changes:

The Sparkbeat

If you’re reading this post, you’ve found your way to The Sparkbeat. We’ll be using this space to let you know what’s going on here at Sparksheet.

This is also where you’ll find our “curated content” – our unique Sparksheet-y take on the most relevant media and marketing stories around the web. As usual, the idea is for this to be a two-way conversation so we hope you’ll post lots of comments and suggestions for what we should be covering.

Columns

Our new columns section will allow us to showcase our most prolific and popular contributors. For instance, TNS Australia’s Carolyn Childs will continue to cover the space where travellers, brands and technology intersect, Alphabird’s Alex Rowland will share his expertise on the world of branded video, and ThinkState’s Gunther Sonnenfeld will wax analytic about “the business of storytelling.”

Of course, we’ll also continue to bring you our signature Engagement Checkups and insights on The Transumer, the elusive consumer in transit.

Tags vs. categories

We’ve had a major rethink about how we categorize and tag our content. In the past, we’ve felt that some of our categories have been a bit too generic (“publishing”), too esoteric (“return on engagement”), or too ambiguous (“relationships”).

Another challenge is that most Sparksheet posts don’t focus on just one topic or industry; they’re all about the unexpected connections between them.

In the new design, we reserve our categories for the different types of Sparksheet posts (Q&As, columns, etc.) and use a limitless number of tags to identify the different topics we cover. You will be able to sort through our most popular topics on our homepage, just below the carousel.

Feature articles

One of the more exciting additions to the new Sparksheet is our monthly “blogazine”-style feature articles. These in-depth pieces will incorporate the best of both print and web design standards and are our way of backing up Slate editor David Plotz’s assertion that long-form journalism is alive and well on the web.

Check out our inaugural feature, Brand New Havana, where we go to Cuba to do what may be the world’s first branded entertainment travel story.

Events, videos and comics….oh my

Other additions to the Sparksheet universe include a dedicated page for our SparksheetTV videos, and a hub for all our events-related content. And inspired in part by “marketoonist” Tom Fishburne, we’ve humbly launched our own cartoon series, Sparksauce, which offers a whimsical take on the wacky world of agencies in the digital age.

Credits

First and foremost, major props for the redesign go to Charles Lim, Sparksheet’s super-skilled and incredibly efficient Creative Director. Charles is also the guy who creates all the slick custom images and infographics on the site. Watch out for his new design column in the coming weeks.

Huge thanks also go out to the extended Sparksheet/Spafax Interactive team, which includes community manager Joey Tanny, editorial interns Erin Rubin and Dani Aaron, content strategist Elaine Lim, content manager Ian Gamache, editorial advisers Arjun Basu and Charlene Rooke, production manager Jamille Barreto, proofreader Jonathan Furze (what other marketing blog has a proofreader?), Spafax CEO Niall McBain and, of course, our ever-supportive publisher, Spafax Interactive president Raymond Girard.

And, last but not least, thanks to all our amazing contributors and readers who have made Sparksheet what it’s become in just two short years.

And as I follow the flock of package vacationers through the terminal it becomes obvious why: in this sunny time warp of an island, there is no branding. No ads for business-friendly hotels or glitzy casinos. No HSBC-stamped jet bridges or Visa-sponsored airport lounge. You don’t realize how many messages are vying for your attention until the messages stop and you’re left looking at off-white walls and fading airport signage.

We make our way down the escalator to customs and I start to wonder if I should just follow my fellow Canadians to some sandy all-inclusive; throw in the proverbial towel and fold out the beach towel. And that’s when I see it: the only ad in the airport. It’s a picture of a dark, handsome bottle with a red circle and two words written on it in white: “Havana Club.” The same brand that invited me to Havana and, as it turns out, pretty much the only brand in town.

Brand history, brand culture

The words “Havana Club” mean something different depending on where you are in the world. They were first stamped on a bottle of rum in 1878 by a 31-year-old Spanish immigrant named José Arechabala. After the 1959 revolution, Arechebala’s distillery was seized and nationalized by Fidel Castro’s new government. The family was exiled to Spain and eventually settled in the United States.

In 1994, the Cuban government relaunched the brand under a joint venture with French spirit conglomerate Pernod Ricard (there are stories of Castro keeping Pernod’s general manager waiting in his office into the wee hours of the morning). Shortly after, rival rum distiller Bacardi partnered with the Arechabala family and began distributing its own “Havana Club” label.

In this sunny time warp of an island, there is no branding. No ads for business-friendly hotels or glitzy casinos. No HSBC-stamped jet bridges or Visa-sponsored airport lounge.

For more than a decade the two companies have been entangled in a protracted trademark dispute, complicated by international law and the United States embargo against Cuban products. As it stands, both brands sell rum under the “Havana Club” name: Bacardi in the U.S. and Pernod everywhere else.

Since reviving the brand in 1994, the Franco-Cuban company has positioned itself as “Cuba’s cultural ambassador,” says François Renié, Havana Club’s global communications director and my tour guide for the trip. In 2007 Renié launched Havana Cultura, a multimedia website dedicated to showcasing contemporary Cuban culture. Eventually the site was spun out into a series of international events, a trilogy of jazz-fusion recordings produced by British DJ Gilles Peterson, and a grants program that supports young artists around the capital.

Havana Club’s latest project – and the reason they flew me down here – is a film called Seven Days in Havana. It consists of seven interwoven shorts directed by a gaggle of Spanish-speaking filmmakers, including Puerto Rican movie star Benicio Del Toro in his directorial debut. The film was written by Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura and, given Havana Club’s hands-on role in its development, represents a unique experiment in branded entertainment.

From Berlin to Havana

I didn’t expect to spend my first night in Havana touring the city with a movie star. I’m seated at the bar at El Floridita, the birthplace of the frozen daiquiri and one of Ernest Hemingway’s many “favourite haunts” (a bronze statue of the writer leans an elbow on one end of the bar). On the stool next to me is Daniel Brühl, a German-Spanish actor who starred in the nostalgic Cold War comedy Good Bye Lenin! and played a Nazi sniper in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Brühl, diminutive and charming, starts work on Seven Days in Havana tomorrow and is spending the evening hitting up several of Havana’s iconic spots for a German GQ photo shoot. I’ve been invited to tag along.

Actors Daniel Bruhl and Melvis Santa with director Julio Medem

Between sips of his daiquiri, Brühl tells me how excited he is to work in Cuba, having made his name in a film about communism but being too young to have experienced the Berlin Wall himself. He describes the bar, with its uniformed barmen and colonial air, as a “time warp” and later tells me that he “didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see the country now because it might change very soon.” This desire to bear witness to the city before it becomes unrecognizable seems to be shared by tourists and locals alike. With a fading Fidel, an influx of foreign money and a growing tolerance for private enterprise (plus a relatively dovish president in the White House) the smell of spring is in the air. There’s also the cruel notion that the crumbling art deco mansions and 60-year-old American cars that lend the city its colour can’t evade the scrap yard forever.

Old Havana, new Havana

The next morning I stop by the film set at the Riviera Hotel, a colourful mid-century modern gem built by American mobster Meyer Lansky. It’s the production’s final week and they’re shooting the first scene of “The Temptation,” Spanish director Julio Médem’s contribution to Seven Days in Havana. The film involves a love triangle between a Cuban singer (played by local musician Melvis Santa), her Cuban boyfriend, and a Spanish record producer (played by Spanish-born Brühl) who offers her a shot at a European singing career. The scene begins with Santa and Brühl’s characters meeting at the hotel bar. After some whispered flirting he kisses her and hands her a plane ticket along with the key to his room. Between takes, Brühl admits that “it’s not so bad kissing those lips over and over,” but says the characters’ relationship “doesn’t go any farther,” suggesting Santa’s character ultimately decides to stay put.

Like previous Havana Cultura projects, the film’s creators seem to be struggling with an impulse to reinforce our romantic, but not entirely healthy, notions of Havana, and a desire to refresh the city’s brand. Based on a classic Cuban novel, “The Temptation” is a “metaphor for the Cuban dilemma,” according to Médem. “Does she stay here where she is from, or does she pursue money and success elsewhere?” Médem says that the fact that this century-old story works in a contemporary context demonstrates that the city’s present is inextricably linked to its past. Fabien Pisani, one of Seven Days in Havana’s Cuban producers, describes the film as a “love letter to Cuba” and a chance to “make a film about Havana in Havana instead of Miami or Santa Cruz.” But while self-consciously avoiding Havana’s cultural and physical clichés (Buena Vista Social Club, vintage cars), the filmmakers are also trying to “capture the city before it goes away, before buildings change or crumble,” says Pisani.

In this sense, Havana Club may be an even better ambassador than it realizes. By shining a spotlight on the present, both city and brand can’t help illuminate its own complicated past.

Actor/director Benicio Del Toro (centre) near the Malecón

A branded film

Havana Club was involved with Seven Days in Havana from the beginning, Renié tells me in the Riviera lobby after we’ve watched the actors shoot the kissing scene at least a dozen times (I may never again be able to watch a Spanish film without imagining a curly-haired director yelling the words “actiones” and “corta” between scenes). The company commissioned Padura to write the script and leveraged its Havana Cultura relationships to get the city’s young talent on board. “What’s great about Cuba is we have access to any artist we want,” Renié says. “Everyone is a free agent.

While a bottle of aged Havana Club rum may show up in a scene or two, Renié tells me that the brand’s involvement with the film isn’t about product placement. Like other Havana Cultura projects, it’s about supporting Havana’s young artists and reinforcing the brand’s status as the city’s unofficial cultural curator. “We’re hoping the movie will make people fall in love with the city,” Renié says, “and we are the city’s ambassadors.”

The film’s creators seem to be struggling with an impulse to reinforce our romantic, but not entirely healthy, notions of Havana, and a desire to refresh the city’s brand.

Branded films have been made before. Douglas Scott, president of branded entertainment agency OgilvyEntertainment, points to Gatorade’s 2007 teen soccer drama Gracie. The film pretty much broke even, Scott says, though it was criticized by one reviewer as playing out “like an extended television commercial…given the very suspicious prominence of Gatorade bottles throughout.” Scott also points to Eurostar’s Somers Town as an example of a successful branded film because the train company was incorporated into the film in a way that felt organic to the story. But Havana Club’s project may be unique in its emphasis on the brand’s values, rather than its rum. “What they’re doing is really the holy grail,” Scott says. “It’s not about the product or even the brand, but about what the brand stands for.”

In a press package sent out before the trip, the film’s producers state that “Usually, we wouldn’t have thought about such a partnership. Brand [sic] and independent movie producers’ universes don’t meet that often.” But when I ask the film’s Cuban producer, Spanish director and German star how they feel about working on a “branded film,” they all seem perplexed by the question. “For me Havana Club is an investor,” says Pisani. “It’s very difficult to raise money for a film in Cuba.” Médem describes Havana Club’s involvement as a “natural collaboration,” saying that he had “no obligation to put a bottle in the film” and “no problem with the brand’s involvement.” As for Brühl, he says he thinks it’s a “great thing” if a brand wants to support local films. Besides, he adds with a smile, “they put a bottle of rum in my room.”

I’ve come here to do a story about branded entertainment but it becomes apparent that these three men don’t see Seven Days in Havana as branded entertainment at all. That’s because the film couldn’t credibly be made without having the rum brand on board. Havana Cultura has been so successful that brand Havana and brand Havana Club and have effectively become inseparable. This sort of “branded curation,” where a company makes itself indispensable to an existing culture or community, is what good advertising is all about, says Gunther Sonnenfeld, an expert in branded storytelling. “It’s not about shoehorning a brand into a story, but using story to develop a brand, Sonnenfeld says. “It’s about putting the narrative before the brand and seeing what comes out of that.” In Havana Club’s case, what has come out of Havana Cultura is a situation where the brand is shaping the city’s story as much as the other way around. The question is whether this case represents a uniquely Cuban throwback to a less competitive time, or a glimpse into the future of branding.

The bar at El Floridita

The only brand in town

On my last night in Havana I meet Renié for dinner at a foreign-run restaurant overlooking the Malecón, the seaside esplanade that locals call their “outdoor sofa.” Internationally, Havana Club is aimed at 25- to 35-year-old “cultural mavens,” he tells me between bites of lemon chicken. These are “young people who like to have fun but aren’t just looking to get drunk,” he says, alluding to archrival Bacardi’s customers. In Renié’s view, the two schools of rum drinkers can be distinguished by their musical tastes as well. In Europe, a “Havana Club bar” will tend to play jazz, soul, reggae or hip-hop while a “Bacardi bar” would favour lounge or house music, according to Renié. That’s why Bacardi’s main competitors are vodka brands such as Absolut (another Pernod Ricard property) while Havana Club “competes with beer” for the attention of more refined bar-goers.

But that’s everywhere else. In Havana, it’s hard to see how any brand can compete with Havana Club, which appears to anchor every mojito I drink during my five days in the city (and that’s quite a few). When we leave the restaurant Renié hands a tip to a parking attendant whom I notice is sporting a red Havana Club vest. I point it out to Renié who proudly states that the uniforms “may be the only advertisements in the city.” Except for the airport, of course. As I head to my gate the next morning I spot another Havana Club banner hanging from the rafters and decide to snap a photo. Then, out of nowhere, two official-looking men in suits approach me and point to the camera. I show them the picture, and after a moment, they wave me off with a smile.

So what exactly is a marketoonist?

Marketoonist is a business I’ve been slowly incubating over the last ten years before I even knew what the business idea was. I started out working in marketing and doing cartoons as a hobby.

The cartoons started to gain their own momentum, and over time I’ve started to focus on creating cartoons about marketing and have this weekly audience of about 100,000 people that read them.

A marketoonist is really shorthand for a way a brand can communicate with its customers using cartoons, and cartoons are “content worth sharing” in their own right – they’re funny, but they also have a subtle connection to what the brand stands for, so it can supplement or augment the way a brand or business communicates with those customers.

You’re a card-carrying member of the marketing community, having worked on both the brand and agency side, but most of your work seems to be devoted to smashing the industry’s sacred cows. Do you see yourself as an outside critic, or an inside observer?

I like to float back and forth. If you think about the overall category of marketing, there’s a very broad spectrum all the way from the snake oil salesman to marketing as a force for encouraging positive behaviour. What I like to do with my cartoons is put up a mirror for marketers to see themselves in a different light and potentially make changes or re-evaluate the way they do things.

Ultimately I subscribe to the Seth Godin school of marketing – that marketing is merely a remarkable story well told. That implies that you have to be doing something remarkable but also that you have to tell that story well and authentically.

And so a lot of my cartoons poke fun at or exaggerate when that doesn’t happen, but then I try to use my blog posts to show positive case studies when it’s done well.

Having been a marketer, I don’t want to critique marketing without putting myself under the magnifying lens because I’ve certainly been guilty too – I don’t see myself as a critic that’s immune to these things.

I always want every cartoon to make fun of myself and not just somebody else. When you get a collective laugh, people see themselves in the cartoons and I think that’s a positive thing.

Some of your recent cartoons poke fun at concepts like brand storytelling. Do you think brands can ever be taken seriously as content creators?

They can but they have to raise themselves to a higher standard. The big goal for a brand is to think less about their brand promise and more about their brand purpose – why are they actually there as a brand.

If your brand purpose is higher than the actual products you’re trying to sell, you can write content about that brand purpose and consumers will be interested because it will have actual, innate value to them.

If you broaden and extend what a brand stands for to a larger brand experience, and you’re creating content that’s larger than the features and benefits that you sell, then publishing becomes a natural extension of what you do. You transform yourself from being a product company to being a service company.

Your latest cartoon depicts a brand executive who seems to fundamentally misunderstand Facebook, and in the accompanying blog post you suggest that “many brands bring an advertising campaign mindset to social media.” What do you mean by that?

Social media shouldn’t be treated as a campaign because it’s an enduring part of the brand experience, not just a one-off with a beginning and an end. It’s more akin to a call centre where customers always have a connection to a brand.

I did a cartoon once that showed a legal review of a tweet. After all the red ink the tweet was far longer than 140 characters and the brand missed the event they were trying to tweet about by a week! If brands think of Facebook as a form of external communication like other forms of corporate communication they miss the dialogue and consumers can really tell.

It comes up again and again both for proactive marketing but also for reactive marketing when there’s a crisis. Brands often fall down in crisis management, take far too long to respond to customers, and that just fans the fire.

I’m reminded of your Brandtube cartoon in which an executive declares that in order to get the brand back on track all they have to do is produce a viral video. Are brands suffering from a case of inflated expectations when it comes to what social media can do?

I think they are. Everyone’s familiar with the success stories on social media, so there’s an expectation that you can just do a viral video as if it’s creating an FSI [free-standing insert] or an in-store display.

You can’t create viral media; you can create enough media with the potential to become viral. There’s a feeling that social media have a direct effect on sales when in fact it’s a far more indirect effect. If you have a long conversation over time, the indirect value is incredible. But the results are much harder to measure.

At the end of the day, I see social media predominantly as being about long-term investment and building an infrastructure. For example, a lot of brands look at their call centres as cost centres and try to minimize the amount of time that people talk to consumers. Zappos was the first one to break that and had a contest for who could stay on the phone the longest. The winner was something like six and a half hours.

You could ask what’s the ROI of the phone call, but symbolically, to say that we’re an organization that will spend that much time with a customer, it creates an incredible effect on the rest of the organization to want to go above and beyond on every consumer interaction.

It’s not a cost centre, but a value creation centre. That’s the same shift with social media – it’s an investment you make with many indirect returns.

A lot of your cartoons have to do with the creative process, and how the structure and bureaucracy of agencies sometimes get in the way of innovation. Does that come out of your own frustrations, and what are some ways we can overcome these institutional hurdles to produce more good ideas?

That definitely comes from my own experience, but also what I’ve seen everywhere. You very often have an idea that is fairly remarkable, but in the course of bringing that idea to life, the idea suffers a “death by a thousand cuts.”

The end result is often something that is mediocre, safe, and predictable – the edges have been sanded off the idea. That happens again and again whether it’s launching a new product or creating a piece of creative.

One way to break out of this is to create an organization that has the capability to make ideas stronger over time. When I worked at Method, we had floor-to-ceiling white boards on every vertical surface – we called it the Wiki Wall.

Rather than have a brainstorm once a quarter, we had an idea happen out in the open. Someone would start an idea on the corner of a wall and anyone within the organization had the ability to add to that idea. We weren’t allowed to say “Yes, but…,” only “Yes, and…” As the ideas went from inception to launch, they became stronger because everyone was adding to it.

That’s a very different approach than most companies take: leave the brainstorm and go back to the real world of the office where sacrifices are made and peace treaties are forged.

I’m creating a lot of cartoon material on that because it’s such a rich area, and it’s more crucial now than ever. In the 1950s you’d launch broadly appealing, fairly mediocre products and drive awareness through advertising. Nowadays, with the number of new products launched every year, the stakes are much higher and you need to have a remarkable product at the outset to have a chance of surviving.

There’s a great quote from the founder of Geek Squad that “advertising is a tax for unremarkable thinking” and so it pushes more that remarkable thinking to occur early on in the process rather than later.

What do you think cartoons can communicate about our world that words or other media cannot?

Seth Godin posted one of my cartoons a while ago and his main takeaway was that cartoons have this incredible power of connectivity between the reader and the cartoonist.

In having just a few simple lines, readers have to connect the dots themselves and make the connection with why the cartoon resonates with their situation. So there’s a bit of call and response.

The comments section of any cartoon that I post is often more interesting than the article that I write because people have their own interpretations and they apply it to their own situations in a way that I could never envision.

Cartooning has a long and rich history, and yet if you talk to many cartoonists, they’d say that it’s never been worse because of how newspapers are failing and the traditional paths to cartooning are broken. But cartoons have been described as the greatest loyalty engines ever created.

Nowadays, who needs loyalty engines? It’s brands. So when I look at the power of cartoons and how it can be applied to where we are today, the future is incredibly bright.

Photo by Eva Blue via Flickr

Magic. Mystery. Emotion. These are words that come to mind when I think of Cirque du Soleil’s gravity-defying shows. But they have very little to do with conventional marketing, and even less to do with social media, which is all about openness and clarity and direct communication between customers and brands.

During his talk at last month’s Tomorrow Awards, Guibert explained how the multinational Cirque brand connects with customers without diluting its core brand themes of emotion, humanity and creativity. In particular, Guibert said that Cirque:

• never uses superlatives in its press releases or promotional material. Instead, the brand focuses on emotional words like “wonder” and “journey.” Said Guibert: “If you oversell you can only under-deliver”;
• always features eye contact in its posters to emphasize the universal human appeal of its shows;
• puts every act of every show on its website for people to experience and share.

This last point is surprising, as one might expect Cirque du Soleil to preserve the magic of its performances by limiting content to ticket buyers. But Guibert said that, after a period of debate within the company, it became clear that sharing content is the best way to connect with both loyal and potential customers. We sat down with Guibert after his talk to learn about the importance of content and emotion for Cirque du Soleil.

Stop worrying about making “good ads” and start thinking about how to make advertising “good.” That was the core message of Cindy Gallop’s inspiring, TED-esque talk at last month’s Tomorrow Awards conference.

Gallop pointed out the irony in the fact that the creator of Mad Men – the advertising world’s pet TV program – was at odds with his network bosses over the fact that they wanted him to integrate more advertising into the show.

“People love advertising in particular,” Gallop said, pointing out that everyone has a favourite TV commercials or jingle, “but they hate advertising in general.”

That sense of frustration convinced Gallop, a former Chairman at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, to ditch traditional advertising for the wild west of Web activism and entrepreneurship. Her first solo venture, Make Love Not Porn, broke down some of the myths people have about sex due to the proliferation of Internet pornography (warning: link is not quite safe for work).

Her current project, IfWeRanTheWorld, is a simple Web platform that brings together people’s good intentions with corporate good intentions to turn them into “collective actions.” We sat down with Gallop after her talk to chat about why “the future of branding is action,” as she puts it.

Robert Wong (in plaid) with his black-clad fellow presenters

Everybody knows Google. Everyone uses Google. And unless you work for Microsoft or Yahoo or maybe Facebook, chances are you love Google. Which means that Robert Wong, creative head of Google’s in-house advertising agency, has the easiest job in the world, right?

Well, sort of. When I cheekily asked him this question, Wong explained that Google’s routine presence in our everyday lives can actually make it a challenge for the brand to resonate with people on an emotional level. That’s where story comes in.

During his talk at the Tomorrow Awards last month, Wong presented Google’s “Parisian Love” ad, which first ran during the 2009 Superbowl. The heartwarming spot tells the love story of an American man and a French woman as it unfolds through the guy’s Google search queries, from “study abroad Paris,” to “how to assemble a crib.”

Wong used the spot as an example of how Google tries to exceed people’s expectations through a mix of surprise, empathy and creativity (which he wrapped up into a neat, Googley algorithm). We sat down with Wong after his talk to chat more about the story of Google Creative Lab: