The social Super Bowl

Goodbye Super Bowl on TV, hello Super Bowl online: NBC and Verizon Wireless are teaming up to provide live streaming of the game for the first time. But given that the 2010 Olympics and World Cup were both available on the net, the real question is: why the wait?

Another first is the social media command centre headquartered in downtown Indianapolis, the city hosting the event. For 15 hours each day a team of 20 will assist local fans and tourists with everything from finding parking spaces to restaurants – using channels like Facebook and Twitter to do it.

And then there’s mobile discovery company Shazam. Similar to how QR codes act as portals to digital content, the Shazam mobile app ‘listens’ to sound cues in the physical environment and directs users to content online.

The NY Times reports that nearly half of this year’s Super Bowl ads will be “Shazam enabled,” meaning more consumers will be directed to more content during commercial breaks (think coupons, free videos and gift cards).

Polar bear’s first word

Coca-Cola is doing its best to distract audiences from the game on whatever device they’re using to watch it.

On Sunday people can attend the Coke Polar Bowl event on Facebook or follow the bears’ real-time reactions on Twitter. It’s a bold move for the company – the bears have never had a chance to ‘speak’ before.

More buzz is coming from another precedent-setting move: Coke execs will be on-site at NBC studios to select which version their commercial to air. Will it be the bear with the Giants or Patriots insignia who “catches” the Coke bottle?

Ferris Bueller’s Pay Off

Everyone’s a sucker for nostalgia. That’s what brands Proctor & Gamble and Honda are betting on with their spots. If they pull it off, the recession-weary audience will enjoy revisiting some iconic moments in Super Bowl commercial history.

P&G are doing a re-make of Coke’s classic Super Bowl ad “Mean Joe Greene,” replacing the can of Coke with Downy.

Honda and actor Matthew Broderick team up for a long-awaited sequel of sorts to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And Jerry Seinfeld dusts off some of his old Seinfeld catchphrases (and characters) in a spot for Nissan.

The Super Bowl is the biggest advertising event in the U.S., which means there is just too much content for one Sparkbeat post to cover. We haven’t mentioned VW’s “The Dog Strikes Back,” why Pepsi Max chose to go gimmicky, or whether GE’s decision to ditch celebrity glitz will pay off, for instance.

But given that most of these commercials already have millions of views on YouTube, and NBC’s post-game Google+ Hangout is already scheduled to discuss and decide which ad was best, it looks like we needn’t worry. Thanks social media – see you at the game.

As someone who used to work at a sports bar, I understand the chaos that occurs during the Super Bowl. I had the pleasure of working at Buffalo Wild Wings as a waitress in Chicago in 2007 when the Bears made it all the way to that last game. This was the first time in 21 years that our team made it, and boy did I underestimate the amount of excitement that was in store for me when I walked through those doors.

I was being high-fived and hugged by complete strangers as I tried to deliver mozzarella sticks, our usually-quiet phone systems were ringing off the hook, the wings were taken out of my hands before I even set down the plate, and I was hit several times with blowup footballs that my managers so kindly gave away to one of my tables. Needless to say, the sport has a following in North America.

Literally. The sport has a huge following on Twitter. Not only do the majority of the players and announcers have their own personal Twitter accounts, but the National Football League (NFL) has its own account with roughly 2,799,121 followers. In other words, social media has a big impact when it comes to the reputation of the game. Twitter works like a domino effect: The NFL could tweet something, and then one of their followers tweets it to their followers, and so on and so forth.

Fan and player interaction

Defensive Justin Tuck of the New York Giants. Image via nfl.com

As with any other big TV event these days, social media gives fans an opportunity to interact with others watching the game. This makes it more fun. When I think about my uncle who lives in a house with four football-hating women (even the dog is a girl), I think about how much he enjoys being able to trash-talk on Twitter. It’s a way for fans to connect (and compete) with others who are watching the game in a different place.

The interaction between fan and player has also changed, as players now have the ability to talk directly with fans via their personal accounts. For example, New England Patriots’ superstar quarterback Tom Brady can explain to fans (after the game) that the reason he fell at a pivotal moment is that an opponent grabbed his facemask. So social media is also an opportunity for athletes to maintain their own personal brands.

Watching it for the ads

Finally, we have those advertisements to discuss. Brands have been leveraging the Super Bowl, America’s biggest TV event, for years with blockbuster commercials and special Super Bowl deals. But brands have also begun to increase their social media efforts before, during, and after the game.

A scene from one of the five competing Doritos Super Bowl ads

Budweiser ran a campaign on Facebook that asks fans to guess Super Bowl scores and answer Super Bowl trivia in order to win special deals.

Pizza Hut bought a “promoted tweet” for #ReadySetHut so that Twitter followers would consider buying their product for the big game. Meanwhile, both Doritos and Pepsi let fans vote via Facebook on which commercial would air during the game.

In other words, whether or not you’re a fan, there are plenty of good reasons to watch the Super Bowl.

Check out our roundup of this year’s best Super Bowl ad campaigns.

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

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.

Johnnie Walker was applauded for its newly-branded vision of Chinese progress. In its ‘Vision of Words’ or ‘Yulu’ campaign, BBH and Ogilvy & Mather targeted the “fickle” young adult demographic by showcasing 12 success stories of Chinese pioneers from all walks of life. The ads struck a chord, winning them Best Use of Content.

Keeping up its winning streak, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia scooped up the Best Use of Mobile Technology at both the Global and Asian editions of the awards with its Property Guide iPhone app.

The app lets shoppers access information about past sales history, current property listings and recent property sales simply by snapping a photo.

And thanks to handy features like financial tools, consumer guides, click-to-call functionality and instant dialing to CBA, the app has resulted in over 1.2 million property searches to date.

The National Australian Bank also saw success, picking up the Best Communication Strategy Award for its quirky ‘Break Up’ campaign.

Teaming up with ZenithOptimedia and Clemenger BBDO, the bank capitalized on public perception that all banks are similar by staging a nationwide, multiplatform “break up” with its three main competitors.

The ensuing 100,000 visits to their Break Up blog and extensive media coverage resulted in $5 million of earned media and more than 225,000 new customers.

Innovation also came out of Vietnam, where Unilever used Augmented Reality technology to get through to grocery market consumers and ultimately, to take home the award for Best In-Store Activation.

Consumers stand in front of a screen at the entrance of a store. From there, they see themselves interacting on-screen with Unilever’s Comfort fabric softener, its virtual “perfume bubbles” and its mascot, Andy.

Taking top spot in the Creative Use of Media category was Coca-Cola along with UM and the McCann WorldGroup, for their interactive ‘Chok’ or ‘Swing’ TVC ad.

The campaign reinvented their under-the-cap concept for digital media with an app that had viewers waving their phones at their TVs during Coca-Cola’s TVC ads.

The aim is to “catch” virtual bottle caps, which are redeemable for prizes including movie tickets, travel coupons, sports apparel – and in some cases – cars.

Tapping into the rapidly-changing realities of the Asian consumer base has proven to be an interesting challenge for advertisers and brands

With increasing access to a growing array of products, Asian consumers have come to expect creativity and innovation, offering further proof that great, platform agnostic storytelling will pave the way to new, emerging markets.

Though critics are deeming it the invasion of society’s last private and sacred space, others feel it’s about time we start creating a branded experience out of our time spent on the can.

Granted, bathroom advertising isn’t exactly new. But seeing as studies place average retention rates for bathroom ads at 84 percent, a growing number of brands are vying for those undisclosed minutes of your undivided attention.

This ad for Coca-Cola’s Japanese beverage, Georgia Max Coffee, has the bathroom-goer feeling the adrenaline rush of an alpine half-pipe jump as he/she settles in for relief.

Sports broadcasting giant ESPN has taken the notion of “interactive advertising” to a whole new level by turning your trip to the loo into an opportunity to step up your game.

Marketers are also using gaming content to drive home important public service messages. In 2007 Frankfurt Taxi Services teamed up with Saatchi & Saatchi to post unique ads in German bars.

The idea was for bar patrons to question their ability to drive as they guided (and inevitably totalled) a virtual vehicle with their urine stream. A message then appeared on screen, warning against the risks of getting behind the wheel. 

This PSA, created by Ogilvy Brazil, encourages people who may be suffering from schizophrenia to seek help by featuring an unsettling figure glaring at them from the far corner of the bathroom mirror.

With this ad adorning the exit door of the bathroom and serving up some scary statistics, you’re likely to think twice about exiting the bathroom without washing your hands.

If you haven’t walked out of the dirty door hoping to change the world, you might just be willing to change the way you go to the bathroom. In this case, P-Mate, creator of an innovative female hygiene product, opted for guerrilla marketing tactics by having women dare to assert their “freedom to pee standing up.”

The team switched male and female bathroom signs and led the confused ladies straight into the men’s washroom – and to its patiently waiting urinals.

Whether your next trip to the loo has you changing perspectives, old habits or transportation plans, it’s a given that someone’s vying for your attention. But brands should tread carefully. When it comes to advertising in bathrooms, it’s a slippery slope between entertaining and invasive.

Fat Tire’s success is rooted in community. In the old, basement-brewing days, Lebesch would offer samples of his homebrew to everyone – from friends and fellow brewers to cowboys and microbiologists.

Two decades later the brewery’s “high involvement culture,” as it puts it, has carried into the digital realm through a variety of Facebook pages, apps and other social platforms that harness the passion, conversation and sense of community that go along with a good beer.

From Barstool to Facebook Wall

Craft brewers are bold. Shunning the ways of big, watered-down commercial breweries, they are known for their innovation and non-traditional ingredients. Good brewers also know their customers personally, be it through philanthropy, volunteerism, sponsorship of local events or by sharing – or even creating – a beer with them.

Dean Browell, Executive Vice President of Feedback Agency, a social media consultancy based in Richmond, Virginia and London, England, has been a longtime friend to the beer community and counts a growing number of impressive keynotes under his belt at the annual Craft Brewers Conference.

“Craft beer is a source of experimentation and taste that lends itself to discussion, exploration and more,” says Browell, whose PhD thesis focused on generational differences and online technologies. “It’s one of those drinks that sparks conversation and practically requires you to drink with others, daring interaction.”

Online these qualities are reflected in the communities that have sprung up in and around specific breweries and beers, and between craft brewers themselves.

While they might not always have deep pockets like commercial brands, craft brewers have repeatedly launched social media campaigns that yield results.

An app on New Belgium’s Facebook page, “Share Your Joy Ride,” asks brew fans to create and share their own Fat Tire labels by uploading photos. During the summer months, winning beer label creators were awarded with a special 20th-anniversary edition Fat Tire cruiser bike.

Not content to settle for just one app, New Belgium offers a variety of branded Facebook apps, such as FoodBuzz (for sharing New Belgium-inspired recipes), Beer Ranger (for connecting local brew pages that are geographically relevant), and Mighty Arrow, a partnership with Outside magazine that sees one dollar of every download donated to local animal protection agencies (at the time of writing, the app had been downloaded more than 10,000 times).

The brewery’s Facebook page boasts almost 200,000 “Likers” who routinely share their hobbies and passions with the brand, and most importantly, buy their beer; New Belgium is now the third-largest craft brewery, and seventh-largest overall brewery, in the United States.

QR at the Bar

Brewing was once but a hobby for Colorado homebrewers Jeff and Stephanie Crabtree. Today the husband-and-wife duo crank out more than 900 barrels a year, along with a hefty dose of digital media.

Like many craft brewers, Jeff Crabtree thrives on direct interaction with customers. While he can’t sit at the bar with everyone who tips back Crabtree’s tasty creations, since September he has slapped QR codes on his beer bottles that allow him to engage with customers the new-fashioned way.

Anyone who orders a Berliner Weisse Ale – an old-style German wheat ale – can scan the QR code on the bottle’s label with their mobile device and view a video message from Jeff Crabtree himself who delivers the lowdown on the brew they’re about to imbibe.

Crabtree drinkers have an opportunity to hatch the next installment in the Digital Age series, by subscribing to an exclusive email list that allows them to keep the relationship going and ultimately decide on the next QR-inspired brew.

By adding a digital signpost to a real-world object, craft brewers have created an ideal inbound marketing tool. While beer lovers tip one back, brewers can collect data on their customers and measure the results of their campaign in real time.

Check-in to Your Beer

With location-based services all the rage, it comes as no surprise that there’s already a crowded market of mobile apps that allow users to “check in” to their favorite pint. One of the most popular is Untappd (think Foursquare for beer geeks), which provides an interactive beer rating and recommendation system.

Untappd users can literally place smaller, independent beers on the map by sharing what they’re drinking and where. Touting over one million check-ins, Untappd is available free on Android and iOs and can be synched with Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter.

Back to the Real World

Proving that the craft brew community is just as strong in the non-digital world, the East Atlanta Beer Festival recently

launched Re:Brew, a free iPhone app that helped concert-goers find – and rate – the best craft beers at this summer’s festival.

As people rated and chatted about their favourite microbrews at the festival, the event’s beer list was adjusted to highlight the most popular offerings.

Beer festivals aside, Twitter is flush with hashtags that paint a picture of the growing American passion for craft beer. Brewers & Union, based in South Africa, provides an ongoing chance to win a case of craft beer each week by simply tagging tweets with #idrinkcraft.

Whether it’s through Facebook pages, check-in apps or hashtags, craft brewers are giving macro-produced beers – and their marketing whiz kids – a run for their money. Most craft brewers live by a simple motto: No crap on tap. And now they’re bringing that philosophy to the digital marketing space.

As it turns out, the big earners aren’t just innovative – most of them are young and funny.

Epic endorsements

The weekly anti-cooking show Epic Meal Time started out as an inside joke among friends, but as 25-year-old host Harley Morenstein’s cooking (and eating) adventures began gaining in popularity on YouTube, he quit his job as a substitute teacher and now lives off the income the show generates through advertising.

Believe it or not, those dollars don’t come from product placement (they consume copious amounts of Jack Daniels during each episode). Rather, it’s Netflix, Gamefly, and GoDaddy among others that are earning them the big bucks through referral marketing. Essentially, the cooking team promotes these brands by offering deals on their website and sometimes in the videos themselves. When their fans use the referral codes, they profit.

The college try

Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, both writers for CollegeHumor, have made it big online with their comedy sketch series, Jake and Amir, which airs twice a week on CollegeHumor.com and YouTube.

The three-minute sketches draw an average of 500,000 views per episode. Now CollegeHumor is going to see whether fans are willing to invest in what they continue to get for free. The duo has just put out a 30-minute episode called “Fired” which fans can stream for $3 via CollegeHumor’s site and Facebook.

They can also purchase the DVD for $13. The verdict is still out as to whether this strategy will pay off, though if it does, we should expect to see other popular web series give it the new college try.

6-year-old angst

Since 2006 Lucas Cruikshank has been serving up videos starring the fictional character Fred Figglehorn, a high-pitched 6-year-old with anger management issues. While Cruikshank generates income from YouTube ads, last year saw the premiere of the Nickelodeon-backed film Fred: The Movie, which was widely panned by critics.

His channel remains one of the most popular on YouTube, and he’s even partnered on sketches with an equally successful private channel, The Annoying Orange.

The old-fashioned way

It seems that YouTube viewers can’t get enough of young comedians with a penchant for gross-out humour, as Shane Dawson can certainly attest.

The 23-year-old has not just one but three successful YouTube channels, which, according to TubeMogul, have earned him a combined total of 431,787,450 page views and $315,000 through ads, proving that mouse clicks and income still go hand in hand.

Digital advertising campaigns are like snowflakes: no two are alike.

But buyers of digital video advertising still spend money the way they do on display ads. That’s like paying the same price for a 30-second video spot that you would for a billboard, banner ad, or magazine spread. When it comes to video content, it’s about paying for time – not just space.

Dynamic as they can be, the cold, hard fact is that videos simply take longer to deliver a message than static images or simple animations do. In other words, it takes consumers more (and more valuable) energy to absorb them.

Adherence to impression-based ad models in television was understandable given the rigidity of the delivery platform and the metrics available to buyers. But digital delivery of video ads is enabling a rapid evolution in the diversity of syndication methods and the incentive structures buyers can use to compensate their delivery partners.

One clear outcome of this trend has been the rise of performance-based pricing models.

Online advertising 101

First things first, let’s do a quick rundown of impression-based buying and performance-based buying:

Impression-based video advertising comes largely in the form of pre-roll video and in-banner video. These units are easy for buyers to understand because they keep with the display paradigm of buying on a Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) impressions of the advertisement. These impressions do not require consumer interaction and are typically bought for pennies (sometimes even less) and are governed by broadcast principals such as reach and frequency.

Image by The Inspiration Room via Flickr

Performance-based video advertising is typically priced on a cost-per-user-initiated view (CPV) basis. A CPV is a consumer interaction metric that looks a lot like buying a click on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis from Google AdWords. These interactions are typically bought for north of a dime and are governed by principals such as keyword targeting (like search terms) and conversions (the percentage of times a click results in the advertiser’s desired action).

At the end of the day, video advertisers require only two things from the consumer to do their job effectively: time and attention.

The primary advantage buyers have with performance-based pricing is that they can provide distribution partners with the financial incentive to deliver viewers who opt in to the ad experience and are most likely to be paying attention to the message for the duration of the ad.

The current standard in performance-based pricing, the CPV, allows advertisers to achieve the same goals with less “waste.”

With growing frequency, CPV pricing is being used to purchase audiences for viral videos, as well as branded long-form video content, because consumers’ intentions consistently dovetail with their desired actions.

In short, the viewer’s initial interest in an advertisement translates into engaging with what’s being advertised with growing regularity.

Monetizing attention

CPV pricing is not the last stop on this journey. For one thing, it doesn’t fully capture the duration of consumer attention or the quality of interaction. A consumer who clicks to watch a branded video and then leaves after five seconds is priced like someone who watches an entire six-minute-long branded video with CPV.

As performance pricing continues to evolve over the next several years, here are a few trends that are likely to emerge:

Buying video is going to look like buying search

Video buyers are already looking at video advertising as a hybrid between search and display buying. Most major agencies that have search buyers on staff use them to buy sponsored views on YouTube through AdSense, like any other search buy.

And unlike display buyers who look most intently at metrics like lift in purchase intent and brand awareness, video search buyers look at metrics like conversions and actual purchases as well.

Increasingly, delivery channels for CPV video buys will be judged by these same metrics, which should result in greater diversity of CPV pricing both up and down.

Performance pricing is coming to in-banner and in-stream video

In-banner video networks are being pushed to charge on user-initiated views rather than autoplay views, which can be intrusive, unwelcome and – let’s just say it – annoying for users.

In pre-roll, advertisers are paying CPV rates for pre-rolls that they have the option of skipping (like YouTube’s Cost-Per-Completed Pre-roll product).

Interactivity will become even more important

If you look at videos produced by top YouTube talent you will notice that they’re filled with calls to action and “hotspots” that drive the user to another video.

The reason this is so ubiquitous on YouTube is that producers know these calls to action work. As advertisers become more concerned about hitting specific performance metrics, providing this type of interactivity in any piece of video will become more and more commonplace.

Earned media will earn its place

In much the same way that social media is permeating every other aspect of our online existence, video will follow suit.

In social media, the audience becomes a key distributor of advertising. For social video advertising, the success of a campaign is frequently measured by the number of views that were earned through people watching a video, and then sharing it as advocates.

The future of performance

The bottom line is that performance-based video buying is going to continue to become more complex over the next several years. Armed with new pricing models, metrics, and delivery channels, buyers will continue to find new ways to use video to boost sales.

Expect video to start being used throughout the sales funnel, from ensuring that viewers spend enough time with their ad, to helping close the sale of a product, to helping existing customers remain loyal.

Amid this flurry of complicated and unique advertising opportunities, why not let it snow?

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.

Customers have changed, marketing channels have changed, and so have the marketing agencies that serve brand marketers.

Digital agencies dot the landscape with a broad selection of services, from search engine marketing to social media to content marketing.

These niche agencies complement – and often compete with – much larger, do-it-all advertising agencies that are aggressively adding new digital services to their traditional creative and media offerings.

The growing complexity of the agency ecosystem raises a key question: How do brands pick the best agency – or more likely, agencies – to suit their evolving needs and reach a changing customer base?

Everyone is going digital

As consumers spend more of their time online and on social and mobile channels, marketing budgets are also increasingly focused on digital.

Revenues from social media advertising will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, surpassing the $8-billion mark in 2015, according to BIA/Kelsey. Meanwhile, eConsultancy predicts that search engine marketing will grow 16 percent in 2011 to $19.3 billion.

Advertising and PR agencies are getting into the content development space, and media companies are getting into the marketing mix in a symbiotic convergence around content marketing.

In a March 2011 study by the Custom Content Council, 59 percent of CMOs said they had shifted marketing funds from traditional advertising to custom content over the past year. In the B2B sector, content marketing is expected to account for nearly 26 percent of marketing expenditures this year.

With the increasing fragmentation of media channels, many CMOs might be content to continue their traditional “agency of record” relationships, relying on one primary agency to coordinate an increasingly diverse marketing mix.

And with marketers now increasingly under intense scrutiny from CEOs and CFOs looking for tangible ROI before giving budget approval, and analytics being more sophisticated than ever, the need for marketers to be more accountable to the bottom line is becoming increasingly important.

So does it really make sense for brand marketers to turn the keys to the castle over to a single agency?

The benefits of a multi-agency approach

To get more out of their agency investments, brands are beginning to outsource increasingly narrower slices of their marketing efforts to specialized agencies.

Because they are smaller and focus on a specific area of expertise – social media or custom content, for example – these agencies tend to be more agile and more adept at delivering services that meet brands’ specific campaign needs.

This best-of-breed approach offers three important benefits to brand marketers:

Accountability. Agencies that manage specific campaigns, channels or tasks can be tracked more accurately against campaign objectives.

Agility. Smaller agencies often possess a nimbleness that allows them to adapt quickly to changing markets and customer needs.

Targeted expertise. Vertical agencies focus on doing one or two things well, which means they often do these activities better than generalists.

Making the right agency choices

So how do marketing executives separate the wheat from the chaff when assembling a roster of agency partners?

Begin with your corporate objectives. Don’t allow an agency to pitch you on increasing gross rating points or impressions – metrics that don’t necessarily align with your business objectives.

Take the lead. CMOs should not delegate the task of managing agency relationships to mid- and lower-level employees. Overseeing multiple agencies requires a top-down view of how all the partners fit together and how they are expected to collaborate on various campaigns or other marketing initiatives.

Tough love. Don’t fall in love with your agency partners. Establish clear and frequent milestones by which to measure their performance, and if they’re not delivering, replace them quickly.

Playing the field

Marketing is undergoing dynamic changes that are forcing brands to view customer and client relationships through a new lens – one that requires the right message, delivered at the right time, through the right channel.

Rare is the single agency that can help brand marketers to deliver fully on that promise; instead, CMOs should develop a deep roster of agency partners that are nimble, accountable, and possess specific skills that drive results.

This piece is an excerpt from the new King Fish Media e-book “How to Choose the Right Marketing Agency,” edited and adapted for Sparksheet. 

When Pepsi launched in China, according to legend, the brand made the mistake of translating its slogan, “Come alive with the Pepsi generation,” a touch too literally.

Pepsi accidentally promised Chinese consumers that the soft drink would make their ancestors rise from the dead. Instead, sales plummeted.

Examples of mistranslation mishaps in marketing are endless and hammer home the point that if a brand is going to succeed abroad, it needs to make sure its message is culturally relevant.

Speaking the language

In 1997, Nike pulled its Air sneakers off the market after receiving complaints that the shoe's "flaming air" symbol resembled the Arabic form of God's name.

As you might expect, language is the major barrier for brands looking to break into new markets. You just can’t rely on English-only marketing when more than half of all Google searches are conducted in a language other than English, and 72 percent of consumers require information in their own language before buying a product.

What’s more, recent stats show that foreign language use experienced massive growth between 2000 and 2008. Arabic usage alone increased by a whopping 2064 percent.

Since your website is often the gateway to your brand, it’s important to make sure it works across cultures, languages and borders.

Don’t rely on translation tools

Free translation tools like Google Translate are great, but they’re no substitute for professional translation. Just ask Coors, whose famous catchphrase ‘Turn it Loose’ infamously promised Spanish beer drinkers that a bottle of Coors would give them diarrhea – hardly an appealing prospect for customers looking to relax with a nice cold beer on a summer day.

Automated translation tools and dictionaries might be useful for looking up a single word or phrase, but when your reputation is at stake you can’t afford to take the risk. Don’t skimp on this area – have your website and marketing material professionally translated.

Image via blog.evacuum.com

Beware of cultural faux pas

When you don’t know the language and cultural norms of a society, it’s very easy for your message to be misinterpreted. Take Colgate, for example. When the personal care giant introduced its new toothpaste Cue in France, it didn’t have a clue that a popular porn magazine existed with the same name.

Swedish vacuum cleaner brand Electrolux found out that mistranslation mishaps work both ways when they tried to import their slogan to the UK; “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux” just didn’t sound very appealing to English ears [Editor's note: this example of  a brand blunder seems to fall under the category of "urban myth;" apparently the Swedes were well-aware of the double entendre].

Avoiding such cultural gaffes is fairly easy if you take care to have your web page and marketing products localized by native speakers. They’ll be aware of the cultural and linguistic subtleties of the place, and will know instinctively how to avoid offensive and inappropriate content.

Lost in Translation: IKEA's FARTFULL workbench (2004) elicited giggles from the Swedish company's English-speaking customers (Note: This post previously misidentified the word's origin as German. Thanks to reader @Sven for the correction).

Search by location

If you want your brand to rank highly in local search engines, register a domain name for each country you’re targeting. If you want more customers from China, for example, you should register the domain name www.mybusiness.cn.

Likewise, Google may be a household verb at your home, but some countries have popular search engines of their own. Baidu is big in China and Yandex is hot in Russian-speaking countries, for example. A little research into your target markets will certainly pay off.

And whether they find your website through search or not, IP geolocation tools will let  you pinpoint the location of each visitor based on their IP address, and automatically displays the homepage in their respective language. But don’t just assume that all your page visitors from Argentina want to view the page in Spanish; allow online users to select the language manually.

Multilingual branding may look like hard work but it’s certainly worth the effort. After all, your brand is the first thing consumers see and – as the saying goes – “there’s no second chance to make a first impression.”

Did I get that right?

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.

Happening now in Cannes, France, from June 19-25, the festival is a global summit for communications industry professionals to celebrate their achievements, forecast digital and marketing trends, and learn from their peers. Above all else, the Lions are the industry’s most prestigious awards show.

Over four evenings during the course of the week, Grand Prix, Gold, Silver, and Bronze Lions are handed out in 13 categories to shortlisted entries, selected from more than 28,000 submissions.

Some of the winners already crowned include Droga5 and Bing’s integrated scavenger-hunt campaign for Jay-Z’s Decoded autobiography, which sent fans dashing around New York to piece together pages from the rap mogul’s first book. It also left judges speechless (and out of breath), taking home top prize in the Outdoor category.

Romanian candy bar producer ROM also caused a stir by changing their nationalist packaging to an American flag. The wrapper switch caused a massive public outcry in Romania, resulting in a wildly successful campaign and two Grand Prix awards in the Direct and Promotion & Activation categories.

Cannes also offers a smorgasbord of seminars, workshops, master classes and exhibits. Conducted by industry and media big-wigs such as Sir Martin Sorrell, Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong, and paneled by popular personalities such as JoBro Nick Jonas and Martha Stewart, the events cover a range of topics, from “the future of mobility and marketing,” to “storytelling and the technology that fuels it.”

At Monday’s Kraft Foods seminar, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell stressed the importance of tweaking ideas over innovating them, pointing out how Facebook was not the first social network, only the most successful.

On Wednesday, Google Executive Chairman (and Cannes Lions 2011 Media Person of the Year) Eric Schmidt took the stage to discuss a world with no credits cards and fewer car crashes, the future according to Google.

You can follow the action on Twitter @Cannes_Lions/#canneslions, or on the event’s official site: www.canneslions.com

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.

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.

For Coca-Cola, this has become quite an exploration. While seizing market share is an ongoing battle with rival brand Pepsi, tapping into consumer advocacy and niche communities has become an equally important brand goal – a goal that was achieved almost by accident, with results that not only boosted sales but presented a host of new media opportunities.

Branding happiness

In 2007, Coca-Cola ran a series of commercials for a campaign called Open Happiness; the spots were beautifully conceived, animated brushstrokes of colour and imagination, depicting a storyworld centred around the idea that happiness is what we create for ourselves in our everyday lives.

They featured Coke as more than a product or brand, but as a support base for individual explorations around the meaning of happiness. There was no harsh product placement or forced messaging. The commercials tested remarkably well.

Coke knew that there was a bigger narrative to explore here, so it decided to expand the commercials into different narrative pieces leveraging established music and artist communities. What became the Happiness Factory created a groundswell of interest around the “metastory” of happiness that culminated in a variety of media types that were adopted, shaped and shared as new stories. This involved everything from mobile applications, to games, blogs and video extensions.

Eventually those pieces blew out even further. Open Happiness kickstarted a world tour of Coke bloggers and laid the foundation for platforms like Coca-Cola Conversations, in which brand stewards curate interesting and fun social artifacts such as Eric Clapton signature guitars, secret soda formulas, subway murals, circus caravans, old inventory lists and a host of cool memorabilia that have been generated or supported by the brand over the years.

As for the measurable success of the Open Happiness campaign to date, we know this:

• There are more than 25 million likes on Coca-Cola’s Facebook page, which is centered around Open Happiness (by contrast, Pepsi has less than 4 million likes).
• Coca-Cola’s worldwide sales have spiked since Open Happiness began.
• Open Happiness has become the new global platform for all integrated marketing for the brand.
• Earlier this year, Coke was awarded the “Best in Show” Addy award for the campaign.

Here’s where curation and community come in

Open Happiness has marked a profound shift in the way we might look at brands as expressions of culture at large. It has also forced us to look at why stories are so meaningful to us as people who consume products, and who directly or indirectly seek out the value of products beyond their consumption.There are some important things to take away from this:

• The social web was still in its early infancy when Open Happiness began, yet the narrative tapped into a cultural vein that culminated in new stories and spread like wildfire. The campaign transcended its own media by connecting niche communities of people, including artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, animators, politicians and activists.

• The narrative had such scale for adoption and growth that it eventually could be applied to a number of channels, and in unique ways – each mobile app, game, blog, podcast and online video extension told its own version of the narrative, and still does.

• Narrative development doesn’t have to find its origins in a new idea (many would argue that there are no new ideas); most stories already exist – they just need to be extracted and cultivated. This is what has made Open Happiness a platform with indefinite scale and unlimited possibility.

Making the story

This initiative also brings to light an important consideration: If a brand doesn’t already have legacy value – affinities that people already express for the product – it should create it through story. If a brand already has legacy value it should harness it.

Open Happiness has drawn upon Coke’s legacy value, and has turned that story into new brand equities that are rooted in everyday culture.

A common assumption among marketers is that consumers will engage with and participate in whatever a brand has to offer through things like social media. But brands need to invite people into a dialogue, either related to the brand, their own experiences or something that inspires them to participate and create their own forms of media.

In other words, brands should become better storymakers, not just better marketers who push their own agendas through the media channels they choose. More on that next time.

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:

Do you think story can really play a role on a screen that’s meant to be engaged with in terms of seconds?

I think it depends on the concept and on the story you are trying to convey. If you attempt to capture people’s attention by expecting them to watch something in 15 seconds, you’ve fundamentally failed.

If you go back to creating an old-school style of press ad in terms of a stopper – something that has stopping power when you walk past it – that glance only takes a second to understand. Then you can roll into a story where you’ve got their undivided attention.

You have to be very aware of your audience and be clever about how you communicate. Through digital outdoors, you still need to get people’s attention, but you have additional benefits including interactivity, built-in cameras, and eyeball detection.

This was used in a great Amnesty ad about domestic abuse: The violence went away when someone looked at the poster, and it started again when the person looked away – just like it does in reality.

The digital billboard is still being used and created for like a poster, but it’s not a poster. It’s an interactive format, it’s a server, it’s a wireless connection, it’s a touch-screen device. You have to think about it as a content management system. You have to think about the possibilities that the medium can deliver, and then you can create stand-out campaigns.

You’ve worked and won awards in both the online and offline marketing worlds. Do you foresee a world where the two will go hand in hand?

We just created a campaign for one of our clients where users can create things on Facebook that feed to outdoor screens. So we’re now taking online content and placing it in offline environments.

This type of campaign is exciting; it can drive revenue for the client and generate fame for the product, and it creates a need for advertising, which could ultimately include branded content from television sponsorships and programs.

Ultimately it depends on who your audience is. If they’re 65-70, which the majority of the world is going to be soon, then some of those people might be more interested in passive media like television. There wouldn’t be much point in doing a Facebook campaign for them.

Once you understand where your target audience or customer is, then you can develop a campaign and select the media that will interact with them in their space. We don’t expect them to come to us; we place a lot of our content where we think they might be.

I always say, “Never technology for technology’s sake.” The technologies should enhance the ideas and, ultimately, deliver a better experience.

But that’s starting to change. Smart brands and savvy advertisers are using screens to engage passersby in a creative, entertaining and memorable way. Technological advancements in touchscreens, gestural interface and facial recognition software are making rich, interactive out-of-home campaigns a reality.

Photo via USA Today

Change in store

The retail sector is one area experiencing a boom in digital signage. Companies like Best Buy and Walmart have networks of screens throughout their stores that help promote products, inform customers and allow advertisers to reach customers directly at the point of purchase. Content on the Best Buy On network includes everything from digital photography tutorials and interviews with movie directors to the ABCs of 3-D televisions.

At the recent National Retail Federation convention, Intel unveiled a seven-foot interactive holographic glass and LCD display that lets customers explore merchandise, find out about promotions, read customer reviews and share their discoveries via social media and mobile apps. Brands such as Adidas, Best Buy, Kraft Foods and Proctor & Gamble, in addition to researchers at the MIT Media Lab, worked with Intel to create these experiences.

Photo via www.thisadvertneedsyou.com

Customization: One size doesn’t fit all

Moving on to the streets, targeted digital billboards can help make out-of-home advertising feel less impersonal. In another first, Castrol, with execution by Ogilvy, Mindshare and ClearChannel, designed specially positioned cameras to recognize car models and registrations as they drove by. Further up the road, a digital billboard displayed a recommendation for which Castrol oil would best suit the car.

JCDecaux used weather gauges to create intelligent billboards that advertise thirst quenching beverages when the sun is shining and cold and flu medication on a wet day.

While it may seem like we’re getting into Minority Report territory here, the idea of transforming what many view as ad clutter into a one-to-one medium makes billboards both more relevant for consumers and more efficient for advertisers.

From advertainment to public service

InWindow’s urban tornado campaign is a great example of how digital signage can build buzz while entertaining people on their daily journey. To promote the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers program, they recreated the experience of a tornado in New York City, complete with fans to simulate wind. Pedestrians were able to have their photos taken and share them with their social networks.

Photo via ericmorello.com

On a more serious note, this example of an ad for Amnesty International to raise awareness about domestic abuse, includes a camera sensor that can “see” when someone is looking at the ad. Face the ad and see a normal happy couple standing side by side. Turn away and the man attacks the woman. The tagline: “It happens when nobody is watching.”

3-D, anyone?

3-D is all the rage these days. 3-D advertising specialists 3D Exposure claim that 3-D public displays have “four times the stopping power of standard 2-D advertisements, up to 10 times the average dwell time [and an] increased brand recall rate.”

ClearChannel recently released what it claims to be the world’s first 3-D movie poster for Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief. But so far technological limitations have prevented 3-D from making much headway in out-of-home advertising. Once glasses-free technology becomes more developed, expect 3-D ads to show up in a public space near you.

The shape of things to come

As younger consumers turn away from traditional media, innovative and interactive digital campaigns are becoming an invaluable way to reach the increasingly important millennial crowd.

With mobile adoption, post-recession marketing budgets and screen technology on the ascent, the out-of-home industry is poised to come out of its shell.

Sparksheet is the official media partner of Love Content, an international showcase of digital-out-of home storytelling. This is part of a series of original think pieces and in-depth Q&As built around the initiative.

Travel Marketing

Caribou Coffee warms up potential customers by transforming bus shelters into branded experiences.

Southwest Airlines turns direct-connect into direct revenue – a competitive advantage they do not intend to share.

ITB encourages travel suppliers to establish trust with consumers before moving into social media marketing.

Media + Magazines

AOL takes aim at Flipboard with its new interactive magazine app, Editions – “The magazine that reads you.”

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reports that few business executives believe their companies use social media effectively.

The Independent demonstrates how newspapers and Facebook can work together to create a personalized media experience for readers.

Branded Content + Entertainment

With digital screens, real-time images and sounds, facial recognition, and some high-power fans, Discovery Channel series “Storm Chasers” comes to life when the “Urban Tornado” campaign touches down on the streets of New York City.

Tostitos focuses on making connections, using its Facebook page to launch an emotional social media campaign that reunites consumers with friends and loved ones.

Pizza Hut joins forces with Movies on Demand in an effort to entertain customers while they wait for their deliveries.

Love Content is all about celebrating media that exist on screens outside of the home, which is nothing new in the marketing world. After all, billboards have been around forever. So why now?

Although digital billboards have been around for a while, they haven’t really represented much of a creative opportunity. Up until now, they’ve mostly been seen as an opportunity to put more posters up on the same screen.

What’s changing is (a) the technology, which is enabling billboards with rich media and high resolution graphics and (b) the rise of other new digital formats which offer a host of creative possibilities. Digital media are now appearing everywhere, opening up new communication channels and challenging creatives to go back to the drawing board with their campaigns.

Eventually the success of these digital media will depend upon creatives rising to this challenge and creating engaging content that drives adoption. The Love Content site and gallery is all about celebrating and promoting that work.

At Sparksheet we’re obsessed with the idea that people are in a unique headspace when they’re out of the home and on the go. How should marketers take this into account when creating content for the consumer in transit?

The key point here is that DOOH [Digital Out of Home] is not just one category or “one execution.” Transit is just one of many digital out-of-home categories and it encapsulates many different types of consumer mindset.

From sitting on a plane to racing through a terminal, there’s a whole host of mindset considerations that are unique to the moment. Dwell time is a key consideration ­as it defines the dynamics of engagement. Beyond that it’s all about context – creating for the specific environment and ensuring all messaging aligns with the opportunity to see and watch.

The idea of “dwell time” is one of the most unique and fascinating aspects of DOOH storytelling. How does dwell time affect content?

Dwell time impacts the ability of the creative to tell a story. The beauty of digital (as opposed to a poster) is that the creative can control the order in which the viewer sees  information. The longer the dwell time, the more opportunity there is to engage and the cleverer and more entertaining that story can be.

In micro-dwell environments, it’s all about just catching the viewer’s attention for a few seconds. As dwell time increases it becomes more about rewarding the viewer for their attention – a “return on attention.” This puts pressure on the creative to entertain – either with arresting images or good storytelling.

How do creatives take into account dwell time in different contexts and environments – say, in an airport lounge versus a city square?

Mindset and dwell time are intimately related. Going on holiday is better than going to work, queuing to check-in isn’t as relaxing as enjoying a coffee in an airport bar.

Environment is critical to mindset and effective advertising should always be targeted to align with a specific viewer mindset.

Whether it’s on an airplane or in a doctor’s office, digital signage risks being seen as visual pollution unless it’s useful to the viewer. How can brands make sure that their screens serve the consumer rather than distract them?

In our cluttered world, consumers already encounter thousands of messages every day. The beauty of digital is that it enables much more effective targeting of those messages. Health care messaging is likely to be more relevant to people in a doctor’s office than plastered all around town.

Digital actually offers the chance to reduce the clutter by offering multiple messaging from a single point. It also guarantees higher-quality presentation. Unlike tatty posters, digital is as perfect at the end of the campaign as it was at the beginning. Plus, designing the technology to ensure that things like brightness can be adjusted automatically to better match ambient conditions helps reduce overspill.

From our smartphones and tablets to our computer monitors and TV sets, a lot of us spend most of our day staring at screens. How does the way we use our personal screens affect the way we interact with digital out-of-home screens? How does it affect the way brands are designing them?

Certainly a key trend has been the move towards portrait presentation of most digital out-of-home media formats. This differentiates the format from TV and the Internet and aligns it more with the growing smartphone market.

Portrait offers an exciting point of difference for media on the move and the connection between DOOH and mobile is a love affair that, combined with QR codes and near-field communications, is set to redefine interactivity and marketing at the point of need.

In a “flattening” world, how do brands design screens that can engage consumers across geographic, cultural and linguistic lines?

By focusing on specific targeted user groups. Global brands and trends transcend geographical divisions. By focusing media to address those users, you celebrate the similarities and not the differences between people.

As Love Content’s official media partner, Sparksheet brings you a series of original think pieces and in-depth Q&As on how brands are telling stories through digital out-of-home media.

I was recently involved in a project where we created some boards of photos of different people, and brought them out to the streets of our little town. We asked people: If such-and-such brand came to life, who would the brand most look like?

The results were surprisingly consistent. Starbucks was compared to a woman best described as a soccer mom. Google was a hip and young Asian guy. And BP was a grumpy middle-aged businessman. This last was, perhaps, a loaded question given that this was months after the oil spill; it’s possible that if we had shown an illustration of Beelzebub, people would have chosen that image instead.

What this simple exercise illustrates is that people project personalities onto brands. Freud was very into the idea of projection – we project onto others what we’re not allowed to feel, or are ashamed to feel. Jung took it further with his concept of archetypes. My hunch is that the complex sensory machines that are humans need to project, simplify, and think in terms of archetypes in order to make sense of the complexities of modern life.

Brand types

I’m thinking there are three different types of brands:

1. The brand that we sort of take for granted. We don’t swoon when we see the logo but we trust it. If it were a person, we’d say hello, and perhaps go for a beer at the local bar. I go to my local grocery store every week and like it well enough. But if a competitor opened up down the street, I’d have no hesitation in trying it out.
2. The sort of brand that we really, really like. We would like to have dinner with this brand, even go on a date. I feel this way about my Marvis Toothpaste and my Happy Socks. I’ll go out of my way to buy it.
3. The sort of brand that we’d bring home to meet our parents. We want to marry this brand. Harley Davidson, Apple, and even Crayola Crayons. People get tattoos of these brands’ logos inked onto their bodies.

As a brand steward, you have to ask yourself: If my brand came to life, who would it be? Who would I like it to be? This is an important question to be asking yourself. Brands are not humans.  But people do project human qualities onto brands. And brands have real humans to help them speak and to act on their behalf.

Speaking through social media

There may be no place more important to the development of your brand voice than social media. August Wilson, the playwright, was once asked how he made his characters speak with such strong voices, and he said, “I don’t make them speak; I let them speak.”

It’s more important than ever for brand managers to identify the passion points behind their brand. A perfect example is Nike on its Facebook page; not one post is self-promotional. Instead, each and every post speaks to the passion behind the company.

One might argue that Nike has an incredible marketing budget so it could afford to talk from its passion points; a company that makes dish soap, on the other hand, would have to be more overtly promotional.

That argument just doesn’t hold. Martha Stewart’s magazine and television show, for example, proved that people could be very passionate about homemaking, something one might consider just as mundane as soap.

Every decent book on marketing, business and strategy talks about differentiation. What better way is there to differentiate your brand than letting it come to life and be a voice for the issues that matter to your customers?

Branded storytelling expert Michael Margolis on the power of narrative:

Consultant David Knies with a few examples of great branded storytelling:

Photo by ChernobylBob via flickr

This is my fifth decade in the marketing communications business and I can say without any hesitation that right now is the absolute best time to be a consumer marketer and brand builder.

My optimism and enthusiasm are fueled by three powerful environmental factors that are taking hold in business today. First, the consumer is in control. Second, brands live in glass houses: They are on display all the time. Third, the people behind the brand matter and have a voice.

As someone who began his career right smack in the middle of the Mad Men era I can see how this positive assessment of the environment might seem counterintuitive. Viewed through the lens of traditional marketing these factors could be seen as constraining, intimidating and threatening to a brand.

But, viewed through the lens of social marketing they can be seen as liberating, supportive and opportune assets upon which to build powerful, purposeful and profitable brands.

For some inspiration on how best to make the most of today’s environment, look to an innovative management concept that resonates with many businesses today, Open-Book Management (OBM). Open-Book Management is a management style and technique where employees are educated about all aspects of a company’s business. They’re given all relevant financial information such as revenue, cost of goods, profit and expenses, so they can make better decisions.

It is a broad and powerful approach to running a business that requires truth, transparency and trust. Here are some thoughts on how to apply the OBM philosophy to the branding world.

Have an open mindset

Be ready, willing and eager to share every decision, action and reaction that is taken to build your brand. Be simultaneously open with your employees, business partners and consumers.

Internally, that can include opening up the books to everyone who touches the brand, sharing business plans with outside partners and stakeholders or proactively providing consumers with information that empowers them to make better, more informed decisions.

Resist the urge to be selective and in total control. Share whatever you can, whenever you can without disclosing information that would help a competitor.

Be open for inspection 24/7

Have the welcome mat out for your customers. Encourage them to drop in and check out any aspect of your brand at any time. Communicate news and updates about your brand and the people behind it as often as you can. Have conversations about programs and promotions before they are launched.

A simple rule of thumb: If there is something happening that can affect the brand experience, positively or negatively, get it to your consumers openly and honestly before someone else does.

This is the first time that I can remember that how a brand reacts to and handles a problem is more important than the problem itself… for better or worse.

The Motrin Moms Baby Wearing video controversy and Target’s refusal to engage a blogger by declaring that its customers don’t blog are examples of defensive reactions that didn’t work.

On the positive side, Domino’s Pizza avoided a lingering PR disaster when it responded swiftly after a few workers posted videos of themselves abusing customer orders. Domino’s immediately created its very own Twitter account to promote positive coverage and address customers’ concerns.

A YouTube video apology, featuring the company’s CEO, was also posted to help repair the damage. Domino’s consumers ultimately brushed the incident aside and the brand is moving ahead stronger than ever with a renewed emphasis on product quality.

Transparency can be a differentiating competitive advantage when managed smartly and swiftly.

Open inside, then out

People love stories, and the people behind a successful brand are often the most interesting parts of the brand’s story. Informed, committed and empowered employees can be a brand’s best marketing resource and most efficient media. Social media have opened the door to wonderful possibilities in this area.

Just like any media plan, opening up on the inside requires carefully planned, resourced and monitored implementation. Companies like Zappos and Best Buy can serve as great models of how to make this work. If you are held back by fear of your employees interacting with consumers in real time then perhaps you might not be hiring the right people.

Open up

An open mindset expands a brand’s horizons and builds its community. Liz Strauss captures this beautifully with this thought: “Build an irresistible community that includes all of the people who help your brand thrive. Build something you can’t build alone.”

A brand’s life should be an open book. And remember, an open book has nothing to hide.

@BrandsConf takes place on Thursday, December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Social Media played a big role in the debate, as consumers shared their war stories on Twitter and YouTube. Key players jumped on the opt-out day train, with Loopt and Foursquare offering iPods and badges to those who requested a pat down in lieu of a an AIT scan.

Amidst growing hysteria, critics like Politico’s Micheal Kinsley called for some perspective. Meanwhile, the TSA continues to defend its position in light of recent terror attacks, but promises to address the growing oeuvre of stories of less-than-pleasant pat-down experiences.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Despite a poll suggesting 61% of Americans are opposed to the new AIT scanner technology and pat-down procedure,  U.S. airports reported few holiday travel hold-ups.

Jamaica makes 100,000 fast Facebook friends, thanks to social media marketing.

In a surprising turn of events, PhoCusWright’s Online Travel Review reported offline travel bookings surpassing online bookings in 2010.

Media + Magazines

Amazon’s new plan to dismantle Brick-and-Mortar competitors? Hit them in the aisles.

iPad or Android? The platform debate for the publishing community.

The Last Newspaper, now on display at The New Museum.

Branded Content + Entertainment

NetFlix takes aim at their competition with a new streaming-only solution.

Tim Burton crowd-sources some creepy tales in the weeks leading up to his upcoming Toronto showing.

Online ad network RadiumOne introduces Like-vertising – a new approach to targeted-advertising.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Museums, retailers and airlines bring guerilla marketing into the social savvy aughts: Guerrilla Marketing in 2010.

Edelman’s Carole Cone warns marketers that “Cause-related marketing, as we know it, is dead.”

Jumping on the latest zombie trend, BrandFlakes suggests you can speak “directly to your audience’s desires. Even if their desires include BRAINS…”

Media + Magazines

Print Matters! The NY Art Book Fair’s patrons redefine print, “unrestrained by the dictates of readability.”

What do last week’s US election results mean for marketers and media types? Advertising Age considers.

Is online media pioneer Slate falling behind its younger, less erudite competitors? The NY Observer discusses.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

The Cranky Flier discusses how Southwest Airlines measures the success of “Bags Fly Free”

Looking to update your customer experience? Here are a few lessons for travel brands.

Ease your airport anxiety: iPhoneness releases a list of the Top 10 Airport Apps for iPhone.

One area of significant growth has been in original Web shows that incorporate brands directly into the programming. The benefit from the marketer’s perspective is that the viewer watches the brand message via an integration that hopefully feels organic and can’t be skipped or ignored.

The goal is for the consumer to have a positive brand experience without being able to draw a distinct line between the brand message and the content. Recent examples include the Wrigley’s Orbit campaign starring Jason Bateman, or the Bailey’s Iced Coffee Break Series.

And now a word from our sponsors…

What this trend actually reveals is the evolution of a very specific economic transaction that takes place millions of times a day between marketers and consumers. Advertisers “pay” for consumer attention by indirectly (or directly) funding content production costs.

In interstitial or pre-roll advertising the transaction is overt and the lines between the fee and the goods are clearly delineated. Consumers simply pay a fee (the time and attention required to watch a 30-second spot) to receive the goods (watching the show).

With branded entertainment, the advertiser is acknowledging the increasing value of consumer attention and is attempting to reduce the upfront “fee.” In fact, well-executed product placement adds value to the content and no longer becomes a “cost” to the consumer at all.

This is all a rational response to the increased leverage consumers have been gaining in these transactions. But simply reducing attention costs is not going to be sufficient over time.

Tools of engagement

The problem with most branded entertainment campaigns is that they still tend to fall into a broadcast mentality. It’s all about producing content in a studio and blasting it out over a network of publishers and driving views.

It’s not about forming relationships with that audience and constructing durable communities of fans that last beyond the confines of a single campaign.

Some brands are beginning to think outside of the broadcast model. They’re using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare to create communities and to engage them in an ongoing dialogue.

Toyota’s recent launch of the new Camry and Corolla highlights how this type of campaign can work. The company’s Facebook page has more than 200,000 fans and an active community of people posting pictures, video, and comments about their experiences with Toyota cars.

This is supported by a fairly large media buy in which selected families have had their experiences highlighted in 1-3 minute clips that have been distributed across YouTube and a network of targeted publishers.

This campaign wasn’t cheap, but they don’t have to point to a study on increased brand to demonstrate return on investment; they now have a growing community of engaged consumers that can be tapped to support future campaigns.

The no-so-lonely case of LonelyGirl15

You can trace the roots of these types of campaigns to the pioneering 2006 Web series LonelyGirl15. The series focused on a teenage girl named Bree who was being pursued by an evil organization called “The Order.” The effort came under justifiable criticism for initially not being transparent about the fact that it was fiction, but it still provides some valuable lessons.

Where Loneygirl broke new ground was in its use of MySpace to create profile pages for fictional characters in the show. These pages blurred the lines between the show and reality and gave the audience the ability to participate in the narrative.

LG15 ultimately used its large audience (110 million views across the 18 months the series ran) to introduce one of the first examples of integrated product placement in a Web video series with the episode Truckstop Reunion, sponsored by Hershey’s Icebreakers Sours Gum.

Time to get social

While this is four years and a billion dollars in US online video ad spend behind us, the things that made LG15 so successful are missing from too many of today’s branded video campaigns.

Agencies marvel over the viral success of Wieden + Kennedy’s Old Spice campaign, but the reality is that the videos didn’t really go viral (i.e. gain attention beyond paid media) until the Old Spice guy started responding to tweets and engaging influencers on the social web.

Getting people to share videos with friends is nice and the way most agencies and brands think about viral success today. But this is still a broadcast mentality: “How can we get free impressions through viewers sharing the videos with each other?” More durable brand equity is built when every dollar spent on production and distribution is also working to build a community of fans by involving your audience in the content creation process.

The faster that buyers in video and social media can work together to create these types of experiences, the faster they can help brands deliver value to consumers instead of simply minimizing the cost of the virtual tax on attention that most ads represent today.

In the future, brand equity will be measured by the strength of the brand’s community. How strong is yours?

I was juggling my effects at the baggage claim when I noticed a floor-to-ceiling banner featuring three men wearing unfamiliar yellow soccer jerseys. The players, who were among the brightest African stars of the tournament, had the words “Africa United” emblazoned on their chest. It was an ad for South Africa-based MTN, the continent’s leading telecommunications company and the only official African FIFA sponsor.

From Bob Marley and W. E. B. Du Bois to Haile Selassie and Muammar al-Gaddafi, political and cultural leaders have been working on the notion of a united continent since at least 1924. But where diplomacy has failed, the confluence of soccer and cell phones appears to be achieving some small success.
MTN’s network connects 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East, including all six of the African teams that qualified for the Cup. Since 2003, Africa has had the fastest growing mobile penetration of any continent, and three countries (Gabon, the Seychelles and South Africa) now boast almost 100% penetration.

“Africa United” is a campaign that no other sponsor could have pulled off, and it’s particularly convincing when coupled with the only cultural medium that pervades every African country south of the Sahara, the beautiful game. The notion of football as a uniting force in Africa is hardly a new one, as Steve Bloomfield’s recent book demonstrates, but a marketing campaign that extends it beyond images of barefoot children on their local pitch and hackneyed ‘hands-across-Africa slogans’ is. (I’d put FIFA’s own “Celebrate Africa’s Humanity” tagline in the hackneyed category.)

MTN’s campaign, which runs across print, broadcast, online and outdoor channels throughout Africa, uses a combination of athlete star power and “Official Sponsor” status to project a simple, powerful message: we want an African champ. The people crowded around TVs across the continent aren’t that interested in celebrating Africa’s humanity; they want the kinds of uniting moments that Roger Milla gave them in 1990 and Siphiwe Tshabalala gave them to kick off the 2010 tournament. And MTN can credibly link its brand to that message, partially because of efforts like its ongoing sponsorship of the Confederation of African Football Champion’s League, but also because of the sheer number of “GOOOOOOOOOAL” SMSs that travelled across African borders on its network on June 11th.

Much of the advertising international World Cup viewers see sentimentalizes the “Africa’s Cup” theme in ways that seem designed to foster some loose cognitive connection between a brand and all the humanity celebrating that’s going on in South Africa this summer.

There’s the good, like Puma’s charming and optimistic “Journey of Football” spot featuring, yes, barefoot children, but also great stock footage from the recent history of West African teams and a pitch-perfect aural hook from Gnarls Barkley. There’s the bad, like Pepsi’s “Oh Africa” spot, which despite its Drogba-Messi star power, doesn’t seem to say much more than “Africans are fun-loving football fans who live on the Serengeti and drink Pepsi.”

And then there’s the awkward and condescending, like the ESPN World Cup theme music, which was produced in Utah using the cast from the Broadway Lion King musical. Every marketer knows that authenticity is a hard thing to find and an even harder thing to sell—Puma’s ‘we heart Africa’ approach is successful because it doesn’t claim more authenticity than the brand can support.

MTN, for its part, has a lot more cred capital to work with than the other brands competing for the Cup’s lucrative collection of eyeballs, and they’re using it to say “we want the same thing you want.” Well, that thing isn’t going to happen, because on Friday, Ghana’s Black Stars lost a heartbreaker to Uruguay, ending the dream of an African team in the finals.

So much for Africa United, but thanks to cell phones and savvy marketing, united Africa looks alive and well.

The very first airline apps were so basic you’d expect them to be a no-brainer for any brand. They provided booking, flight information, flight tracking and mobile boarding passes, eliminating the need to dig through your luggage.

Then last summer Air Canada became the first carrier to provide complimentary travel information through their app,  including weather updates and the ability to rent a car.

In the last few months, things have gotten even more interesting. Southwest Airlines’ brand new app does everything mentioned above, but includes a built-in DING! function, which notifies frequent flyers of exclusive airfare deals.

Cathay Pacific’s app includes 68 destination guides. It also allows passengers to “Meet the Team” by browsing photos of Cathay Staff, making the journey experience that much more personal.

But leading the way is Lufthansa, with three different mobile tools. The Lufthansa Launcher provides customers with the now-standard booking, tracking and boarding services. Not a true native app, it directs customers to the German airline’s iPhone-optimized site.

The recently released Lufthansa Navigator acts as a GPS, providing travellers with an interactive map and Google Street View-like functionality. It will store your flight information and tell you exactly how to get to your gate, check-in counter, baggage carousel or favourite airport lounge. A native/web app hybrid, some features are embedded into the app itself, while others direct you to the optimized site. For now the Navigator is only being tested in Frankfurt Airport, but it’s a sign of things to come.

The third app encourages Lufthansa’s Miles & More frequent flyers to engage with one another. MemberScout allows passengers to share their geo-location, arrange meet-ups, give and receive travel advice, and even share taxies—a social feature suggested in this Sparksheet think piece last summer. How long until Lufthansa combines its three apps into one mobile monster?

A handful of other airlines launched basic apps in the last few months, including GOL, Luxair and Swiss International Airlines. And Singapore Airlines is already integrating iPhone connectivity into its seatback system.

But it’s surprising how many of the world’s largest airlines have yet to leave their mark on the iPhone or any other mobile device. In the meantime, we’ll keep checking up on them.

by markhillary via flickr

What inspired HSBC to target the consumer in transit?

We’re very much focussed on the sort of person who has an international outlook. That’s not necessarily someone jumping on and off planes, but someone who is interested in the world. Maybe they work for a global company and need to travel for work.

We’re an international bank with a presence in 86 markets and a lot of our products – specifically our Premier banking and a new product we’re launching this year – are designed for people who have financial needs in more than one country.

So it would be crazy for us not to target this demographic.

These days it’s rare to cross an airport terminal or air bridge and not see an HSBC ad. How did you become the “airport brand”?

We started off buying U.K. airports, then our office in the U.S. bought up the New York airports. We’re now in 48 airports in 24 countries.

The U.S. has been interesting for us. We just did a huge research project on effectiveness and the New York results were very skewed. The passengers going through LaGuardia are very domestic. But outside New York and California, where we have a few branches, no one in the U.S. knows who we are. So our ad recall results were low there.

Generally, we’ve bought in places where we have a very large footprint in the market. There’s no point in advertising in all these jet bridges if the take-away message is, “Oh, HSBC is here,” and then we’re nowhere to be seen. So we need to think about changing our message. We can’t presume people walking through LaGuardia will know who we are.

We also look at the international traffic going through an airport. For example, we bought jet bridges in Bangkok. We only have one branch in Thailand but given the international passengers passing through Bangkok, and bearing in mind our footprint throughout Asia, it was obvious for us to buy ads in such a hub. Same with Los Angeles. We only have five branches in L.A., but that city is the gateway to the United States from Asia so it was an obvious choice for us.

by Tamas Tamasov via flickr

Your ads appear in print, on TV, and online, as well as in airports, airplanes and other public spaces. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each medium in getting your brand message across?

Print has become so targeted that we use it to advertise certain products and services, and not much for brand awareness any more.

TV ads are the most versatile because you can use them for inflight systems, online streaming television, movie theatres, etc. These days a TV ad isn’t necessarily just going to reach you in your sitting room.

We do lots of online advertising at the local level and we’re appearing on British Airways’ website, on their Executive Club pages, which makes sense for us.

How do you integrate the HSBC brand into physical spaces like airport lounges and terminals in a way that also serves the immediate needs of people in transit?

It’s something we’ve looked at, but haven’t cracked yet. What can you offer as a bank within an airplane environment that people can take away and do something with? It’s not like we’re selling phone chargers or cashmere blankets.

We did do an initiative in 2008, where we commissioned food writers, supermodels, directors, and economists to write articles and then set up airport kiosks where people could create their own bespoke magazines as an alternative to the inflight reading.

As an international company, how do you tweak your brand messaging to appeal to local customs, norms, sense of humour and taste?

When we launched our brand globally, the creative was all about understanding local customs and culture and sensibilities. But it’s very difficult developing campaigns that will mean the same thing in 86 markets. We provide the framework at the global level and they do what they need to do locally to make it work. But it’s tough because you can’t please everybody, and you do need to retain some sort of control and discipline at the centre.

Any examples of ads you thought would work globally but were construed differently than you intended?

We’ve been quite guilty of developing brand TV commercials that work very well in sophisticated markets like the U.K. or Hong Kong, where we have very high brand awareness, but fall flat in places like Poland. Because no one knows who we are in Poland.

So this year we’ve developed TV ads that don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach.

We’ve literally made one ad that explains HSBC is a bank. Two years ago we wouldn’t have thought that was necessary. But in a lot of places where we’re just opening up, people have no idea what HSBC is.

Ny Ewan McIntosh via flickr

It’s interesting how you’re such a household name in some areas, while in other places people don’t even know what HSBC stands for.

They haven’t got a clue, and we haven’t always done a very good job explaining it to them.

In Tokyo, for example, we bought every jet bridge in the airport, but had only one branch on the ground. At that time our creative featured pictures of food, and a lot of people walking through thought we were a catering company.

Hearing things like that made us realize that we had to understand our brand awareness in each market and work from there. We can’t assume anything.

© Dan Lamont

Brent Friedman is Co-Founder and President of Electric Farm Entertainment.

How did you get major brands like Kodak and Verizon to sign on to something as new and untested as transmedia storytelling?

Our first transmedia project, Afterworld, was a great litmus test for the model. It became something that we could use to showcase what we were capable of from a production quality and creative standpoint, as well as a business standpoint. I mean, the reach that we got with Afterworld was globally over 20 million views and it made money!

So, although we didn’t have any sponsorship on that project, when we did Gemini Division as our next project, everybody could see we had credibility. We got Rosario Dawson interested and once we had her, and we had NBC, and we had Sony, we had the confidence to go after some big sponsors.

We got Cisco and Intel and Acura and UPS and Microsoft all as sponsorship integration deals on Gemini Division. It was an embarrassment of riches, but it was also too many balls to juggle. So by the time we got to Valemont and Woke Up Dead, we decided it’s better to have one sponsor take on a bigger role in our project. It just becomes too difficult to manage all of those relationships while you’re also trying to produce content.

Transmedia projects produced by Brent Friedman for Electric Farm Entertainment (chart by Sparksheet)

What have been the most effective ways to work these brands into your stories?

You really have to sit down and explore what it is that the brand wants to communicate; what aspect of their brand do they want to represent in this story, or in this experience? Taking the Verizon example, before we even knew that brand was on board, we had embraced this idea that the central narrative device of Valemont was going to be a cell phone.

When you’re working in two- to three-minute episodes you need shortcuts. Something I learned in video games was to cut out the first act of set up – jump right into the action – and the way we thought we could do that in Valemont was to give our main character all the clues she needed in the very first two-minute episode. Give her a cell phone with all the digital fragments of her brother’s life – his voicemails, his text messages, pictures, videos – so she could solve the mystery of his murder one clue, one episode at a time… using a Verizon branded phone, of course.

How do you integrate your sponsors into the narrative without insulting your audience’s intelligence?

That’s another thing I learned as a story consultant at EA [Electronic Arts], the video game company. When I was there they were really embracing the verisimilitude of advertising. It used to be that you had a major league baseball game, for example, and all of the signage inside the parks were jokes, they were parodies of real ads.

But then they started getting feedback that the game would seem more real if there were real ads that simulated the experience of being in a ballpark. And I think a light went on in everybody’s head – “Oh, wait a minute, they’re not going to feel that’s advertising, they’re going to feel that that’s reality” – because we live in a branded world. So from our standpoint, we could make a fake phone, and we could make a fake wireless carrier, but that would take you out of reality.

What are some of the ways in which you enabled your audience to interact with the story, as well as the brand?

As a kind of nexus of the entire ARG [alternate reality game] and interactive experience, we built a faux Valemont University website that we modeled after real 21st century college websites. Students could apply to Valemont University and when they were accepted, they got their own virtual phone through the website.

That became their communication device, where they got text messages and pictures and videos sent to them from characters in the show. And that was also a Verizon-branded phone, so it became a replicate experience to the show’s main character.

Both Woke Up Dead and Valemont have more or less completed the run of their episodes. How have your sponsors been able to realize some ROI on these projects?

We were able to offer click-throughs to the Kodak website. They featured Woke Up Dead on their main site and got a lot of attention for that. I think they really got a lot of return on their investment in terms of what it did for their brand., because it connected a new demographic to their digital cameras and made using them fun and cool. Plus, it allowed Kodak to loosen up their brand identity. In terms of actual numbers – selling cameras – I don’t know. But I do know that they couldn’t be happier with the whole experience.

Verizon was excited about a lot of things that happened on the show; the number of people who enrolled in Valemont U completely exceeded everyone’s expectations. The amount of engagement, the time that people were spending on Valemont U, the number of fans we garnered on Facebook, as well as the amount of streams they were getting to their V CAST users of Valemont was through the roof.

The retention rate of the Valemont episodes when they aired on TV was also off the charts. But most importantly, it wasn’t that people were watching the show, it was that they were engaging with the content.

And because Verizon was integrated into that whole experience, from the episodes to the websites, they felt like they were getting a lot of great exposure.

As a transmedia storyteller, how important is it to create a community around your content?

I think at this stage of the game it’s one of the most vital things. I think what’s happened is that there used to be this kind of wall between creators and audience. It used to be a one-way experience where creators created and they distributed to an audience at whatever time they chose to give it to them, for however long and for whatever price. Those days are gone and that wall has come down, and now you don’t have creators and audience, you have co-collaborators.

You have people who initiate the content and you have fans who invest in the content and even help market it virally. And I think that that relationship is going to be key going forward because the audience has become so empowered and so enabled because of the technology.

Something else I picked up at EA is the notion of “a universe worthy of devotion.” When you look at a project or a franchise like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, it’s not just that the movies themselves were successful. It’s that those worlds have been so fleshed out, so well conceived in their 3-D qualities, that fans want to go live there, they want to explore that world. The key is to create content experiences that satisfy that compulsion.

Taking Valemont as an example, what was the most surprising way in which your audience became part of the story?

We initially decided we didn’t want to have a fan forum on the Valemont University site. We were trying to create what feels like a real university site, so we couldn’t have fans talking about the TV show on it.

We thought we’d have a Facebook page where fans can gather and talk. But that’s not really a forum, that’s more of a bulletin board.

And so, without any prompting, a group of hardcore fans rose up and created the Valemont Commons, which is a very good replica of our Valemont U site. They emulated the design of the VU site, and created an adjunct, essentially, where fans could gather, and they did a really smart thing: they created an “on campus” portion of the forum where people could be in character and talk about Valemont as if it were a real institution, and then they had “off campus”, where you could kind of step back and talk about the show.

That happened instantaneously. It happened within the first week of the show being released.

Is transmedia a niche, or is it the future of entertainment?

It’s definitely the future. I think that what’s happening is that storytelling is taking on a different life because people are looking for a different level of experience. I think that transmedia producers are actually rising up to meet a need. I think that it’s an emotional, psychological need to not just watch passively anymore.

I think there is both an opportunity and a challenge for content creators. To trust the audience, to invite them in and let them make it their own. That’s exciting for creators and fans. And you don’t really have enough of that right now.

Honestly, I always look to video games when I want to peek into the future. Everything you’re seeing from Project Natal, which is creating interactivity in terms of not just movement recognition, but voice recognition, eye recognition, emotion recognition – it’s putting the viewer, the audience, into the game, into the movie, into the web series, and once they’re in there, they don’t want to just watch. They want to be part of that world.

I don’t know how far off that is as a mainstream technology, but that’s what kind of keeps me going – the idea that I’ll be around to not just see something like this, but to actually create a next-gen experience like that.

©istockphoto.com / Dave Long

I recently attended a lunch with the founder of a leading experiential travel group. After his talk I was struck by how passionate and positive people were about the experiences the company offered.

It reminded me once again that our industry offers one of the most exciting, memorable and rewarding experiences imaginable. Even the most mundane trip has its moments. On business trips, it might be the deal you close or the glimpse of a city that you might never otherwise visit. On a ‘fly and flop holiday’ it might be that moment when you finally pause and get some perspective.

But if an alien tried to guess what humans cared about by looking at communications for different products or services, I don’t think travel would figure on his list. That’s because most travel communications focus on price instead of experience.

I’m not saying that no one in travel does emotional advertising – think Morgan Hotels’ FTR campaign, Emirates’ “Keep Discovering,” or Qantas’ “I still call Australia home.” But compared to other industries – many with weaker emotional pulls – travel tends to emphasize fares and function over fun.

Take iPhones or iPods, for instance. I haven’t seen a single ad from Apple about price. They’re all about the freedom of music, or the magic of intuitive design. Despite a global recession and a consumer mindset favouring caution over consumption, Apple hasn’t been able to fill orders fast enough.

The travel industry, on the other hand, has been awash in discounts and offers – each lower than the next. Yeah, we put a few bums on seats and heads on pillows, primarily in areas that the customer already wanted (cruises), but the constant discounting may have done long-term damage. It’s caused consumers to devaluate travel.

Our Domesticate research, which explores why Australians are travelling less within the country, found that many Aussies forsake travel for other luxury products – pools, home entertainment systems, landscaped gardening – which more effectively leverage emotion in advertising. The impact of this on the future is an extended period of low yields. And on the way, we shortened the booking cycle to historic lows – making our lives harder than ever.

One reason might be budget. Our industry is fragmented, operates on a global basis and has narrow margins. Money is tight and every message has to deliver immediate gain. Price-centred messages seem to drive conversion.

Well, of course they do. If you always talk about price and features, that’s all the customer will consider. Increasingly, the industry is like a hamster on a wheel. However hard we run, we stay in the same place, because there is always someone who can pitch the price lower and every step down makes it harder to drive price back up.

Here’s the good news: Creating compelling promotional content isn’t as hard or expensive as it used to be. In the digital age, small budgets can go a lot further. After the 2002 Bali bombings, a group of Bali hoteliers put together an ad costing US$18,000. Adapting Tourism Australia’s high-profile “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign, it asked “So where the Bali hell are you?” The visuals were poor, but it was cheeky and it reminded Australians why they loved Bali.

Tourism Queensland’s much-heralded “Best Job in the World” campaign, while not exactly low cost, generated return on investment well above its weight. The campaign also demonstrated that social media like Facebook and Twitter, properly managed, offer a world of opportunities for low-cost, high-return engagement.

Perhaps us travel types spend so much time travelling that we’ve started to take the experience itself for granted. But if we want to build a sustainable industry, we’ve got to get off the hamster wheel. We need to start investing in great content and stop being so afraid of emotion.

As long as there are human beings we are going to have print media. There’s no substitute for something audiences can feel and touch – something that they can call their own.

What is the “magazine experience” and does it translate online?

I don’t think there’s anything yet online that replicates that immersion experience you get with print. We’re talking more than just ink on paper here. We’re talking about an entire package in your hand – the photography, the colours, the design, the copy. We collect magazines, hoard them, put them on our coffee tables. They can be a conversation starter, a relationship starter. When you’re online you have to bend forward, look at a screen, touch, click, search. But with print you lean backward, hold it in your hand – the magazine experience comes from inside the pages toward you.

Let’s put it this way: you can never lose yourself on the Web. You do not like what you see or read you are only a click away from something else.  Magazines are the slow food that you can own, savor and digest. You may own your computer, but you do not own anything that comes through it. You own your copy of the magazine.  Marrying a virtual spouse will never result in children.

Addressing magazine publishers on your blog recently, you wrote that “There is a big difference between a ‘brand experience’ and a ‘magazine experience.’ Please do keep the ‘magazine experience’ well and alive and the ‘brand experience’ will follow.” What did you mean by that?

People don’t have experiences with brands. They don’t experience Nike, they experience the shoe that Nike makes. They experience the product. If it’s good for your feet, if it’s comfy, if you like the design, then you might feel warmly toward Nike. But no one says, “Oh, I just love that Nike brand.” It’s the same thing with magazines. You’re not going to get me to fall in love with the “Car and Driver” brand. I need to engage with a product and have a product experience before I have a brand experience. If the product is relevant to you, enjoyable to you, then you’ll start believing in the brand.

What role do you think branded content will play in the future of print media?

That will play a big role. Branding is still very, very important. But you want to make sure readers know that your content – whether online or in print – is both necessary and sufficient in each medium. People won’t hop around from medium to medium because they love your brand. So if I’m reading a magazine, don’t send me to the Web to get the rest of the story. You need to meet readers in their media of choice.

Why is it that inflight magazines, despite being the original custom publications, tend to get a bad rap?

Well, where do they get their bad rap from? From the passengers who read them or from our colleagues the magazine snobs who thumb their noses at Sky magazine because it’s not The New Yorker? I love Felix Dennis, the guy who started Maxim magazine in this country, who always used to tell his staff, “If you ever win a national magazine award, you’re fired.” Because that’s when you know you’re not designing a magazine for your audience, but for your colleagues in New York.

The important thing to remember about inflight magazines is that, yes, we have a captive audience, but passengers can bring with them as many magazines as they want. And so you have to include information about the plane and the airport in every single issue. In that sense, you’re always designing for the first-time user.

But your content has to reflect the majority of customers on that airplane – their lifestyle, their attitude, and also their fantasies. Sure, I may not be able to fly to Bangkok right now but I know the airline flies to Bangkok and here’s a great piece of writing from Bangkok. So one of these days I might go for it. It’s this combination of service and fantasy in inflight magazines that have given them that “must have” factor.

You like to say that publishers need to start “concentrating on customers who count, rather than just counting customers.” Doesn’t every customer count?

The magazine business model that we created in this country after World War II was based on delivering numbers to advertisers. In the beginning it was a great model, because the numbers were important. People had to buy a magazine from a newsstand or pay for a subscription. And then toward the ‘80s we got into the business of tricking people into looking at our magazine, of creating numbers to show advertisers. That’s what I call the business of counting customers.

For example, I just read that I can get 24 issues of Tennis magazine for free. Now, if someone pays $24 to receive Tennis magazine, I can guarantee that she is going to spend more time with the magazine’s content, and its advertisers, than someone who found it in the mail.

That’s what’s great about custom magazines – they’re not aimed at the lowest common denominator. You have a set lifestyle in mind. You have an audience that counts. If you don’t fly at least three or four times a year, an inflight magazine probably isn’t aimed at you. Customers who count are those whose lifestyles match the marketplace.

Do you think the Internet has the potential to enrich the magazine experience by bringing like-minded readers together?

I don’t think readers want to get together. I think they get satisfaction from being part of a community, yet acting on their own. The way we use magazines and interact with them is completely different from the way we use and interact with the Internet. And that’s why each medium has to be both necessary and sufficient. In this case, readers connect through the pages of the magazine.

So what’s your favourite magazine?

I never choose favourites amongst my children.

©istockphoto.com/Terry Morris

You know that scene in Austin Powers, with Dr. Evil’s henchman screaming in horror as the giant steamroller inches its way towards him from across the room? To me, it’s a good depiction of how media companies are continuing to brace for the ongoing impacts of digital technology and an on-demand world.

Digital advertising has transformed the traditional media business. In the broadcast world, advertisers are no longer steadily buying ads adjacent to “appointment television programming.” Personal video recording systems like TiVo allow audiences to set their own appointments and watch programming when they want. Brands today are finding innovative ways to speak to consumers while measuring marketing ROI within digitally-driven social environments like Facebook, on-demand services like Hulu.com and performance-based search advertising on Google.

Television still reaches more people than any other ad-supported medium. But broadcast delivery technology leaves much to be desired by advertisers. Unlike online media’s impression-based advertising model, television ads are unable to reach or target audiences with the same granularity.

There is no way to traffic TV ads on the “viewer level” because subscriber-based data is currently protected by cable TV service operators. If service operators were to release subscriber data to advertisers, ads could be targeted based on household viewing habits, channel loyalty and patterns of viewing. This is Broadcasting 2.0! It’s very similar to how “tracking cookies” are used to unlock the Internet’s targeting capabilities for advertisers.

The folks behind Hulu.com understand how much more targeted its advertisers can be on the Web compared to television. A joint venture of Disney, Fox and NBC Universal, Hulu allows U.S. viewers to watch advertiser-supported TV shows and movies on demand, for free. Hulu has the best of both worlds: a captive audience and advertising that that can be trafficked down to the individual viewer level. Advertisers that buy ads on Hulu can measure ROI better than on traditional television because of the targeting data made available by cookie tracking on Hulu’s site. As Seth Godin noted recently, viewers will gladly pay attention to advertising “if it’s anticipated, personal and relevant.”

Broadcasters can also look to the world of inflight entertainment for inspiration. Desperate for distraction during a recent 7-hour+ Air France flight, I happily sat through 30 to 45 seconds of car ads before watching a feature film and a few episodes of my favourite TV shows on the inflight system. Despite the variety of content I viewed, I counted only two unique advertising pre-rolls over the course of my flight, which suggests that Air France’s system does not traffic ads based on my viewing behaviour.

But airplanes are already a highly distinct and targeted viewing environment. Airline advertisers have a pretty good idea of who I am and what sort of products and services I want. Television advertisers don’t.

In the next few years, our television screens will become our computer screens and our cell phones will carry our content above the clouds. Doesn’t it make sense to provide advertisers with the technology and control they need to actively participate in the evolving viewing experience? If broadcasters and cable companies can’t put the power of Broadcasting 2.0 into the hands of advertisers, I bet services that understand the audience’s needs and the role of advertising might actually steamroll the entire industry.

What do you think about advertising’s role in an on-demand world? Are ads a necessary evil or do they add value to the overall media experience?

Wiki-Seating

A Web-based pre-flight discussion board can help customers connect at the very beginning of the journey cycle. Giving passengers the option of sharing their travel plans, interests and destinations before the flight could help users build their own “wiki-seating plan” together. Business travellers could choose to sit next to fellow attendees of a particular conference. Backpackers could find like-minded travellers to explore with.

Itinerary-sharing sites like vtravelled and social applications like Dopplr are already allowing passengers to connect and share information. But why should airlines concede this ground to outside parties (or in vtravelled’s case, leave the network itself on the ground)? Consider the long-term branding power of your customized application being responsible for a new pair of travel buddies, business partners or even close friends.

Social Embodiment In Flight

Enabling passengers to access Twitter from their seats is a great start. But why not construct your own inflight social network? I’m not just talking about seat-to-seat chat. That’s so AIM; this is the Facebook era. Passengers could volunteer biographical information that can be used to generate relevant social statistics. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that “14 people on this plane are flying for the first time,” or that “there are seven Spanish speakers on this flight”? A sophisticated social interface could allow passengers to customize their privacy settings, allowing more discreet passengers to participate in conversation threads without feeling vulnerable.

This type of content could also be a key marketing point, as statistics could present brand-specific information (i.e. “64 percent of the people on this plane booked their flight through Cheaptickets.com” or “59 people on this plane are staying at Holiday Inn”). If Facebook has taught us anything, it’s that people are happy to share personal information – with both people and brands – so long as they get something in return. That something could be a new best friend, an interesting bit of trivia or a great last-minute deal at a local spa.

Completing the Journey Cycle

The socializing doesn’t have to stop at the terminal. Your inflight system can help passengers coordinate their plans upon arrival. An interactive map of the destination city could allow passengers to pinpoint their hotels or conference centers – and figure out the best way to get there. The system could easily suggest social groups who might benefit from sharing a taxi, helping each other find a connecting flight, or sharing a drink during the layover. By providing these services inflight, you can keep passengers off their PDAs and engaged with your brand and partners throughout the journey.

It’s great to see airlines embracing social media. But it’s time to realize that your airplanes are social media with the ability to convert strangers into travel mates and frequent flyers into loyal customers. With a scientific approach to product design, you can turn your inflight system into a Transumer gateway. The key to real aircraft connectivity is right in front of your nose – or rather, in the back of your seat.