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

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

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

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

“Creative thinking is commercial thinking”

Cindy Gallop

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

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

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

Andrew Davis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reanna Evoy

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

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

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

Helen Klein Ross

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

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

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

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

Frederic Bohbot

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

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

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

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

Jay Vidyarthi

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

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

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

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

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

Ron Tite

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

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

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

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

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

On the other hand, the face of a social media site like Facebook or Twitter would probably look more like a laid back, twenty-something dude (ala Justin Long in those Apple commercials).

But in the last month or so, LinkedIn has made a huge effort to catch up with its hipper rivals – and gotten a much-needed facelift in the public eye.

GigaOm reports that LinkedIn is launching a new button this month called “Apply with LinkedIn.” The function essentially lets job candidates use their LinkedIn profiles as resumes, to apply directly for jobs.

As Mashable’s Sarah Kessler points out, this is a smart move for LinkedIn because employers are a vital demographic for the now public company; hiring solutions generate a whopping 43 percent of the company’s revenue, according to GigaOm. Forbes’ Dan Schawbel predicts that more companies will use LinkedIn’s button as job boards become less popular.

This news comes on the heels of LinkedIn’s new share button which, much like Facebook’s ubiquitous “like” button, allows readers to share articles with their social networks.

And earlier this spring, the company launched LinkedIn Today, a daily online “newspaper” that curates stories shared by LinkedIn users around the world.

Shares rose to an impressive high of USD $122.70 soon after LinkedIn went public a few weeks ago, causing Slate and other publications to speculate whether social media represents a new tech bubble.

However, shares have since dropped to approximately $77 on Wednesday, suggesting that this bubble may burst before it’s fully inflated.

Whatever the case may be, we’re not going to underestimate LinkedIn anytime soon.

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?

Photo by jonny goldstein via flickr

Care to share

The theme of this year’s conference was Perestroika, a term coined as the Soviet Union gradually opened up to the world. From the panel topics to the participant-led “unconference sessions,” Supernova was all about transparency, openness and sharing.

A very passionate Jeff Pulver marveled at how millennials will eventually be able to reconstruct their youth by sifting through their Flickr photos, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. He insisted that social media is an opportunity to connect and share across geographic and generational divides, noting that in a networked world “we often know more about strangers than we do about our own family.”

Wharton’s David Hsu led a discussion on the increasing importance of networks for entrepreneurial innovation, while plucky media critic Jeff Jarvis and charismatic privacy researcher danah boyd (she never capitalizes her name) engaged in a spirited discussion about shifting notions of public and private.

Citing the gay rights movement and his own public battle with prostate cancer (and the emasculating after-effects), Jarvis made an ethical case for living a radically transparent life. Boyd cautioned that what people are willing to share depends on perceived expectations of privacy; it’s when a person or brand like Facebook violates those expectations that they get into trouble.

In a fitting compromise, Supernova organizers assigned each participant a forwarding “email alias” to foster post-conference collaboration without divulging confidential information.

Listen up

The flipside of sharing is listening, and several Supernova presenters acknowledged the increasing importance of what Bob Garfield calls “Listenomics.” Entrepreneur Anil Dash and Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani presented ThinkUp, a crowd-sourcing tool that the White House will use to give citizens a voice in US policy decisions.

Calling it “a clinical trial of a million voices,” Wharton researcher Shawndra Hill talked about sifting through online medical discussion forum data to learn about the potential side effects of medication. The ever-quotable Chris Brogan suggested that companies start asking customers, “How much do we suck?” because “listening to people is better than marketing.” And digital consultant Deborah Schultz warned brands that it’s no longer sufficient to engage with customers at the Superbowl, on Valentine’s Day and other intermittent occasions. “We’re no longer living in an episodic world,“ she said. “We’re living in a continuum world.”

New media and old media are converging

After last year’s Blogworld conference I noted that digital and legacy media were finally ready to work together. At Supernova, they were almost indistinguishable.

The conference’s main sponsor was Comcast, the U.S. telecom giant whose service portfolio includes cable TV, high-speed Internet, video on-demand, and 3D television. In a live interview with festival organizer Kevin Werbach, Comcast’s Executive Vice President David Cohen said the company has “evolved from being a cable company to being a technology company.” And with its pending acquisition of NBC Universal, it’s also poised to become a content company.

Another panel took on the loaded question, “Can social save media?” Channeling Henry Jenkins, Transmedia producer Anita Ondine suggested Facebook and Twitter were making television into a social experience again. Addressing monetization concerns, Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan revealed that she had just mailed a $123,000 cheque to an independent producer for a show on her online-only network.

“Media needs no saving,” concluded Jim Bankoff of sports website SB Nation. “If anything, it needs taming.”

From click to brick

One of Supernova’s most fascinating motifs was the notion of bringing online experiences into the physical world.  For instance, Anita Ondine explained how online story worlds can incentivize people to discover new physical (read: retail) spaces.

Jim Bankoff endorsed the geo-targeted Where app, which sent him coffee coupons as he walked by a Starbucks on the way to the conference. One of the best ideas came from an astute audience member who wondered why airlines or hotel brands he’s engaged with online don’t recognize him at the check-in desk. Good question.

Bridging the digital divide

As educational psychologist Idit Harel Caperton noted, Supernova 2010 was an overwhelmingly white, male and American event. It was an important reminder that as intellectually and professionally diverse as the discussion was, there were still some key voices missing.. During his panel on networks and innovation, Wharton researcher David Hsu explained that ethnicity, gender and other cultural factors can hinder an entrepreneur’s access to finance and support networks. This is a problem, Hsu said, because “people who look alike will probably think alike.”

The Internet isn’t necessarily the great equalizer, as danah boyd put it, but it could be. And if we truly expect it to be an engine of global wealth, it ought to be.

And all I can think is, “Those kids in China should be in bed!”

See, while there are books and Web sites and management courses about understanding the cultural and economic hurdles of doing business globally, there’s one thing you don’t often hear about.

Time zones.

Time zones are a pain. And, unless we change other people’s morning into night, they’re something us Transumers with colleagues and customers in other countries will always have to deal with.

So here are a few friendly pointers for dealing with the perils of longitude:

Know what time it is. Really.

The recent move of North American Daylight Savings Time to the second week of March didn’t help the time zone dilemma. We now have a two-week period where everything is an hour off from the norm.

It would be a good excuse if people didn’t ever mess up the other 50 weeks of the year. Unfortunately, they do it all the time, and the only thing more frustrating than getting up for a 5:30 a.m. conference call is getting up to find out the call doesn’t start until 6:30 a.m.

How do you avoid this?

1. Check out timeanddate.com/worldclock/. It’s all on the Interwebs.
2. Beware the Outlook Calendar automatic time zone feature. While it probably works fine most of the time, it never hurts to put the actual time for each participant in the subject and body of that meeting request.
3. Send out a reminder. 11:30 p.m. calls are easy to forget about (intentionally or not).

Don’t give in to 24-hour email temptation.

It’s late at night. You wake up and roll over to see the light blinking on your Blackberry. You pick up the phone and see there’s an email from Geneva. You answer it. You roll back over. An answer comes back, usually accompanied by, “I can’t believe your up?” The back and forth continues. It’s now 4 a.m.

Is there some sort of weird corporate-warrior thrill from engaging in late-night email? Maybe. Do some people like the badge of honour that comes with being able to answer budget questions at all hours? Perhaps.

Is it unhealthy? Most definitely. Get some sleep.

Share the pain.

Someone on that monthly global sales call always seems to get the short end of the stick. That person is either staying up until midnight or waking up at 5:30 a.m. in order to participate. There’s nothing like trying to enjoy dinner with the looming spectre of having to dial in to the automated-conference-call lady. And, no matter how often the call happens, that poor soul always gets greeted with a “How late is it there?”

You know how late it is. You probably set up the call.

Share the pain with your colleagues and change the time every few months. Yes, it might mean that you have to get up before the sun does to discuss those projections, but your friends in Seoul or Doha will thank you for it.

One of the best parts of my job is having the opportunity to interact with people around the world. I just find these interactions much more enjoyable when everyone is awake.

Do you have any funny or frustrating time zone stories to share? Leave us a comment!

For the full feed, follow us on Twitter. Here is our iPhone “tweetphoto” shot from within the 900-plus audience:

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.

A 2007 TNS-KPMG study found that 70 percent of consumers buy luxury products as a form of self-reward. The wealthiest Chinese are becoming accustomed to the comforts of five-star hotels, spas and high-end restaurants and are craving new forms of gratification. They’re joining luxury-brand clubs not because of exclusivity but because they are regular consumers of deluxe experiences and accustomed to the service and perks.

These “cosmopolitan commuters” live, work and vacation in different regions across the country, taking advantage of falling travel costs and flexible work styles. Time-pressured consumers want to extract maximum value out of their travel time, therefore booking convenience, check-in speed and access to technology throughout the journey are high on their list of priorities. Eco-consciousness is becoming more important as well, as companies and individuals work to become carbon-neutral.

The URBN Hotel in Shanghai

The URBN Hotel is a hip, 26-room hotel in Shanghai. The hotel offers such localized amenities as tai chi and yoga classes and custom bike and walking tours. Its original-brick walls, floors of reclaimed indigenous hardwood, and the array of traditional Chinese services offered speak to the older Shanghai, while URBN’s contemporary design and services draw on the energy of a younger, more modern metropolis. Its  building materials were locally sourced; and the building incorporates passive solar shades and water-based AC systems.

As China’s first carbon-neutral hotel, URBN tracks the total amount of energy it consumes, including staff commutes, food and beverage delivery, and guest water usage. The company  purchases credits to neutralize its footprint by investing in local green-energy development and emission-reduction projects. Guests can also buy their own carbon credits to offset their flights.

Cong’s Hutong in Beijing

Cong’s Hutong in Beijing offers an entirely different experience – one that is committed to preservation. Drawing on ancient Chinese culture, the Cong family renovated their old courtyard home in Lishi Hutong near the Forbidden City. The hotel has only four rooms, named Zither (a string instrument), Go (a board game), Calligraphy and Painting, as an homage to the four arts prized in ancient Chinese scholarship. It offers guests the authentic courtyard lifestyle that is rapidly fading as China’s capital modernizes. As you’d expect, rooms are booked months in advance. And yes, they offer free broadband access.

The lesson for big hotel chains? The days of one-size-fits-all hotels are over. Transumers expect their hotels to draw upon the best of what local culture has to offer so long as they’re clean, comfortable and distinguish themselves with great service.

International chains are great at standardizing “clean” and “comfortable” across the globe, but they stand to learn a thing or two about Eastern-style hospitality. A concierge at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai had this anecdote to relate in That’s Shanghai magazine:

A guest wanted to get hold of limited-edition cigars that were only available in Hong Kong. I asked if he would pay me to fly to Hong Kong to collect them, which he was happy to do. I picked them up at the airport and flew back that evening. He was so grateful. I later discovered it was a present for a close friend, an extremely famous NBA player.

Can you beat that?

©istockphoto.com/Simon Oxley

Travel is a social activity. You meet people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. On a business trip, you hang out at your hotel bar and meet others doing the same thing. You strike up a conversation. Sometimes, you stay in touch. Every business trip is really a trip to meet someone. Business is, in the end, the art of the honest handshake.

So it’s not really surprising that the social aspect of travel has morphed into social networking. Sites like FlyerTalk are not just message boards about airlines and airports but also places where people “meet” and talk and, eventually, socialize. Friends are made, alliances are formed, plans are hatched. Travellers are a tribe, a group of people with common interests and problems, a real community. FlyerTalk makes this obvious.

Dopplr is another site that announces where you are at any given time to a wide range of people, some of whom you might not even know. My Dopplr account is hooked up to my Facebook account, so anyone who cares knows where I might be on any given day. (This might seem an intrusion of my social space, but how is it intrusive if I’m the one advertising my whereabouts? If I don’t want people to know where I am, I don’t post. It’s like turning your ringer off on your cellphone.) On Facebook, you can tell people where you’ve been, where you dream of going, where you’ve eaten, what you pack, where you buy stuff on your travels. The endless number of applications built around travel speaks to our desire to see the world or, if we can’t, to experience it vicariously through others. What these sites do is something many are calling “intelligent networking.” Our business trips are often networking opportunities, and the Internet has allowed us to network without leaving our desks.

On Twitter (yes, I’m on this as well; makes me wonder how I get any work done), anyone who is thinking about travelling announces it to the world. The “tweets” come in waves when someone is actually on the road; it’s almost as if you’re travelling with them, and, in a sense, you are. From Twitter you can link to a site where you’ve uploaded your photos, so your followers can see what you’re talking about. Go to Flickr, another photo-sharing site, and you can sort through millions of vacation photos from all over the world.

Why are we doing this?

Well, what’s the first thing you ask when meeting someone who’s been away? How was the trip? Because travel is social. You want to know the story. Even of someone you’ve just met.

“Watching” others travel allows us to construct our own stories in our minds. Every traveller has something to relate, no matter how mundane the reason for travel, and every anecdote has the potential to illuminate and entertain. So whether I’m following someone’s tweets or meeting someone in person after having met them online, my own personal narrative is nour­ished and grows – again, just like what travel itself does for me. And if this social travel allows me to grow my network and even wins me new business? Well, that’s about as intelligent as networking gets.

Originally published in Air Canada‘s enRoute, published by Spafax.

Q: WHAT ARE SOME OF THE TRENDS IN IFE THESE DAYS?

For airlines who are already involved with content as part of the customer experience, the proliferation of digital and social networking platforms are starting to provide new opportunities to use and co-ordinate content to engage with customers, inspire purchase decisions and build a return. Having invested in content-on-demand to deliver passengers more content, we know have the realization that it is much more than movies on an airplane – it’s about getting an engaged customer in the bargain and staying with that customer for much longer than the length of the journey.

Airlines have the audience – and the media – to build a 360 degree coordinated, integrated experience tactically delivering content at selected touchpoints of the journey. This experience can leverage engagement into increased revenues, cross-selling and cost savings.

Q: SO IF CONTENT IS MORE THAN MOVIES ON AN AIRPLANE, WHAT IS IT?

It’s still movies, TV and audio on airplanes – but it’s also community, social media, e-zines, loyalty newsletters, advertiser funded programming, microsites, etc on AND off the airplane. Content is no longer confined to the airplane as so many more channels to the consumer are now possible, throughout the entire airline journey cycle.

Q: WHAT’S THE “AIRLINE JOURNEY CYCLE”?

It’s the linked system of experiences that take place at every step of a customer’s contact with an airline brand. It’s the connection between the real-time activity of travel with the planning or ideas that inspired it: the purchasing of flights, of products, the information, communication and entertainment onboard. It’s the time spent at the destination and the memories that accompany you on the return

Q: WHERE – AND HOW – DOES CONTENT FIT INTO THE AIRLINE JOURNEY CYCLE?

Simply put: everywhere. Content bridges platforms and media, connecting in-flight experiences with online and offline “between-flight” experiences. It allows airlines or brands to weave messages into the traveler experience. For example automotive clients of ours do this with everything from ‘design’ in bespoke furniture at the lounge, to display advertising airside, in print and video, branded content on-screen and interactive microsites for customer acquisition

In the case of the airline’s own message, an online duty free “magalogue” that pops up when you book an international ticket may accelerate passenger revenue away from the airport shop to the onboard shop or a loyalty e-zine sent out to frequent flyers will inspire travel thoughts through any number of well written and illustrated travel pieces . These connections might be used by the airline to increase sales of surplus inventory..

Q: SO IT’S ALL ABOUT CREATING CONNECTIONS

Actually, it’s more about creating engagement via those connections. Engagement happens naturally when customers interact with content that fits into their lifestyle or the mode they are in and which is intuitive to their frame of mind. Essentially, engagement can happen throughout the cycle, if the media tools chosen to communicate it are sympathetic.

As providers of content, revenues and engagement to the world’s airlines, we’re observing the ongoing changes to our mediascape. The value we add should increasingly be derived from our understanding of where content fits in the cycle and where there is both transactional and opportunity value.

Q: CAN IT BE CUSTOMIZED TO INDIVIDUALS?

Airlines have an amazing “addressability advantage” and already know a lot about their customers due to sophisticated loyalty programs and the nature of booking a flight, for example.

This gives them the opportunity to engage the customer in ever more substantive ways as they expand their capacity for trip planning and trip sharing. They can use these advantages to build better content bridges, say, between consuming travel content then booking flights, or flying then sharing travel experiences, or any other pair of stages in the cycle.

Q: IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

Some airlines are already using social media to engage with their customers on the ground but they could take it a lot farther, by using using Facebook and Twitter on mobile devices while they’re on trips to stay in touch or recommend restaurants, or letting customers form their own communities while on the aircraft. Inflight AVOD systems already allow for this – all that’s required is a change in attitude at the airline.

Q: WHAT’S NEXT?

I think we’re experiencing a convergence of factors that will see a complete rethinking of “IFE” over the next few years. Substantial changes to the economy, advertising, media, content, the advent of social media and user generated content – not to mention the advent of inflight broadband… mean exciting times for airline media, marketing and IFE.

If airlines haven’t yet begun to explore the concept of  “return on engagement,” they will soon!

©istockphoto.com / ayzek

“This client just doesn’t get it!” is a refrain repeated countless times a day in agency/service provider/vendor hallways around the world. Meanwhile, across town, the client in question has probably just walked over to his/her boss’s office to complain, “The supplier is driving me crazy!”

As someone who has uttered both of these exclamations (more than once), I know with certainty that a happy world in which client and provider work in perfect harmony is next to impossible.  The constantly changing demands and increasing pressures of today’s workplace stand in the way of that utopian vision. However, people on both sides could dramatically improve their current working relationships by modifying just a few behaviors.

If you’re the provider:

Help your clients help themselves.
How quickly we forget that it’s our job to make sure that our clients – and not just ourselves – succeed. This often means running the gauntlet between internal meetings, approvals and politics. For example, an advertising agency and its client should not only map out the launch plan for a new campaign, but should also take some time to figure out how it will be sold at the client company, and what materials and steps will be necessary to do that.

Control the communication.
Ever feel completely overwhelmed with client requests and demands? Only able to react and never able to be pro-active? The answer doesn’t lie in a lengthy status report with constantly shifting due dates that no one wants to read or update. The answer actually lies in more frequent phone or live contact between you and your client. It’s amazing how much more you can cover in two or three quick conversations – conversations that can help you prioritize your tasks and potentially eliminate others.

Email is not your friend.
How many week-long-thread/19-people-cc’d email disasters will it take before we learn that email often does more harm than good? Yes, it serves a purpose, but that purpose is not the passive-aggressive bullying of others. Sure, referencing an email you sent your client two weeks ago with that information they claim to be missing will make you feel good, but couldn’t it have been avoided if you had worked a little bit harder at point #2?

If you’re the client:

Don’t cry wolf . . . unless there really is a wolf.
Yes, we expect our vendors to be able to adjust to our demands. “Flexible and adaptable,” I used to say. However, if every request is made under the threat of the world coming to an end “unless we get that file here by close of business today,” your provider will quickly learn that you are perhaps prone to occasional hyperbole regarding your needs. What happens, then, when there is a real requirement for them to jump through hoops?

Trust the provider; that’s why you hired them.
Client input and feedback are critical to program development. Client nitpicking and complete strategic reversals are not. In the desire to control the process, clients can often confuse the two, particularly when it comes to anything creative. Resist the urge to say that you ran the ideas by your spouse last night and he/she had some changes.  (Even if he/she did.)

Email is not your friend, either.
See above. Pick up the phone. Heck, if your account manager does IM, that’s cool, too. If airlines haven’t yet begun to explore the concept of  “return on engagement,” they will soon!