It’s the same with your marketing program. You have to understand how each marketing tool fits into a larger marketing mix.

Most marketers are specialists so when it’s time to think about strategy, we tend to gravitate to the tool we know best – even if they’re not the best for the job.

Never has that been truer than it is with social media. Talk about the shiny object syndrome! A new tool comes out (cough, Google+ or Pinterest, cough) and you’d think the silver bullet of marketing had been invented.

Tools of the trade

There are four things you should consider when selecting which tools to use for your marketing program:

• Key performance indicators. We also know these as business goals. Is the goal of the brand to improve revenues? Shorten the sales cycle? Improve margins? Increase grant funding? Gain more volunteers? Whatever the goals are, understand them as best you can so you know how your efforts will provide the best return.
• Corresponding marketing objectives. What is it you’re trying to achieve? Is it your job to generate leads? Increase brand awareness? Both? Figure out what success looks like so you know which tools to incorporate.
• Stakeholders. Every organization has more than one audience – customers, employees, the community, a board, etc. Think about the most effective ways to communicate with them before you begin to decide on the tools you’re going to use.
• Capacity. One of the mistakes we make, especially with social media, is thinking that because most of the tools are free, the cost is minimal. But you also have to consider how much time it takes to keep up with those tools. Capacity is always budget plus human resources.

These components form the foundation of your strategy and dictate the tools you decide to use.

Marketing for victory

Marketing strategy can be compared to military strategy. Unlike a military strategist, you do not want to attack people or treat any stakeholders like enemies…even if they’re saying negative things about you online.

But you do want to realize objectives in your campaign. You do want people to buy your product or service, and to advocate for your brand. That allows a company to “win a market” and defeat its competitors. In that sense, there is much to learn from military strategists.

One of the greatest books on military strategy is The Book of Five Rings by 17th-century Japanese samurai Miyamoto Musashi. Several of his battle tenets are relevant to your fight to communicate your brand’s message and achieve victory.

In the book, Musashi discusses four primary approaches to strategic engagement:

• The middle (or direct)
• Above (or top-down)
• Below (or the groundswell)
• The left and right sides (flanking)

Independently or sequenced, these approaches form a baseline to approaching marketing strategies. All four of the approaches work best when they are integrated into a holistic campaign, but invariably one technique is primary. The more sophisticated a program, the more likely it is to deploy multiple approaches.

Determining which approaches you use depends on your budget, the resources you have internally, the strengths of each person in your marketing round, and customer preferences.

Sometimes the choice is obvious while, at other times, it’s more difficult. If you use the four approaches described above in “Tools of the trade,” and understand where your team has strengths among the four, your decision will be a whole lot easier.

For perspective, second place goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which earned $483 million its opening weekend in 2011. And while 3-D admission price markups help account for The Avengers’ massive margin, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

That story begins five years ago with the release of Iron Man, the first of The Avengers’ superheroes to star in a feature film. Of the six superheroes, four had starring roles in films prior to The Avengers’ release and two had sequels. All were hits at the box office

Marketers… Assemble!

So what does this mean from a marketing standpoint? First, brand recognition matters. As Disney’s head of distribution Dave Hollis explains, Marvel “established character equity that, when combined, makes one and one equal a lot more than two.”

It also helps that Kevin Feige acted as Marvel Studios’ chief producer for the entire franchise, which allowed him to create a unified brand and “storyworld” from the get go: All of the films have the same feel and share the same vision.

The range of characters makes the film appealing to a broad demographic. Image via imdb.com

And although the film is unequivocally geek-centric (I’m sure The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy wishes he could attend), as The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit explains, the range of actors makes it appealing to multiple demographics.

Bright colours attract kids, Robert Downey Jr. brings in the 40+ crowd, Samuel L. Jackson is a huge draw for African Americans, and Thor ensures all half-mortals will be lining up to experience the 3-D extravaganza.

Feige suggests in a New York Times article that the feel-good levity that writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Cabin in the Woods) brought to the film is in part responsible for its word-of-mouth success. And with overwhelmingly positive (and numerous) Twitter mentions, it’s fair to say that’s probably true.

And then there are the games and apps. Avengers Alliance has been available on Facebook since March, with 1.2 million users playing per day, helping spread the word online.

If you’d rather play a game even Tony Stark would be proud of, there’s the Super Hero Augmented Reality App for iPhone and Android advertised by Wal-Mart in partnership with Marvel, that lets players assume the role of their favourite characters (here’s looking at you, Hawkeye).

The marketing genius lies in the app’s retail details, says Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff. Wal-Mart, in partnership with Marvel, is selling over 600 Avengers-related products, and to get fans into their stores, they have erected QR codes and placards of the superheroes.

Bring the Super Hero AR app to Wal-Mart, snap a shot of the QR code and unlock more characters. Take a photo of one of the placards and the character appears in life-sized digital glory beside you, which, of course, you can send to your friends, enticing them to head to Wal-Mart for their own photo shoot.

But perhaps the most significant marketing coup goes to the humble shawarma. According to TMZ, shawarma sales skyrocketed inLos Angeles after the premier. The reason? A post-credit scene features the Avengers team noshing in a shawarma shop. How’s that for celebrity endorsement?

A Starbucks in Lao Ximen, Shanghai. Image by bitslice cipher, via Flickr.

History suggests that foreign brands lack the local understanding to effectively target Chinese consumers online.

Companies like Google, eBay and Groupon all entered the Chinese market hoping to translate their success from the U.S., only to ultimately meet with failure in the Middle Kingdom.

Rather than try to introduce Chinese citizens to online services from the West, successful multinationals like Starbucks, Diageo and IKEA have all worked within the existing frameworks of China’s online space to engage potential customers.

By making use of local microblogging platforms, popular online video sites, and lifestyle social networks, these brands demonstrate that the real winners of online in China are not internet companies themselves.

Instead, they are brand marketers who understand where their customers spend time online, and come up with creative ways to engage them in an environment they are already comfortable with.

Starbucks: Microblogging the Chinese Way

A poster from Starbucks' 2011 Christmas campaign. Image by dcmaster, via Flickr.

In October 2011, Starbucks opened its 500th store in mainland China, with plans to reach 1500 stores in the country by 2015. To fuel its ambitious growth plans, Starbucks partnered with China’s leading mobile advertiser Guohe Ad, tapping into its local expertise for a Christmas 2011 campaign.

Guohe created a social app on the Chinese version of Twitter, called Sina Weibo, that allowed users to “check in” when they visited select Starbucks locations in China. Starbucks customers who used the app received a free drink size upgrade.

The campaign was so successful that Starbucks received 40,000 daily click-throughs to the microsite and achieved the number one ranking on the popular Chinese application platform Weico.

By partnering with a local firm that understands the marketplace for mobile and microblogging, Starbucks built up a tremendous amount of buzz among its Chinese customers.

Diageo: Chinese branded entertainment

Spirit brand Diageo is another international company that tapped into local expertise to target Chinese consumers online.

Diageo faced tough competition from Pernod Ricard, which had already established itself in China by appealing to the Chinese preference for Chivas and green tea, a popular drink at Chinese bars and karaoke clubs.

Diageo partnered with acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke to produce a series of brief documentaries entitled the Yulu Project.

The documentaries feature 12 individuals from different backgrounds who all share one thing in common: a willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve their dream.

One example is Zhou Yunpeng, a blind folk singer and poet who recounts the challenges he faces on his path to performing professionally. Xiao Peng has a different dream. He seeks to create a successful company after returning to China from his studies overseas.

The campaign tapped into the fact that, according to the 2011 Chinese Market and Media Survey (CMMS), Chinese netizens between the ages of 15 and 34 spend an average of over two hours per day watching online video.

Diageo chose not to make the video segments advertisements, but rather inspirational branded entertainment, only flashing the Johnnie Walker logo briefly at the end of each segment.

According to Diageo, the campaign generated 20 million video views over the course of eight weeks. Given the success of its first campaign, Diageo plans to run a second Yulu campaign later in 2012.

IKEA: Engaging customers on their turf

In China, marketers understand they need to have a presence on social media, but the problem is that they do not always know the best sites to invest in (the Chinese social media landscape is more fragmented than in the West, where only a few sites dominate).

Inside an Ikea in Nanshan, Shenzhen. Image by dcmaster, via Flickr.

Like Starbucks and Diageo, Sweden’s IKEA did an excellent job leveraging a Chinese social media site to engage customers. IKEA created a profile on Douban, a popular Chinese social networking site that allows users to recommend, comment on and compare their favourite books, films and music.

In September 2011 IKEA launched an event on its profile page called “The Dream Home in Films.” Users were encouraged to upload screenshots of their favourite home furnishing styles from famous films and write a description of the scenes. The most thoughtful entrants won IKEA products.

IKEA’s online campaign provided potential Chinese customers with an outlet for self-expression, giving them a positive impression of the IKEA brand in an online environment they were already familiar with.

Go local

The examples of Starbucks, Diageo and IKEA demonstrate that the true Western champions in China’s online space are not those who simply transplant and translate their existing model, but those who play within the existing frameworks of China’s internet.

Companies need to build internal local expertise or partner with domestic firms and social media sites to win the hearts and wallets of China’s 500+ million netizens.

This surpasses both The Twilight Saga: New Moon as well as Spider-Man 3, making this the third-highest grossing premier weekend of all time. This shattered any predictions made by experts, and it left many wondering: How did they do it?

The answer, of course, lies in the marketing strategy.

The Hunger Games was made to be marketed

The mockingjay pin logo

The Hunger Games’ success can teach marketers about the importance of having a solid product. This is the reason that the book had such a large following in the first place. First, the story had an amazing logo. The mockingjay pin was used on the cover of the novel and become key to the branding of the film. In the novel, the pin stood for courage and spirit. Lionsgate knew what the logo meant to fans of the novel, and put it in every trailer, poster and ad.

Second, the novel puts a heavy emphasis on partnerships. Spoiler Alert: Although only one person was supposed to win the games, two came out victorious. The novel is full of instances where one person could not have survived without the other, and this is something that can transfer over into the marketing world.

Having partnerships with other companies can strengthen your brand. Although you may not want to sync up with your competition, working with a complementary brand could help bring you a new audience.

Actors Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth

Marketing the movie

Aside from what the novel brought to the table, the film’s producers were able to create a few little marketing tricks of their own. Word-of-mouth became very important for those charged with marketing the film.
The film had different social media accounts for the different “districts,” or groups of people, that were described in the novel. If you wanted to see what one district thought about something in the news, all you had to do was head over to that district’s Twitter account.

Tributes: We welcome you. We salute your courage – and your sacrifice…

— The Capitol (@TheCapitolPN) March 28, 2012

PANEM ALERT: The Hunger Games Adventures are now open for all of Panem. Visit bit.ly/PlayTHGAdventu… & start exploring Panem today.

— The Capitol (@TheCapitolPN) March 30, 2012

Marketers also created social media quizzes that let fans find out which district he or she would live in if they were in The Hunger Games’ story world. Once again, bringing the story to life really worked. There was an element of interaction to this marketing tactic, and teens everywhere couldn’t seem to get enough (In case you were wondering, I would have lived in District 8).

Most importantly, the social accounts never gave away any scenes from the film. The integrity (and suspense) of the story was preserved.

If you were to read the novel, you would likely find many more marketing lessons that relate directly to your business. Unfortunately, you will likely be too wrapped up in the story to really
pay attention.

Retailers aren’t just tapping into the past on baby boomers’ behalf – they’re playing on a generation’s nostalgia for a time they never knew.

While some brands are cashing in on their own rich cultural cachet (see: Coca Cola or Adidas), others are hopping on the retro bandwagon, providing eager young buyers with faux (but fashionable) relics faster than you can say Lana Del Rey. But this instant aura of authenticity may ultimately be their downfall.

“The ironic fate that extinguishes so many trends built on suggesting and exploiting authenticity is that their very popularity extinguishes that which made them popular,” argues Nathan Jurgenson in the online sociology journal The Society Pages.

Jurgenson adds that faux-vintage photos made through Hipstamatic and Instagram serve “to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past.” (And this was written before Facebook Timeline became standard.)

For posterity’s sake, here are some of my faux nostalgia finds in the world of fashion, film and more.

Fauxtography

A Harcourt portrait of actor Jean Dujardin

The tweeted photo: a quiet, snowy street scene. The comment: “It was so beautiful I didn’t even need Instagram.”

We’ve gone from grainy, faded polaroids to disposable cameras to crisp digital photos to… grainy, faded digital photos. The new mantra: When in doubt, add a filter. That way you’ll place “yourself and your present into the context of the past, the authentic, the important and the real,” according to Jurgenson.

But if you want to be really original, you’ll take a photo that can’t be Photoshopped. On a recent trip to chic Parisian department store Franck et Fils, I happily paid €10 (one tenth of the price of my last digital camera) for a single picture from a photo booth.

Developed by legendary photo studio Harcourt, the booth debuted at Cannes and produces bright, flattering headshots that are a far cry from the stark portraits made at your local DMV.

Vintage reinvented

Banana Republic’s Mad Men capsule collections aren’t just cashing in on a sexy, award-winning series set in the 1960s – they’re appealing to men who collect bowties and women who long for the days when Marilyn Monroe’s voluptuous figure was the standard of beauty (whether these days even existed – just try nailing down Marilyn Monroe’s dress size, I dare you – is another matter).

The first collection, created in collaboration with Mad Men costumer Janie Bryant, was promoted through an online casting call that let fans reenact and upload scenes from the show.

Banana Republic's Mad Men clothing launch. Image via PSFK.com

In a nod to (or a swipe at) the copycat series Pan Am, the second collection launched on a branded Virgin America flight from JFK to LAX, with a suspicious number of fashion bloggers on board.

The cinched waists and tailored tops are accessibly retro, whether you’re a Peggy, Joan or Betty, but never stray into kitschy costume territory. And no girdles required. Can Debenhams’ Downton Abbey line be far behind?

Classic cocktails

Singapore Sling, from Fairmont's "Everyone's an Original" website

Forget alcopops and molecular mixology. Old-school spirits are front and centre in hip bar and hotel menus like Fairmont hotels’ Classic Cocktails program, which lets guests order a Singapore Sling, Boxcar or Brandy Alexander at any Fairmont property in the world.

Not only is Fairmont appealing to a prohibition party-throwing, Boardwalk Empire-watching crowd, each drink serves as an intro to the hotel brand’s illustrious history. e.g. The Jazz Bar at The Peace Hotel in Shanghai, or The American Bar at The Savoy in London, former home to bartender Harry Craddock (who created The White Lady and published the seminal Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930).

Fairmont is also using the program to send fans to their social networking microsite – Everyone’s An Original – for recipes and tips.

Found footage

Popularized by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project (or, if you must, 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust), the found-footage genre is running strong in movies such as Cloverfield, The Devil Inside and the Paranormal Activity franchise.

With less of an air of manipulation than a mockumentary, found footage gives viewers an “authentic” alternative to scripted scenes and slick CGI. In the case of recent teen comedy Project X, the goal is “simply to look like the wildest viral video of all time,” wrote The Globe & Mail’s Andy Nayman.

And while early faux footage films may have strained audiences’ credibility – what kind of person would keep the camera running with her life at stake? – in 2012, it’s all too believable that someone would document every waking moment of her life, assuming it will interest someone else (see also: Twitter updates).

Even more believable? That in the future, all footage will be found with iMovie’s Aged Film effect already applied.

Did I miss anything? Live performances of podcasts? Joysticks for your iPad? New albums on vinyl? Mobile phone attachments that look like rotary handsets? Feel free to weigh in with your favourite old-school-inspired goods.

Original photography in top image by Yu Tsai.

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

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

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

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

Cause marketing lessons

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

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

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

— Rihanna (@rihanna) March 7, 2012

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

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) March 6, 2012

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

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) March 8, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image via blog.spoongraphics.co.uk

Something that has stuck with me is an idea from one of Amber Naslund’s webinars that I attended last year. Why are many big brands so uncomfortable with letting their employees represent their brand on social media? This is not a social media problem, in Naslund’s view. This is a hiring problem. You need talent you can trust.

The way I see it, social media is a tool. A tool that will either emphasize parts of your business that are great, or bring the not-so-great to the public eye, painfully.

Sometimes the problem is that big brands want to jump on the social media bandwagon so quickly that they never implement a social structure within the organization. But if it doesn’t work from the inside, then what you put out on the outside won’t work either.

Brands need to be social in every department, not just marketing or communications. Making social media a skill for each and every employee instead of a full-time job for one, will make your business social in operation.

Instead of looking at social media as your silver bullet to virality or some spaceship into relevancy, brands need to look at social media as a tool to make all aspects of your operation work better, and be better in the eyes of your consumer.

Social on the inside

The keys to building a truly social business are training, guidelines and empowerment. The transition will be slow, which is why some big brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on third-party agencies to take it off their plates.

Using a platform like GetSatisfaction, for instance, can make your customer service social by nature. It can be implemented on your Facebook page and all incoming support inquiries will be indexed so that if someone has an inquiry that’s already been answered, they will be prompted to look at that answer instead of creating a new case. This will save your customer support agent’s time, and the department money.

Public relations have embraced social media faster than most departments. No longer do you have to push your pitches via email and pray that media will pick them up. You can create and maintain relationships with press through Twitter, having short conversations daily rather than only talking to them when you need something.

Brands can also use tools like PitchEngine, which makes news releases social media friendly and turns PR professionals into media outlets in their own right. In the social business age, many PR pros have reputable blogs and Twitter accounts with thousands of followers which allow them to connect with mass influencers without using the mainstream media as intermediaries.

Creating social leadership

Image by ChrisL_AK, via Flickr

While social should permeate all aspects of your brand, it’s still important to have the right leadership to define overall strategy and look over individual elements of your social media presence.

This can either be one person or a panel of people, each responsible for a different area of social (PR, Marketing & Sales, Customer Service, Product Development, etc).

Collaboration has never been more important to bridge the silos that traditional business has created, and which are the enemy of social.

Big brands are the slowest to adapt, when people may expect (with all the money that they have) that they would be the quickest. Redesigning your business to be social by nature trumps having 100,000 Facebook Fans, because doing it right is more important than getting it done.

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

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

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

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

We have the tools we need

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

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

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

Ogilvy Notes presents visual summaries of SXSW keynotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

France's knitted booth on the trade show floor.

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

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

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

Design is everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latin America is hot

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

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

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

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

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

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

Events are platforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

In celebration of IWD, here’s a roundup of links, news, and videos that are sparking conversations about women’s issues.

Perhaps the biggest (read: most controversial) social media story relating to IWD is the “Rock The Lips” campaign, backed by advertising agency AKQA.

With a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and more, the campaign invites women to upload photos of themselves wearing bright red lipstick and share them on whatever social network they use. The goal is to raise awareness by getting over 1,000,000 women to upload photos.

The Washington Post warns that because the campaign doesn’t link to the IWD site, followers of the campaign “may never learn the substance of the women’s issues being raised.”

In the run-up to IWD, AdWeek published The Women’s Issue, composed of a series of articles that provide a consumer-centric breakdown of women in three age groups, “The Indie Woman,” “The Mom Achiever,” and the “Alpha Goddess.”

The issue is chock full of stats and trends (who knew that women aged 55-65 spend more on consumer electronics than their Gen Y counterparts?). Forbes, however, had a thing or two to say about the depiction, suggesting that despite AdWeek’s optimism, the “Millenial Ms.” has “a lot more on her plate than sex, social media and shopping.”

image via Forbes, via Wikipedia

Forbes’ article paints a more even-toned portrait in response to AdWeek’s issue, including stats that tell a less rosy story (“83 percent of college-aged women diet, regardless of their weight”).

A recent post by Fast Company let women do the talking, featuring advice for women looking to climb the corporate ladder by peers who’ve already made it to the top. The advice (“go where the opportunities are”) probably works just as well for men.

You may or may not have seen this hugely popular TED Interactive presentation by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, but in case you haven’t, her message is as relevant as ever: When it comes to leaders in the workplace, we need more women.

Speaking of careers, the hugely successful Little Pink Book, a free digital content provider designed for businesswomen, is getting a boost from top-notch brands. PR Newswire reports that in celebration of International Women’s Day, Coca-Cola and FedEx will be running marketing campaigns on the site.

Little Pink Book screenshot

Finally, for information about women in politics, check out the guardian’s coverage. The Third Annual Women in the World Summit will be kicking off in New York today, with speakers Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee in attendance.

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

A range of apparel companies are putting online design and configuration tools into the hands of their customers. Online shoppers can pick and choose clothing details, colours, styles, fabrics and sizes – in effect, creating their own unique threads.

Marketing has always been about understanding what a customer’s needs are, and then delivering products and services to fulfill those needs. Customizable clothing helps take the guesswork out of that process.

The advantage for companies that embrace co-creation is that they only manufacture items that have been configured and paid for in advance. So supply always equals demand, making the model both clever and efficient.

More specifically, there are three consumer needs that custom fashion fulfills: the need to be part of the design process, the need for individuality, and the need for the perfect fit.

The need to be part of the design process

Customers want to have input into the goods they purchase. Academics have dubbed this the “Ikea Effect”: Consumers place a higher value on goods they create (or assemble) themselves, even if the end product is less than ideal.

Fruit of the Loom’s Pick Your Perfect Pair website allows shoppers to create their own bra to fit their exact size (choose from “just about” or “exact” cup sizes), unique shape (combine different left and right cup sizes), individual style (mix and match patterns) and support needs (adjust the band width).

Here’s the problem, though. The tool gives users free rein to make bad design choices. What’s needed is a balance between total creative freedom and total constraint. There is nothing on the site, for instance, that prevents customers from choosing bizarre colour or pattern combinations.

I’d like to see some sort of “configuration rules” that help users match colours, or a “fashion alert” that warns them if patterns aren’t complementary. That way customers can be assured they’re making sound design choices.

The need for individuality

By involving consumers in the process, businesses are moving away from the “company knows best” model to “consumer knows best.”

As Tom Peters argued in his 1997 article “The Brand Called You,” self-commoditizing has become the norm. Egosurfing, commonly known as “Googling yourself,” becomes more palatable when it’s referred to as online identity management, but the activity still betrays an increasingly me-focused mentality. The Internet has made us all into brands.

Shoe shoppers can unleash their inner designer at the Australian-based Shoes of Prey website, where the motto is “Your design. Our craftsmanship.” Customers choose the heel, toe, fabric, colour and embellishments, and the shoes are then hand-made by the company’s craftsmen.

The site puts the consumer in control, transforming them from passive shopper to (nearly) full-blown designer. Move over, Jimmy Choo: With a $185 to $335 price range, ladies get one-of-a-kind creations for much less than designer shoe prices.

The need for the perfect fit

Perhaps the strongest argument for customizable clothing is that it gives customers a fit that off-the-rack clothing just can’t match.

Boston-based custom menswear site Blank Label has built this notion right into its mission statement: “Brands claim superior fit, but the only true fit is custom.”

And it’s the same story over at California-based Indi where its motto is “Clothing for INDIviduals who know what they want.” Indi’s in the business of designing custom-made jeans for all body types, seeking to convert skeptics with its “perfect fit promise.” Not satisfied? Buyers can return their garments for alterations.

With all of these examples, the value proposition is pretty clear: When brands relinquish some control and let consumers in on the design process, what’s lost in brand recognition is gained in customer satisfaction.

Burberry Acoustic

It’s February 21, 2011 and Burberry’s Autumn/Winter womenswear collection has just been revealed to 1,000 attendees at Kensington Gardens in London. Simultaneously, it’s streamed live to 150 countries, at 40 events, and on a 32-metre digital screen in Piccadilly Circus – a world first.

Shoppers are invited to click to buy products on Burberry’s website up to a week after the show, allowing Burberry to earn revenue and access direct customer feedback months before the collection hits stores.

Luxury brands like Burberry define themselves and their products with words like “authenticity,” “timelessness,” and “iconic.” By building their reputation around tradition and history, these brands achieve a level of hyper-exclusivity that keeps them off-limits to the general public.

So how does this translate to a 140-character world where networking, sharing, and the open exchange of ideas, thoughts and emotions are the norm?

Burberry goes geeky

Technology has to be dynamic. It needs to enable the process of designing, and enable the consumer to get close to the brand.

–Christopher Bailey, Chief Creative Officer, Burberry

Luxury brands today need an online presence, but the virtual world is trickier for them to navigate than most. Not enough presence, and brands risk losing potential customers and revenue opportunities; jump in head first and they risk demystification.

Furthermore, a luxury brand’s online image has to remain consistent with its offline values, which can be challenging given the emphasis on history and tradition.

At the helm of Burberry’s technological revolution is Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey, who has been heralded as a digital pioneer in the fashion industry.

Since his arrival at Burberry in 2001, Bailey has made strides to revive the 155-year-old British brand, once famous primarily for its trench coats. Thanks to Bailey’s efforts, the brand has become a streetwise global leader on the digital frontier.

Burberry boasts almost nine million Facebook fans and Bailey personally updates the company’s Twitter account, posting behind-the-scenes photos and re-tweeting mentions from followers.

“It’s about an experience as well as buying a product,” Bailey told Vogue last year. “The more we entertain, the more we allow people into our brand. Then maybe one day they’ll buy. And then … who knows?”

In 2009 Burberry launched the hugely popular Art of the Trench, a social networking site where users can share their trench looks from around the world.

It’s also launched Burberry Acoustic, a website featuring up-and-coming British bands, complete with its own Facebook page and YouTube channel, and which has quickly become the MTV for the British fashion scene.

In the meantime, Burberry’s corporate website features countdowns for product launches and fashion shows, in addition to an online shopping portal.

Technology is now part of the brand’s DNA, and Burberry continues to look towards the future: its most recent retail opening in Beijing featured virtual image technology, animated footage, and holograms – all streamed live on Burberry.com. It even launched official accounts on four Chinese social media platforms to honour the occasion.

Burberry's Art of the Trench

Hermès’ digital stumble

Luxury whispers and cannot be loud or too colourful.

–Cem Boyner, Chairman & CEO, Boyner Holdings

While Burberry’s reinvention as a thoroughly digital brand has been applauded around the world, Hermès’ digital forays have been seen as major missteps. When a brand veers too far from its original values, customers take notice – and quickly.

In 2010 Hermès launched J’aime mon carré, a street-style inspired micro-site featuring ‘It Girls’ from New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. Through the use of photos, videos, and guides, the girls showed visitors the many ways they wear their Hermès silk scarves.

Within days of the launch the blogosphere was ablaze with comments. Visitors noted the site’s lack of interactivity compared to Burberry’s Art of the Trench; there was no way to upload pictures or leave comments.

But what was really jarring to existing and would-be Hermès customers was the acute departure from Hermès’ much-lauded brand values.

Hermès is widely considered to be the last genuine luxury brand, in part because of its discreteness. Hermès has never used splashy marketing campaigns or engaged in the now ubiquitous celebrity-endorsement deal. Instead, it has chosen to remain truly exclusive, with customers gladly waiting up to a year to purchase one of its coveted Birkin or Kelly bags.

The girls featured on J’aime mon carré were young and beautiful – meant to show the masses just how cool wearing an Hermès scarf can be. But Hermès is not for the masses; within months of its launch, the site was shut down.

Out with the branding, in with the content

People are no longer being communicated to, they choose what they want to see, when they want to see it, and how they want to see it.

–Jefferson Hack, Editor-in-Chief, AnOther Magazine

Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) is one of the world’s largest fashion conglomerates. LVMH’s portfolio includes a myriad of luxury brands with a range of online properties, from the simple lookbook-style of Celine’s website, to e-commerce and dedicated microsites at Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton.

Blurring the lines between editorial and promotional content, LVMH launched NOWNESS in February 2010. The site’s content is generated by an international team of editors who produce photo slideshows and videos about art, fashion, photography, architecture, and design. Users can provide editorial direction by tagging a post as “Love” or “Don’t Love.”

Excellent curation and exclusive content is a powerful combination, and with no product to sell and no obvious links to LVMH on the site (the site also features brands outside of the LVMH group), NOWNESS has taken on a life of its own.

NOWNESS attracted 300,000 members and more than 10,000 visitors within the first month of its soft launch, and now boasts more than 35,000 Twitter followers.

Keeping the brands’ values and the brands valuable

Luxury brands are still figuring out where they fit into the digital landscape. But it’s becoming clear that while they can’t afford to sit out of the social media revolution, they need to engage people in ways that respect their existing customers and reputations.

Hermès initially stumbled in the online space because it forgot what made it successful in the first place. Burberry and LVMH, on the other hand, knew who their audiences were, and then created content and communities especially for them.

For both brands, establishing an online presence that held true to their brand values allowed them to push their brand forward into the digital market, and also to attract a new generation of digital-savvy shoppers.

This is the year of Content. For sure. It’s used so much and by so many people, it must be, right? But I hate the word. I really do. Because it has been boxed into a kind of limitation that is dangerous.

As a wordsmith, I hate that Content is used primarily as a web/digital/mobile “strategy.” But Content as an industry, the way it defines itself, well, that’s the picture of growth.

I attended two content conferences this year and both were some of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. Here’s the thing about content strategists: they sweat the details. And so they put on great conferences.

The indefatigable Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 was behind this year’s Content Marketing World, held last week in Cleveland. I came away with some great insight into, well, content marketing, and where it sits in the world, and also with some insight that Joe might not appreciate.

Well, actually, he would. I know he would, and I think content marketers overall should, lest they push themselves into a corner and leave the real world forever. Some takeaways:

Content is fascinating

I learned a new word at Content Marketing World. Fascinate. I knew it before, of course, but Sally Hogshead spoke of the key to getting content read: Fascinate your audience.

This was the first presentation and it speaks to the high quality of the conference overall that the presentations didn’t let up. Sally spoke of the “emotional triggers” that lead to increased audience engagement and “commodity value” – meaning this works for a presentation, a tube of toothpaste or your words.

In a world where our attention span is down to nine seconds, the key to attention is through fascination. And you can be fascinating with content, something that can shortcut the decision making process. I would argue that storytellers (of all sorts) and advertisers have kind of known this for years. But I’ll get to that in a second.

Content has hit the real time

The real difference, to me, at least, between “old” and “new” media isn’t delivery or metrics. The real difference is what David Meerman Scott called “real time content marketing.” Meaning the 24/7 of the internet is what has changed everything.

He’s right. He showed examples of marketers creating content within hours of events to make themselves a part of the overall story, or, as David cleverly calls it, “the second paragraph.”

That is, what does the news story say in the second paragraph after it’s laid out the facts in the first? This was smart, smart stuff, but David has literally written the book on marketing for the digital age. I expected nothing less.

Friend the Muppets

Andrew Davis from Tipping Point Labs talked leveraging other people’s audiences He called it “harnessing the power of participation creation,” which seems like a lot of words for what it is: borrowing an audience to build your own.

He recalled how Tony Bennett’s career was floundering until his son (doubling as his manager) had the great crooner singing with everyone from K.D Lang to the Muppets.

He leveraged those audiences to create a second act for his career. Brands leverage others’ stories as well to combine two disparate audiences into one new one. Simon Kelly of Story Worldwide said much the same thing when he said, “The goal of content marketing is to create customers that create customers.”

It’s the story, stupid.

Story, story, story. As a writer I know this but it’s great to hear it told to hundreds of people at a time. And there were hundreds of people at this conference. Over 600, actually.

Sally Hogshead looked at story from an emotional point of view. Director and podcaster Kevin Smith then spoke twice – once at a club and the next day at the conference itself – where his storytelling abilities (which are tremendous) were living examples of what he was trying to say.

Smith’s career as a podcaster, on top of his career as a filmmaker, is a direct result of an audience connecting to a story well told. Social media strategist and author Jay Baer noted that podcasts are the most underutilized medium in the world and Kevin Smith’s success in this field should be an example to everyone.

Be honest

Beyond authentic and genuine, the real buzzword of the conference was “honesty.” I heard “honesty” and “trust” (again, Sally Hogshead has trust as one of her seven emotional triggers) over and over.

Marcus Sheridan, the CEO of River Pools and Spas said, “Tell the truth. Your customers can handle the truth.” Kevin Smith said much the same thing. Truthtelling is becoming an interesting part of storytelling on the internet because the sheer amount of information means honesty cuts through the noise.

Because our bullshit detectors are off the charts. Really.

Content marketing world universe

It wasn’t until the closing hours of Content Marketing World when I heard someone say something about non-digital media. Michael Pranikoff of PR Newswire said, “traditional media is not dead, it’s just changing.”

And a little later Ann Handley and CC Chapman, co-authors of Content Rules, noted that “content” isn’t an “instead of” it’s an “added to.” Meaning it doesn’t live in a bubble but in a real world where TV is still king, people read magazines and books (whatever the format), they listen to the radio and even, yes, read newspapers.

Taking all of that in, we start to appreciate the “content is everything” mantra. But that’s not what this conference, or Confab, was about. It was about the internet and digital marketing. It was not about multiplatform marketing. It wasn’t about multiplatform anything.

It was about a silo and this silo is becoming dangerously out of touch with the real world. My good friend (and truly one of the smartest guys out there) Mitch Joel has also fallen into this trap by saying “content is fleeting.”

Someone on Twitter noted this meme and said “Try telling that to Homer” and he wasn’t talking about the yellow guy from Springfield. The “content” crowd is painting itself into a corner.

This has lead to a kind of groupthink that is dangerous. It’s an ironic thing for this crowd – a crowd that has been on the “outside” of traditional marketing and content so long that there seems to be a kind of bunker mentality seeping into the discourse.

The other thing: Content people think they’ve invented everything. So suddenly the idea of the “influencer” has become a “super fan” and “editing” has become “curation” and “writing” has become…“content.”

Here’s the thing: the content people haven’t invented anything. They’re just using a new medium – a transformative medium, yes, even a revolutionary one – to reach an audience. But we’re still just playing with words. And words have been around a long time.

Sometimes it feels as if the content crowd isn’t playing in the wider world – and that’s wrong because the work they do is too important for that kind separation.

I’ll say this: The panda risks extinction because it can only eat one kind of wood. My good friends in the content industry, smart people all (with gusts up to brilliant), might face the same risk if they don’t come out of their digital forest every once in a while. Just to see the forest for the trees.

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?

Known as the digital middle class, these Brazilians made up 42 percent of the country’s Internet population in 2010, and are highly coveted by digital marketers, despite their average monthly income being only US$581.

This historic shift has forced Brazilian brands and marketers to figure out how to engage 101 million people to whom they never really had to pay attention before.

It’s clear that the “social pyramid” traditionally used to describe Brazil’s social structure no longer works. Today, a diamond is more accurate. In 2010 alone, 19 million Brazilians "graduated" from classes D and E to Class C.

Social media nation

An impressive 45 percent of class C Brazilians are active on social media. Brands, therefore, have focused their marketing efforts on channels such as YouTube, MSN Messenger, Twitter and Orkut, the Google-owned social network that still trumps Facebook in Brazil.

Popular chocolate brand Lacta, for example, partnered with Orkut on Fazendinha, Brazil’s answer to Facebook’s Farmville game (the name literally translates as “little farm”). When players plant a cacao seed on their virtual farm, the seed grows into a tree that produces MiniBis, Lacta’s new chocolate snack.

These social networks have also given brands access to a previously elusive demographic: middle class women. According to research, 83 percent of class C women access the Internet on a daily basis, and 40 percent of them spend more than two hours a day on social networks.

In order to engage this underserved market, popular Brazilian clothing chain Marisa launched a flashy new website that includes a virtual changing room where shoppers can “try on” clothes on a variety of body types.

Almost half of the Brazilians who use social media belong to Class C, and the vast majority of this "digital middle class" are female.

Different market, different rules

Brazilian brands have learned that the products and strategies they’ve used to reach class A and B consumers can’t simply be “pushed down” to class C.

This new middle class is, after all, making the transition from a very different economic reality in which a can of condensed milk was considered a luxury item to be offered as a gift on special occasions.

Brazil’s emerging consumers will be loyal to brands and products that cater to their unique needs and norms. Sales at the Casas Bahia retail chain skyrocketed after the brand figured out that class C customers loved furniture with mirrored doors because it made their small homes appear bigger.

And since many class C customers live in isolated areas where electronic products such as mobile phones are essential, Casas Bahia added a video series to its shopping website to explain in plain language how to use these unfamiliar items.

Class C-targeted ads also tend to be more didactic and direct. Most middle class Brazilians access the Internet from pay-by-the-hour Internet cafés (LAN houses) and don’t have time to ponder the pros and cons of buying a product while surfing on the clock.

With this reality in mind, department store chain Ponto Frio, one of the largest in the country, has added video and 3-D presentations on its website to reel in customers.

Class warfare goes digital

If wider access to credit lines over the past decade is largely responsible for allowing class C to participate in the economy, Orkut gets credit for putting class C on an even social footing, at least online.

About half of Orkut’s Brazilian users come from the digital middle class. Meanwhile, the upper classes are quietly fleeing to rival Facebook to escape Orkut’s rapid “favelization,” a term commonly used to describe the influx of lower income users.

Some things change more quickly than others.

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

So what exactly is a marketoonist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having been a marketer, I don’t want to critique marketing without putting myself under the magnifying lens because I’ve certainly been guilty too – I don’t see myself as a critic that’s immune to these things.

I always want every cartoon to make fun of myself and not just somebody else. When you get a collective laugh, people see themselves in the cartoons and I think that’s a positive thing.

Some of your recent cartoons poke fun at concepts like brand storytelling. Do you think brands can ever be taken seriously as content creators?

They can but they have to raise themselves to a higher standard. The big goal for a brand is to think less about their brand promise and more about their brand purpose – why are they actually there as a brand.

If your brand purpose is higher than the actual products you’re trying to sell, you can write content about that brand purpose and consumers will be interested because it will have actual, innate value to them.

If you broaden and extend what a brand stands for to a larger brand experience, and you’re creating content that’s larger than the features and benefits that you sell, then publishing becomes a natural extension of what you do. You transform yourself from being a product company to being a service company.

Your latest cartoon depicts a brand executive who seems to fundamentally misunderstand Facebook, and in the accompanying blog post you suggest that “many brands bring an advertising campaign mindset to social media.” What do you mean by that?

Social media shouldn’t be treated as a campaign because it’s an enduring part of the brand experience, not just a one-off with a beginning and an end. It’s more akin to a call centre where customers always have a connection to a brand.

I did a cartoon once that showed a legal review of a tweet. After all the red ink the tweet was far longer than 140 characters and the brand missed the event they were trying to tweet about by a week! If brands think of Facebook as a form of external communication like other forms of corporate communication they miss the dialogue and consumers can really tell.

It comes up again and again both for proactive marketing but also for reactive marketing when there’s a crisis. Brands often fall down in crisis management, take far too long to respond to customers, and that just fans the fire.

I’m reminded of your Brandtube cartoon in which an executive declares that in order to get the brand back on track all they have to do is produce a viral video. Are brands suffering from a case of inflated expectations when it comes to what social media can do?

I think they are. Everyone’s familiar with the success stories on social media, so there’s an expectation that you can just do a viral video as if it’s creating an FSI [free-standing insert] or an in-store display.

You can’t create viral media; you can create enough media with the potential to become viral. There’s a feeling that social media have a direct effect on sales when in fact it’s a far more indirect effect. If you have a long conversation over time, the indirect value is incredible. But the results are much harder to measure.

At the end of the day, I see social media predominantly as being about long-term investment and building an infrastructure. For example, a lot of brands look at their call centres as cost centres and try to minimize the amount of time that people talk to consumers. Zappos was the first one to break that and had a contest for who could stay on the phone the longest. The winner was something like six and a half hours.

You could ask what’s the ROI of the phone call, but symbolically, to say that we’re an organization that will spend that much time with a customer, it creates an incredible effect on the rest of the organization to want to go above and beyond on every consumer interaction.

It’s not a cost centre, but a value creation centre. That’s the same shift with social media – it’s an investment you make with many indirect returns.

A lot of your cartoons have to do with the creative process, and how the structure and bureaucracy of agencies sometimes get in the way of innovation. Does that come out of your own frustrations, and what are some ways we can overcome these institutional hurdles to produce more good ideas?

That definitely comes from my own experience, but also what I’ve seen everywhere. You very often have an idea that is fairly remarkable, but in the course of bringing that idea to life, the idea suffers a “death by a thousand cuts.”

The end result is often something that is mediocre, safe, and predictable – the edges have been sanded off the idea. That happens again and again whether it’s launching a new product or creating a piece of creative.

One way to break out of this is to create an organization that has the capability to make ideas stronger over time. When I worked at Method, we had floor-to-ceiling white boards on every vertical surface – we called it the Wiki Wall.

Rather than have a brainstorm once a quarter, we had an idea happen out in the open. Someone would start an idea on the corner of a wall and anyone within the organization had the ability to add to that idea. We weren’t allowed to say “Yes, but…,” only “Yes, and…” As the ideas went from inception to launch, they became stronger because everyone was adding to it.

That’s a very different approach than most companies take: leave the brainstorm and go back to the real world of the office where sacrifices are made and peace treaties are forged.

I’m creating a lot of cartoon material on that because it’s such a rich area, and it’s more crucial now than ever. In the 1950s you’d launch broadly appealing, fairly mediocre products and drive awareness through advertising. Nowadays, with the number of new products launched every year, the stakes are much higher and you need to have a remarkable product at the outset to have a chance of surviving.

There’s a great quote from the founder of Geek Squad that “advertising is a tax for unremarkable thinking” and so it pushes more that remarkable thinking to occur early on in the process rather than later.

What do you think cartoons can communicate about our world that words or other media cannot?

Seth Godin posted one of my cartoons a while ago and his main takeaway was that cartoons have this incredible power of connectivity between the reader and the cartoonist.

In having just a few simple lines, readers have to connect the dots themselves and make the connection with why the cartoon resonates with their situation. So there’s a bit of call and response.

The comments section of any cartoon that I post is often more interesting than the article that I write because people have their own interpretations and they apply it to their own situations in a way that I could never envision.

Cartooning has a long and rich history, and yet if you talk to many cartoonists, they’d say that it’s never been worse because of how newspapers are failing and the traditional paths to cartooning are broken. But cartoons have been described as the greatest loyalty engines ever created.

Nowadays, who needs loyalty engines? It’s brands. So when I look at the power of cartoons and how it can be applied to where we are today, the future is incredibly bright.

Photo via Adrants.com

Look for bloggers

When Pepsi wanted to raise awareness of its new logo, it turned to bloggers to spread the word. Instead of sending out a press release, the company put together a bundle of cans showing the way its design had evolved since its launch. This was delivered by hand to each blogger, and then followed up shortly after with a set of cans in the new design.

It was just the type of PR stunt that Pepsi needed to distract people from a leaked design document and to re-introduce people to the brand. It also helped show Pepsi as a company that is proud of its heritage.

Those bloggers could then write about the new design and might be more inclined to talk about Pepsi in the future. Not bad for a few cans of soda.

To use this concept yourself, search online for bloggers who are already talking in your niche, whether it’s food or complex laser systems, games or ironing board covers. You can use Google Blog Search to search recent topics, and then get coverage from these bloggers by offering products for them to review or feature.

Embrace strong community voices

Twitter is an ideal platform for finding the positive conversations within your industry and building links between your brand and customers. Jet Blue leveraged Twitter with excellent results last year by giving away 1,000 flights to people via the microblogging service. The twist was that only the most proactive fans would get the tickets, as the opportunities were tweeted out at random times.

Not only did fans have to be engaged online, they also had to be prepared to dash to a secret location for a chance of claiming a ticket. A mob of people descended on the location, creating great press exposure and a lot of happy customers.

The excellent Follower Wonk will let you search Twitter profiles for keywords, helping to find people who are passionate about your niche. Take a leaf from Interflora, who gave away free flowers to people who had had a bad day, with similar results to Jet Blue.

Reward loyal customers

In the UK there’s no better example of a brand rewarding its customers than supermarket chain Tesco, which offers a free clubcard to every customer. Tesco rewards customers with vouchers based on how much they spend, in effect giving them free money to spend in store.

This idea isn’t unique – but if you already use a brand regularly and can get free stuff in doing so, it’s a no-brainer to continue with that brand instead of others.

Tesco takes the rewards concept a step further by allowing customers to trade in vouchers for triple their face value on other products – even products not sold by Tesco such as theme park tickets, meals at restaurants, flights and hotel stays.

It’s a clever way of developing the brand, and Tesco is more than aware that giving something away will keep you coming back.

Even without a loyalty scheme, brands can search online for positive customer comments and reward them. To identify brand conversations on forums use Board Tracker.

Reduce unhappy customers

Another British retailer, ASDA, offers a 100-day money-back guarantee on all its clothes. ASDA uses this policy to ensure minimum negative feedback about the brand.

Giving everyone who complains a freebie actually encourages negative conversations, so the ASDA approach of pre-empting criticism with generous guarantees makes sense.

European video game retailer GAME took a similar approach when it offered a higher trade-in value for the Nintendo 3DS than the purchase price. Now it was easier for customers to trade in the product if they didn’t like it than to complain about it.

Photo by Majiscup via Flickr

Free sells

It’s the same old strategy seen at your local farmer’s market  or trade fair, but amplified by the viral power of the Web. Giving away free stuff is a great way to build relationships with bloggers, reward loyal customers and foster positive conversations around your brand.

Even if your product is expensive, trials and product loans can be worth it. Try giving the strongest voices in your niche a free product today and you’ll be surprised by how well free can sell.

Photo by Eva Blue via Flickr

Magic. Mystery. Emotion. These are words that come to mind when I think of Cirque du Soleil’s gravity-defying shows. But they have very little to do with conventional marketing, and even less to do with social media, which is all about openness and clarity and direct communication between customers and brands.

During his talk at last month’s Tomorrow Awards, Guibert explained how the multinational Cirque brand connects with customers without diluting its core brand themes of emotion, humanity and creativity. In particular, Guibert said that Cirque:

• never uses superlatives in its press releases or promotional material. Instead, the brand focuses on emotional words like “wonder” and “journey.” Said Guibert: “If you oversell you can only under-deliver”;
• always features eye contact in its posters to emphasize the universal human appeal of its shows;
• puts every act of every show on its website for people to experience and share.

This last point is surprising, as one might expect Cirque du Soleil to preserve the magic of its performances by limiting content to ticket buyers. But Guibert said that, after a period of debate within the company, it became clear that sharing content is the best way to connect with both loyal and potential customers. We sat down with Guibert after his talk to learn about the importance of content and emotion for Cirque du Soleil.

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.

Branded entertainment

The Possibility Shop is produced by Disney and sponsored by Clorox

Typically, branded entertainment takes the form of a serialized or episodic Web show that receives some or all of its financing through a brand investment. Branded entertainment can certainly “go viral” if the content is high quality and the brand provides enough financing to help promote it. But branded entertainment is usually designed to secure audience through paid syndication, licensing arrangements or revenue share deals.

Some recent examples of branded entertainment are The Possibility Shop, a kids show produced by Disney and sponsored by Clorox, and Dirty Talk starring comedian Mike Rowe and branded by Motorola. Both of these efforts work to incorporate the brand into the story.

These videos are very unlikely to go viral. They may have provided value for the viewer by informing or entertaining them but they don’t elicit the emotional connection that compels people to rewatch the videos or pass them on to friends and followers.

Viral videos

On the other hand, viral videos are usually one-off video clips that have been designed for repeated viewing and sharing. These videos rarely establish a narrative and can be as short as 15 seconds long. Viral videos are sometimes launched with the assistance of a brand, but they are more likely to be produced by an amateur or by a studio for TV and repurposed for the Web.

A relatively early example is “Lazy Sunday” (no longer available on YouTube), a mock music video often credited as YouTube’s first true viral hit. In this case, the video was a Saturday Night Live skit that had been uploaded illegally to YouTube. But if you look at the top 100 most viewed videos on YouTube (and filter out the music videos), the vast majority of the all-time biggest viral hits are produced by amateurs (early examples include “The Evolution of Dance” and “Chocolate Rain”. In other words, budget often had very little to do with the video’s ultimate success.

Again, the reason these videos have gone viral is that they have made someone laugh, cry or squint in disbelief. They get shared because viewers want to pass on these emotions with someone else they care about.

When branded entertainment goes viral

Viral videos and branded entertainment sometimes overlap, as was the case with T-Mobile’s “Welcome Back” campaign, a branded take on the flash mob meme perfected by “amateur” content creators like Improv Everywhere.

A more recent example is “The Force”, a Volkswagen Superbowl ad starring a pint-size Darth Vader. The ad demonstrates that an emotionally resonant video combined with some major media dollars can generate 25 million online video views in a week.

Yes, this aired during the biggest television event in America, but the same agency, Deutsch LA, produced another Superbowl ad for the Volkswagen Beetle that has yet to generate 500,000 views on YouTube.

Why viral videos are not a content strategy

The lesson is that viral success is hard to predict and even harder to replicate. Even in the case of Improv Everywhere, some of their videos do better than others and none are guaranteed to go viral.

In fact, the more videos they produce, the more likely the market will become saturated with the concept, diminishing our emotional response. Part of what makes a video go viral in the first place is that the user feels like they have discovered something new and that by sharing the video with friends they are sharing that discovery.

Viral videos depend upon the perfect combination of creative genius, market timing and an emotionally engaged audience.In other words, you have to get lucky. Betting on a video going viral is a great way to set up your campaign for disappointment.

Branded entertainment is all about brands and content creators working together to tell a brand’s story in a compelling, organic way. Great branded content can achieve this goal and create value for brand and consumer whether it goes viral or not.

Photo by Robert Scoble via flickr

Another week means another battle in the tablets wars. The release of Apple’s iPad 2 dominated this week’s headlines. Even before Wednesday’s launch, an alleged prototype spotted in China sparked much speculation in tech circles ranging from the device’s size and price, to whether Steve Jobs would make an appearance despite being on medical leave. Jobs did take the stage, announcing the new product to the delight of Apple fans and shareholders alike.

Reactions were mixed among critics and some felt strongly that there were more developments that Apple could have made. The newest iPad does enable significant face time, integrating both a front-facing camera and HD video capabilities. Apple has also created a Smart Cover and applications for Garageband and iMovie to beef up its pioneering tablet. As for price, the iPad 2 costs the same as the original iPad at $499.99 to $829.99.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry maker RIM conveniently garnered some attention of its own this week by leaking the April 10 launch date of its Blackberry PlayBook tablet. The company also showed off some of the PlayBook’s gaming capabilities at the Game Developers Conference, right around the corner from the iPad 2 launch in San Francisco. Even Hewlett-Packard joined the tablet conversation, accusing the PlayBook of copying its operating system design.

When it comes to tablets, Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha believes the most important feature is software. It remains to be seen whether software alone will make up for a higher price in Motorola’s own Xoom tablet. What we can say with certainty is that this week’s launch of the iPad 2 will continue to drive innovation among the companies vying to loosen Apple’s iron grip on the tablet market.

Top Stories

Google fixes a glitch and restores thousands of Gmail accounts.

Facebook makes group messaging easy, acquiring messaging service Beluga.

Apple’s subscription fees come under fire by publishers.

YouTube creates a new class of dot-com millionaires.

Views from around the web

The Daily is rumoured to renounce its iPad-only status and prepare for an Android launch this spring.

U.S. State Department invests $150 million in teaching Egyptian organizations and individuals about digital media.

Seth Godin weighs in on the battle between Apple and the publishing industry.

Google to launch in-app payments this May.

What the partnership of titans Nokia and Microsoft means for the mobile space.

This week in social media

Coca Cola continues to spread joy with the Happiness Truck:

Teach a man to tweet? Charlie Sheen attracts more than 1 million fans less than 24 hours after Ad.ly teaches him how to use Twitter:

Dan Ariely by poptech via flickr

You talk a lot in the book about the need to design better products and systems that take into account human limitations. Are you generally positive about the role of technology and branded products in making us behave more rationally?

Am I generally optimistic? Not really about brands. The commercial world is creating many incentives for companies to get us to behave badly. It’s very hard to think about the company who would want us to save for retirement or to consume in 30 years.

Companies inherently want us to spend money now. I think what technology is actually quite good at is creating the infrastructure for a large number of people to try and fight these incentives. So from that perspective, I’m optimistic.

What products have you seen lately that you’ve been impressed by and what are you still waiting for someone to design?

There are many products that I am waiting for people to design. I am a big fan of the phone because it can connect our good intentions to the way we actually work in the world. We can all sit at home and have lots of good intentions. The question is, do we execute them? And the answer we have to admit most often is no.

The phone is a very interesting thing in that it’s with you both when you make the plans and when you execute them. If we can get our phones to be more aware of what we are doing, of our initial plans, and of the mishmash between them, I think there could be some wonderful opportunities.

What about what you call the “IKEA effect,” the idea that people find deeper enjoyment and value in things that they had a hand in creating? By doing so much of the legwork for us, has technology made us less happy? (If not less smart, as Nicholas Carr contends).

I think that’s an interesting question concerning the optimal role of our involvement with technology. If you’ve created something or have been a part of it, you will be more likely to listen to it.

It’s a continuum between convenience on the one hand and motivation to participate on the other. I think the issue with technology is determining the golden point of connection.

For example, it’s four o’clock and I have a problem with eating cookies. Now I’m at Starbucks and the phone reminds me of my pledge. Perhaps it shows me a photo of how I might look in 30 years if I keep on eating like this.

My personal problem involves time management. I think, again, it’s one of those things where we all like to be productive and efficient and then we get to the office and look at our e-mail and Facebook accounts. There is a great opportunity for fixing things in that direction as well.

Do you think the Internet has made the “Not-Invented-Here Bias” (our tendency to be more attached to our own ideas and creations) less powerful? After all, aren’t we in the age of curation, open-source collaboration and Wikipedia?

I think it’s a question of, “What do we need to do to feel that something is ours?” We were able to show in the book that people could simply unscramble a sentence and feel like they had written it themselves. Just the fact that you had to unscramble the words and reconnect them suddenly made you much more proud.

So the barrier to feel that something is ours is actually quite low. If you talk about Wikipedia, I think that the people who curate it actually think it is theirs; they don’t think they are curating it, but that they’re creating it.

Another interesting concept for marketers in the book is the “Hedonic Treadmill” – the idea that people inevitably adapt to and fall out of love with things once they’re no longer new and shiny. Now, it’s easy to see how this is good for marketers and brands, but not so much for debt-ridden consumers. So here’s my question: Do you ever fear that your research and tips are going to be used for evil instead of good?

Very much. If you understand something about how people work, you can use it for good and for bad. I think there is a risk of people really doing the wrong thing and making lots of money from it. If you look at the world as a zero-sum game, it’s a very depressing thing because it means that everything you make, other people lose.

But I think there are many opportunities to provide real value where everybody benefits. Let’s say you started a company that helped people to lose weight or to waste five percent less of their time at work. Now we can create real value.

The sad thing about behavioural economics is that you understand how inferior and fallible people are compared to what you want them to be. The good news is that it means that there are places for real improvement.

You spend a lot of time touring the world speaking to business executives about how their bonuses might actually be making them less productive, or telling doctors that the methods they’ve been using for hundreds of years are wrong. What’s it like being the bearer of bad news?

What I usually try is not to be the bearer of bad news, but the bearer of data. It’s not me telling you how things are but saying, “Look, this is what people believe in general.  Here is the data.”

What do we want to do given this data? How do we want to update or change our understanding? I think that by trying to remain objective and not idealistic, and by saying that it’s basically all about data, it becomes a little simpler.

As someone who spends a lot of time touring the world, what frustrates you most about air travel? How can brands make the experience more rational?

For me the biggest thing is uncertainty. I never know if the flight will take off, and when – or if – I will get to my destination.

If I know what to expect I can plan for it. Airlines are taking bigger precautions by making flight times longer so they arrive on time. This is a good trick because it helps us schedule more effectively.

And then, of course, there is the rudeness. If you’re in a situation where things are not going well, it would be very nice to deal with someone who is empathetic. But the whole experience of flying is a continuing struggle.

How have you applied your research to your personal and professional life? In the same way that a fitness trainer might be expected to have six-pack abs, do people expect you to be Mr. Rationality?

Not so much. Partly because I admit my irrationalities in the book. And it’s clear that they give me lots of sources for ideas. But people do approach me for help with difficult decisions they have in their lives. They expect me to have a different perspective.

I can’t turn off the behavioural economist in me. I have never tried to turn it off; I try to share it with people. We could be standing in line for something and asking questions about what is really going on and why we do certain things. I am continually fascinated by people.

Actually that’s one of the main benefits of social science – we can ask questions about our own lives and realize how little we know about the subject.

As you all know, we’re high on air travel around here and 2010 was a huge year for airline news. These past 12 months saw many a mid-air scandal, myriad mega-mergers and a deluge of tweeting. And with the holiday season in full gear, airport security remains a “touchy” subject.

Content is at the core of what we do at Sparksheet so we always keep a close eye on how it’s being created, shared and monetized. Brands, now involved in a group embrace with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, have put a whole new spin on storytelling, creating transmedia campaigns and series that bridge the gap between advertising and entertainment.

Of course, the world of media and magazines continues to be transformed by the digital age. Aiding its metamorphosis in 2010 was the introduction of the iPad which, along with Amazon’s Kindle, spurred on the meteoric rise of the eBook. While this year saw more proclamations about the death of the print newspaper, huge news stories like the WikiLeaks cables injected new life into purportedly dying beasts.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Confounding airlines and the tongues of news reporters alike, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull filled the air with ash for seven long and flightless days. The TSA’s patdowns and backscatter x-ray technology threatened to prolong the American Thanksgiving rush, but what came out of it in the end were some rather “junky” YouTube videos.

Twitter-savvy director Kevin Smith ruffled the feathers of Southwest Airlines with statements like “You [messed] with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!” after he was booted out of his single seat for purportedly being ”too fat to fly.” On the other side of the curtain, disgruntled JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater caused an incident memorable enough to warrant an eight-part Wikipedia entry.

We also saw some major mergers this year, with United and Continental becoming United Airlines and LAN and TAM poised to join forces in Latin America. Meanwhile, outer space acquired its first commercial caller, as Virgin Galactic’s V.S.S. Enterprise made its inaugural trip in October from a runway in New Mexico.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Old Spice, Nike and other brands proved that advertising can be as entertaining as unbranded content.

QR codes brought “traditional” media into the digital fold, with everyone from grocery stores to Dom Perignon crafting up clever 2D messages.

It’s that time of year when top 10 lists warrant their own top 10 lists: Time Magazine offers its top picks for entertainment, while Mashable serves up Twitter’s top trends.

Media + Magazines

The newspaper got its own doomsday clock this year but that hasn’t stopped muckrakers and newsgatherers; the recent WikiLeaks fiasco has brought issues such as transparency, freedom of the press and journalistic ethics back into the limelight.

The iPad launched in spring of 2010 to mixed reviews, selling over a million units within the first month.

Who said magazines can’t still turn heads? We leave you with the best magazine covers of 2010.

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.

Over the course of the last year, incidents such as Southwest Airlines’ Kevin Smith fiasco, and the ominous Icelandic ash cloud have elevated branded tweeting from a viable marketing helping hand to an indispensable B2C tool.

Searching Mashable for “airlines on Twitter” brings up a list of content long enough to warrant its own tag, with similar content appearing everywhere from marketing blogs to travel and tourism websites.

“Airlines on Twitter” was even poached as a domain name, hosting a tool for tracking airlines’ Twitter usage in real time. Like dog years to human, time on the Web seems to pass by sevenfold, and the business world is now well aware of the impact Twitter has had, and continues to have on their brands.

Content first

Smart airlines have learned that Twitter is more than a customer service platform or PR message board. With some brands offering funny and off-the-cuff content on a rapid cycle, following airlines can often be more entertaining and rewarding a pastime for Twitter users than following some celebrities. Air New Zealand (@FlyAirNz) out-tweets some of its much larger competitors, updating followers on the exploits of its puppet mascot, Rico. FlyAirNZ’s tweeted content regularly traverses the Web, often finding itself on Facebook, blogs and other websites outside of the company’s reach.

For an extreme example of content standing alone, check out the Aloha_Airlines Twitter feed. Even though the defunct airline folded its wings in March of 2008, its Twitter account managed to retain a fair-sized following for well over a year, solely on the power of its customer engagement.

Giving nods to other airlines and updating followers on the status of employees, Aloha lived on in spirit, and even managed to make it into more than one “best airline on Twitter” list despite being permanently grounded.

Branded contests

A popular form of branded content, contests and cross-promotions are springing up in hash tags all over Twitter. Drawing on the popularity of the Awkward Family Photo blog, Virgin Airlines offered a family vacation package in exchange for embarrassing family portraits.

EasyJet created the 15-Hour Blogger Challenge, showcasing four prominent travel bloggers in four destinations with frequent updates. Followers vote on their favourite journey for a chance to win a short trip to the winning city.

Cheeps & Twares

Some airlines do contests, others prefer deals. JetBlue pioneered the latter with their famous “Cheeps” concept. In the last six months, other companies have been quick to mimic these lightning-fast last-minute airfare specials on Twitter, with their own cutely named fare deals; United Airlines does “Twares,” for instance. Notably effective from day one, these offers continue to drive up hits to the companies’ main sites and effectively push sales in off-seasons.

Turbulence

Engaging in the real-time Web hasn’t been smooth sailing for all airlines. With the speed and scale of Twitter’s reach, it’s easy for brands to lose control of their message. As we reported earlier this year, Kevin Smith’s “not-so-silent” dust-up with Southwest Airlines was exacerbated by Southwest’s allegedly “snotty” online persona which, though familiar to the airline’s fans, was jarring to many outsiders, including the well-known director.

Like all recognizable brands on Twitter, airlines have had oodles of imitators, though the large majority of phonies have been weeded out at this point in the game. Still, Twitter users have caused their fair share of controversy in the world of airlines outside of airlines’ official accounts, including this hoax during the Haiti crisis, and this one following the Icelandic volcano eruptions.

Engage

Though many critics have praised Twitter’s real-time customer service capabilities, others suggest that a bandwagon mentality is the real driving force behind brands warming to social media trends, pointing out that embracing the technology is not the same as engaging with technology.

Some airlines still seem to prefer to use Twitter as a one-way PR tool, neglecting a large and integral part of the network’s value as a medium. In an interesting (if not exactly scientific) experiment, travel blog A Tramp Abroad attempted to panel airline Twitter usage by directing this query @15 major airlines:

We’re doing a survey – do you generally respond to customer inquiries received on Twitter? Average response time?

This experiment was completed in July 2010, with roughly 60 percent of airlines queried responding within 24 hours. Again, time flies in the digital world, and chances are that percentage has grown considerably, even just three months later. All things considered, it’s clear that Twitter’s status as a liaison between companies and customers has taken off, and will likely continue to soar.

Further reading: Airlines on Twitter

SimpliFlying’s list of interesting airline and aviation experts on Twitter

Cheap-o-Air’s top airlines on Twitter

About.com’s list of Top Ten Airlines on Twitter

Measure your favourite airline’s tweet-score with Tweetlevel.com

Track airlines’ activity on airlinesonTwitter.com.

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 Joi via Flickr

You recently made a splash by announcing that Linchpin would be your final book with a conventional publisher. Is cutting out the middleman a luxury reserved for bestselling authors with established brands and strong marketing talents, or do you think this is where the publishing industry is headed?

Publishing is about taking a financial risk to bring an idea to the world, it’s not about printing. Printing is easy.

The hard part for any author going forward isn’t going to be getting shelf space (that’s infinite at Amazon). The hard part is permission to talk to people who want to hear from you and in creating ideas worth spreading.

So, either publishers are going to start building that asset or authors will.

What happens to organizations when linchpins leave? Can Zappos be Zappos without Tony Hsieh? Can Virgin exist without Richard Branson?

Great question. I think smart organizations have more than one linchpin, no?

In Linchpin, you write that “it’s damaging to put on a new face for work” and suggest people bring their personalities and emotions into their jobs. But doesn’t it get tiring to be “on brand” all the time?

It’s not tiring if your brand is you. If the emotional labour you do is from the heart, then it’s natural. If the work you do is important, it’s okay to keep doing it. Where the stress comes is when you don’t believe, or if you’re scared out of your mind.

You talk about the need to stop obsessing over perfection and simply “ship” ideas and products as soon as they’re ready. But does this ability depend on the brand’s positioning? (i.e. it may work for Google but not Apple or Mercedes who have built their reputations on the promise of perfection).

Apple? Apple ships stuff that isn’t perfect all the time. They sell to people who value “first.” I agree that Mercedes is in a different category. I think most organizations that want to grow, though, have little choice but to create a culture of innovation.

What are some sites, tools or services that you find indispensable for overcoming resistance and “shipping” what needs to get done?

I use a big watercolour pad and some markers. I don’t go to meetings. I make promises and keep them. The Shipit journal I just published to Amazon helps a bit with that.

How important a role does content play in what you’ve famously called permission marketing? Are there any brands doing a good job of providing useful, relevant content in an unobtrusive way?

Content is at the core of it. I like that Amazon knows what I like. I like that Groupon is funny. I like that my domain service only reminds me of expiring domains at the appropriate last minute…

Linchpin draws upon Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which was written a good two decades before the whole question of whether online content should be free or locked behind a paywall. Do you think media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and soon the New York Times are making a big mistake by opting out of the gift economy?

There’s no doubt it’s a huge error. The Guardian is already bigger than both, and the Times is much bigger than the Journal. Trading attention for short-term cash gain is a no-win strategy I think.

Your books contains so many airline- and hotel-related examples that you obviously spend a lot of time on the road. Can you think of an instance when a travel brand or service proved indispensable?

What is actually good about travel?

The security guys treat me like a criminal. The flight attendants yell at me. The flights are overstacked, things go wrong, promises are broken. The airport food is miserable. Sorry, but the only thing the travel and hospitality people I interact with seem obsessed with is cost reduction. They usually pander to the middle of the market and forget to treat different customers differently. Where’s the joy?

I’m ranting now. I’m sorry.

It’s so easy to get this more right than they’re getting it. So easy to hire people (and train people and reward people) to focus on delight, to keep promises, to get to the heart of why people are travelling in the first place. I know how deadening it is to deal with the crowds day in and day out, and I’m sure it wears them down, but the individual traveller finds it hard to be sympathetic.

Media + Magazines

Design buffs are abuzz about the new Writer app for the iPad (we’re loving the product brief as much as the app).

Living up to the hype: the US eBook market expected to reach $500 Million in 2010.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: a look at the state of the magazine from three distinct angles.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

A self-proclaimed “Instapaper for the real world,” Foursquare’s revamped iPhone App offers location-specific “tips” and curated “to-do” lists.

The no-nonsense bus gets a business casual makeover: bus lines step up to compete for the business travel ticket.

Photographer Nick Gleis offers exclusive views into the world’s most opulent private aircraft.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Why marketing heads should turn to Hollywood for cues on branded content.

Ad network VideoEgg acquires conversational media company SixApart to form SAY:Media.

Time Magazine’s curious countdown of oddball celebrity endorsements.

SAS Scandinavian Airlines plans the first inflight gay wedding.

Launching an airline in fast-growing Brazil.

The Top 10 Social Travel Networks broken down.

Media + Magazines

Five lessons from Longshot, a magazine made in 48 hours.

What’s wrong with American journalism, according to Jay Rosen.

YouTube pitches Hollywood on Pay-Per-View.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Behind the Arcade Fire’s interactive video experiment.

Mad Men stars shill for real brands, blurring the show’s boundaries.

The advertising jingle makes a comeback.

Brazil has the highest percentage of social media users in the world. By the end of last year, more than 67 million Brazilians – that’s 35 percent of the population – had access to the Internet, according to Nielsen. Of these wired Brazilians, 38 million spent an average of 71 hours a week on the Web, and 80 percent visited blogs or social networks such as Google’s Orkut, Brazil’s answer to Facebook.

Buying a house? There’s an app for that

These numbers are extremely enticing to companies who invested R$1.3-billion (more than US$700-billion) in the Web last year. Tecnisa was the first construction company in Brazil to do business over the Internet and the first in the world to sell an apartment – worth R$500,000 – via Twitter.

With 35% of its sales originating online, the company has already closed 38 deals through Twitter, where they have 6,000 followers, and two deals through their iPhone application in the last year. One customer took just four days to buy an apartment through the app.

Tecnisa has a long-standing relationship with the Internet; in 2005, it was the first Brazilian company to launch a corporate blog. Romeo Busarello, the company’s Internet director, says the Web is about building relationships as well as ROI.

“The Internet is not the end, but the channel for us,” Busarello said. “The social networks help us with brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, public relations and customer care. We engage with neighbours, stockholders and bloggers.”

Free delivery in 140 Characters or less

Engagement was also the goal of Pizza Hut of Rio Grande do Sul, which received more than 80 suggestions for new pizza combinations on Twitter during a recent promotion.

The five best recipes were put to a vote on the franchise’s website. The winner – a combination of beef, pork, cheese, oregano and barbecue sauce – garnered 1,746 votes and was added to the menu as the “Twitter Pizza.”

Fun with magazines

Like their counterparts around the world, Brazilian media brands are also striving to reinvent themselves online.

Ediouro, publisher of the crossword puzzle and hobby magazine Coquetel, transformed its website into an interactive gaming portal. The new site gets 2 million visits per month, has led to increased magazine subscriptions and, most importantly, refreshed the brand’s image.

“Crossword puzzles are victims of the digital age, of the mobile phone and the absence of free time,” said Robert Cassano, the strategy director for Frog Agency, which spearheaded the Coquetel rebranding. “For print media, digitalization is both the death and the salvation.”

The lesson here is that brands ought to offer customers a space to connect with each other and communicate with the brand. That’s why the new world is about return on engagement, not just return on investment.

“Social networking involves understanding the consumer broadly, talking to them individually, and mobilizing those brand advocates,” Cassano said.

Facebook of Brands

These days, 70 percent of Brazilians use Orkut to interact with brands and each other. But a group of local executives is trying to empower consumers with a new website called Drimio, which is the first social network focused exclusively on the customer-brand relationship.

Marketing specialist, Gil Giardelli, says that Orkut used to be a space for consumers to create communities and publish their opinions about brands. But then the brands themselves started using it to publicize their services and silence critics.

“Most companies use social media to publish content, recruit brand advocates and then start selling,” Giardelli said. “But the first step is to practise radical transparency, in which all decision making is carried out publicly.”

Drimio allows members to follow companies, publish information about them and share their brand experiences with other customers. Drimio puts customers back in the driver’s seat.

Meanwhile, at Pizza Hut, here comes one more Twitter Pizza for someone wrapped up in a crossword puzzle or checking out a new apartment – all on the Web, of course!

by Steve Rosenbaum (@magnify) via flickr

You’ve led parallel careers as an advertising columnist and media critic – and we now find ourselves in a world where the two are converging. Why are you giving up the AdReview right when things are getting interesting?

Well, for several reasons. The first is that if I didn’t get rid of AdReview now, very soon, AdReview would have gotten rid of me. It is not exactly a bull market for full-time critics these days. They’re dropping like flies. There’s just too much revenue pressure on my publication and they’ve been looking at me funny for years.

I also want to see if I can make some money as a consultant. I took a vow of poverty to be a journalist. And I’m thinking that maybe there’s a way to actually redeem my accumulated knowledge for cash.

What role will branded content play in the future of media? In The Chaos Scenario, you talk about branded apps and widgets that deliver compelling, utilitarian content. I’ve heard the government, the public and philanthropists all put forth as possible saviours for the news industry. Why not companies?

I don’t think that’s going to be the saviour of anything. It will help inject a little extra revenue into the marketplace, but the overall curve is still going to be down, down, down all the way to oblivion.

The predominant use of branded content these days is in television, and I believe it’s already reached the point of obnoxiousness. It’s yet one more factor in the disaffection of audiences. People don’t mind commercials, and they’re willing to put up with any old crap on TV, but they’re weirdly resistant to the idea of their TV crap being adulterated by commercial messages within the stories.

How about in the print world? Do you think that companies could sponsor good journalism in a way that doesn’t completely obliterate the “Chinese wall” between editorial and advertorial?

Well they’ve been doing it for three and a half centuries, haven’t they? They’ve been underwriting journalism with brand messages, and that’s called advertising.

However, all of the attempts so far – especially in the digital world – to somehow scale the Chinese wall have pretty severe ethical issues attached to them. For example, it seems like a no-brainer in a book review to link the book being reviewed directly to Amazon and the newspaper that runs the review would simply be one of Amazon’s affiliates and get paid for every click through, right?

Unfortunately, that creates an automatic and direct conflict of interest because it means that newspapers will get more money if they review books that are mass market, and they will make more money if they review things favourably.

So it gives them two gigantic disincentives to play it straight and that’s enough to raise the issue in the reader’s mind as to whether the reviewer is being a fair broker of the material.

Now, to the extent that in the digital world, advertisers can provide utility or entertainment in widgets or apps, I don’t see any ethical problems with that.

The main problem with apps and widgets is getting distribution. We are awash in both of them. So, how do you get your particular Home Depot App in front of the reader?

We recently spoke to Jeff Jarvis who has been a regular guest on On the Media. He says journalists are becoming more like brands, and brands more like journalists. Is that the “chaos scenario” – a society in which media and marketing are no longer symbiotic but indistinguishable?

That’s exactly what the chaos scenario is about. More specifically, it’s about the interregnum from the time that everything collapses in the old world, and is rebuilt to everybody’s satisfaction in the brave new world. But in that time, we will be living in a world with just a handful of newspapers instead of thousands of thousands of newspapers. There’ll be only a few survivors.

So if you are a journalist, and wish to have distribution for your ideas, and earn a living, you better figure out a way to become a brand because you’re going to have to do it yourself.

Has it become essential for magazines and newspapers to foster a strong brand independent of content, that can be parlayed into events and products and conferences?

Of course it’s important, but with very few exceptions, none of the revenue streams that you’re going to develop by holding New Yorker conferences or selling New Yorker tote bags is going to replace the revenue that you had in the good old days of advertising.

If I’m a publisher, I am looking for ways to extend my brand. I’m trying to figure out ways within the confines of ethical conduct to think of myself not as a newspaper, for example, but as an intelligence-gathering brand.

But every newspaper and magazine in North America has decided it’s got to be in the conference business. So now there are more than 403 trillion conferences every week, and this is obviously unsustainable.

As the man behind Comcast Must Die, any advice for how brands can avoid running into their own Bob Garfields?

My advice to brands would be to look for their own Bob Garfields out there. You attend to their issues as rapidly and transparently as possible.

And here’s what happens: The squeaky wheel is not only silenced but seduced, whereupon they go out and become your greatest evangelist. You already know they’re not shy. Well now they won’t by shy about telling the world how great you are.

It’s jujitsu and it’s just so basic and so obvious, but it is also so contrary to all of the instincts of every corporate PR person who has ever lived. Their instincts are to deny, to deflect, and to quash.

Well, in the connected world, you can’t do that and so that’s why you should cultivate even your worst critics.

In the first chapter of the book you issue this stark warning to brands: “You are not in control of your message, your image or your reputation.” Does this render public relations departments, ad agencies – and the whole notion of branding – effectively futile?

You know, as bearish as I am about the future of advertising and media, that’s how bullish I am about the future of marketing and PR.

Within the balance of legality, the ability exists for marketers to know more, and to slice and dice better, and to target their consumers better than they ever have before.

They also have the ability to have their audiences be their de facto PR agents because word of mouth, which has always been the most credible sort of advertising, is much more readily exploited in the connected world.

The Internet is a word of mouth machine. Once brands let the people formerly known as the customer base into the tent, they have the benefit of their knowledge, their passion, their ideas, and especially, their communities. And these possibilities are staggering.

© istockphoto/Rubén Hidalgo

With 87 percent of U.S. travellers hooked on the Web, it’s clear that the number of people researching and/or booking their trips online will continue to grow. But while the digital space is more important than ever, many travel marketers have a rigid vision of what online success looks like.

In trying to achieve their preferred end result (a booking on their brand site, a registration in their loyalty program) marketers often lose sight of the fact that the digital space has no singular prescribed path.

Customers relish the freedom and options the Internet gives them as they click their way to their desired outcome. Travel marketers need to respect and plug into this process, not try to dictate it.

Let’s take a step back and consider how the online travel consumer behaves. We know they shop around. Most Transumers visit a variety of sites before they actually book. At the early stages of their planning they likely compare different destinations, different hotels, and different airlines.

But as customers home in on where they want to go, where they want to stay, and how they want to get there, their search becomes focused on isolating the best price for the same product among different vendors.

So our consumer checks out the online travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia and Travelocity, aggregators like Kayak and Sidestep, and the brand sites themselves. And, if they don’t find a better deal in one of those places, our Transumer will most likely return to the site they usually book on.

For some that may be an OTA, regardless of whether it’s for a flight, a hotel, or a car rental. For others it will be the brand site, perhaps for ease, peace of mind or loyalty club incentives.

But here’s the rub. Most travel companies devalue a booking if it occurs anywhere other than their brand site. Mainly because of the fees they pay for those bookings but also because they can’t control the brand experience as much.

Both fair points. But let’s have some perspective, travel brands.

First, the behind-the-scenes business and pricing issues that exist between brands and aggregators mean nothing to the consumer. They couldn’t care less about the complexity of our business except when it makes their experience poor. And none of us are looking to do that.

Second, a booking is a booking. The economy is still pretty rotten. A booking for you is a booking your competitor didn’t get. That’s a win.

Third, what incentive did you give to the customer to book directly with you? None? Then why would you expect them to do you any favours and change their preferred booking behaviour? I go back to my second point – a booking is a booking. Win/win.

If you really want to increase conversion to direct booking, remarket to those who booked you elsewhere. Offer them an incentive to book direct on their next trip. Get them into your loyalty program. Show them why the grass is greener on home field.

But if your campaign and your business goals are predicated on securing direct bookings, the reality is that you will fail unless you offer customers something on your site that they can’t get anywhere else.

Controlling access has worked for some but remember that your paid media budget can be lower with multiple distribution points online. You don’t have to work so hard to ensure that the consumer finds you. This allows you to invest your budgets more wisely – say in more targeted media, a better brand website experience and, critically, in strong, compelling offers.

And, frankly, that’s what you really should be focusing on – making the consumer want to pick you. Regardless of where they opt to do the picking.

But did you catch our fascinating chat with Web design icon Jeffrey Zeldman? Or our refreshingly candid interviews with brand execs like Emirates’ Patrick Brannelly and best-selling business author Chris Brogan? We’ve put together our favourite Sparksheet Q&As for your reading pleasure.

Of course, we’re also known for our original “think pieces”—micro-essays, roundups and sparks of inspiration. Ogilvy’s Kunal Sinha takes us inside China’s hippest new hotels; Al St. Germain offers clients and agencies pointers for the big pitch; and jet-setting travel writer Charlene Rooke documents her 24-hour journey through Lufthansa’s brand space, on land and in flight—plus so much more in The Best of Sparksheet.

Download The Best of Sparksheet for free now!

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/Yulia Akatyeva

I’m a big proponent of outsourcing content.  So much so that I’ve built my entire career around it.

There are a number of reasons why brands should seriously consider outsourcing their content. Most brands are set up to sell products and services, not to consistently deliver compelling content. It’s tough to take off your sales hat as a brand.  Having someone who understands your message, but also knows how to tell a great story, is critical. Many brands have trouble weeding out the sales pitch to tell an honest, engaging story.

Content is everywhere. Good storytelling is hard to find.  The difference is the Grand Canyon. Look at your resources.  Could your staff’s time be better spent?  Are you really saving money?  Probably not.

I could go on.  There are dozens of reasons for outsourcing your content. But my favourite is this: Multitasking makes you stupid.

I’ll explain.  When a brand begins a content marketing initiative, they rarely hire for a new position.  The job is usually given to one or many people in the marketing, communications, or public relations departments. “Hey, you’re good at this content thing, you can do it!”

So now there’s a group of people who have to do their current jobs, and also have this content thing to do as well.

In almost all cases this is a bad idea. Why? According to a recent Stanford study, high multitaskers perform much worse than low multitaskers.  In the study, students who juggled several things at once (TV, Internet, cell phone, etc.) fared significantly worse than students who focused on core activities. The point: multitasking makes you stupid.

When brand managers throw content marketing in the mix as just another individual or group task, the result is bad content. Corners are cut.  Research is forgotten. Sloppy copy is the norm. Bad storytelling looks like Mark Twain to internal folks.

Is your brand story important enough to foster in its own right, or is it just another item in the marketing pile?

Is your content stupid?

I’m thinking about going to Dubai or Capetown…for my next pedicure. I’m only half kidding. Earlier this year at the One&Only Palmilla in Los Cabos, I got hooked on the Reverence de Bastien pedicure, available only at One&Only resorts and a handful of Paris spas. As a travel writer, I can conceivably plan my next several trips around natural, baby-soft feet.

It sounds a bit ridiculous, but many frequent travellers I know tell similar stories about the powerful loyalties they’ve developed to goods and services while travelling. Take the emotional rush I get drinking a French 75 cocktail; it’s not just the champagne bubbles or the memory of the silver fox who once ordered one for me at a Lower East Side speakeasy, but an alchemic memory of both. These strong loyalties and emotions help set the Transumer apart from the jet-setting shopper.

Their wants and tastes fueled by global lifestyle magazines like Monocle and Wallpaper, Transumers aren’t satisfied with garden variety items from the shop around the corner. Though Montreal-based magazine editor Claude Laframboise must nose dozens of new fragrances a month, he relies on trips to New York to buy the Krizia cologne he’s worn since the 1980s from its flagship store on Madison Avenue. Exclusivity has always meant cachet, but a product that a discerning consumer not only deems valuable but self-defining? That’s priceless.

Toronto power-publicist Ann Layton flies frequently to London for clients and cashmere, which she buys only at Ocabini. The hand-knit, hand-died garments are imported directly through the owner’s sister in Kathmandu. In an era of cheap Chinese cashmere, Layton could buy a poncho anywhere, but she seeks out the most authentic, ethically-produced goods. Sure, she could order online, but I’d say her carbon footprint is lighter walking over to the boutique while in the city on business. And eBay wouldn’t provide her with Nepalese anecdotes to share over drinks at the Dorchester.

Spafax editorial director Arjun Basu often gets asked on Twitter and Flyertalk about his distinctive eyewear, which he gets from Ottico in Vancouver. Basu lives in Montreal—roughly 3700 kilometers (2300 miles) away. Here’s a personal, recurring Transumer relationship created by one chance visit to fix broken eyeglasses on a business trip. “Our optician Anita has a photographic memory for faces,” says Dr. Brad McDougall, the store’s co-owner. “Now, when he needs glasses, we just send him a selection.” The clinic also draws repeat visits from actors and their families filming in Hollywood North, which McDougall attributes to hotel-concierge referrals (a strategy the practice has focused on) and highly personal service.

Sometimes there is not only a qualitative preference but a quantitative difference in these relationships. The Transumer seeks out the best and most efficient services and “trip chains” them on to existing travels, the way a soccer mom lines up dry-cleaning and kiddie drop-offs. Vancouver writer Neal McLennan packs brogues that need a good working over when he returns to his former lawyering base in Calgary, a corporate town with a “disproportionate amount of good shoe shine stands,” he says. Spafax’s Raymond Girard swears by the world-class toothsmithing he gets from a Harvard-trained dentist while he’s on business trips in Santiago, Chile—at a fraction of the going rate in Toronto, his home base.

So how do brands get in touch with this border-blurring demographic? Client databases and e-mail lists are a first step in establishing where your far-flung customers might be located, how to keep in touch with them, and what will bring them back. Tools like Backtype can help track in real-time who’s buzzing about your brand across a vast swath of the online world, what social media monitoring company Radian6 calls “finding your brand evangelists.” The next step might be partnering with travel applications like Dopplr or TripIt, customizing promotions, or even syncing CalTweet-ed events with peak travel periods.

Online travel and lifestyle information is a powerful tool in cultivating a nomadic following, but think, too, of these high-flying consumers as you drop your URL or IATA code onto your packaging or ads. A shopping bag on a plane might just be better than a business card in hand to reach this transitory tribe.

©istockphoto.com / blackred

A few years ago, a colleague told me about a small airport in an exclusive enclave in South America where it’s still the glamorous, golden, jet-set era of aviation. Everyone was bronzed, smoking, sipping generous cocktails and there was no security lineup in sight. Those times are long gone, but I still love airports for what they represent: a taking-off point with limitless potential, a limbo-zone between the known and unknown and a glamorous gateway to future adventures.

In reality, what they often truly are is a bad food court, a mediocre shopping mall and a land of lineups and rudimentary—if not downright rude—service. Here are a few features of my favourite airports that show a true understanding of the needs of the Transumer, plus some ideas I haven’t experienced, but would love to see.

Golden Green Gate

Challenge When I’m purchasing my airline ticket, I’m usually focused on value and, I’m ashamed to say, unlikely to tack on an extra cost for carbon offsets.

Spark The new carbon offset kiosks in the international terminal at SFO in San Francisco have the green-flyer equation right. Once we’re behind the security line, trip hassles behind us, the excitement of a trip at top of mind, the Transumer midset prevails and green is an easier sell.

Health and Happiness

Challenge I maintain that the reason most travelers are grumpy and discontent is…indigestion.

Spark Offer us clean, fresh, unprocessed food at airports and everyone will be happier. My mouth is watering at news that the San Jose-area farm C.J. Olson Cherries has opened a kiosk selling its wholesome cherries, dried fruit and nuts in Terminal B at SJC. Amsterdam’s AMS has long been one of my favourite airports because of the fully stocked Food Village Supermarket at Schiphol. Why aren’t there more boutique grocery stores within airports? Whole Foods, we’re looking at you.

Quiet Please

Challenge The clever “cell phone zone” waiting areas offered by many airports have eased up the queues of cars at arrivals level. Now can airports please ease up on my ears with cellular-free quiet zones that demonize public cell-yell the way most public buildings have done with smoking?

Spark Many of us would pay for quiet-zone access, as the nominal but successful $10 entry fee program for B.C. Ferries‘ quiet Seawest Lounges proves. Why don’t the folks at Bose open pay-per-use, noise-cancelling headset equipped quiet zones at airports?

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah

Challenge With the hassles of full-day car rental, insurance and gas top-up, I usually can’t be bothered to hop into a set of wheels and explore the local area on a layover.

Spark The rental companies won’t like it, but I’m a car-sharing devotee who would rejoice at airport Zipcar locations. Holding me hostage in the terminal doesn’t make me spend more; it just makes me hostile!

Shop and Fly

Challenge Where are stores like Monocle and Flight 001 when I really need them—that is, in the airport terminal?

Spark I’d love to see more co-branded retail stores in airports, run by the brands Transumers have already come to trust. The first outpost of a planned chain of Travel and Leisure stores (in Vancouver’s YVR) has a good mix of luggage, travel gadgets, maps and guides and other reading material. Roots, with its sturdy leather bags and comfy gear, is also a great fit at the airport.

Paperless Planes

Challenge People lose things at airports because we’re juggling too much stuff—boarding pass, mobile, identification, hand luggage…

Spark The new SKIP system at 24 Japanese airports lets you do paperless mobile check-in, payment and seat selection using bar-code technology. Cell-phone-pay vending machines, transit passes and other conveniences have been de rigeur in Asia’s top cities for years; it’s time for the rest of the world to catch up!

Paging all Airplane Geeks

Challenge Plane-spotters are a largely unrecognized group of aviation fans that could easily be converted into airport Transumers.

Spark Facilities like the observation decks at Sydney’s SYD and Tokyo’s HND put plane-spotters in the centre of the terminal action. Frankfurt’s FRA offers guided behind-the-scenes airport tours which often stop at the runway intersection that’s best for plane-spotting. Tours are a great way to get aircraft aficionados into the terminal instead of cowering outside runway fences, where they can pose a security risk—and don’t contribute anything to the Airworld economy.

For the first time in eight years airports stand to regain some of their onetime stardust, through cultural phenomena like Wired’s Terminal Man, pop-philosopher Alain de Botton’s Heathrow Diary and George Clooney’s upcoming adaption of Walter Kirn’s seminal AirWorld novel “Up in the Air.” Are they ready for their closeup?

This story is about me and how I came to understand the concept and power of a Six Pixels of Separation world, but really this story is about you. It’s going to illustrate how the little things we do as entrepreneurs to get our messages “out there” are now creating big opportunities that are connecting us—and our businesses—to opportunities that were not available to us before the advent of the Internet.

In 2007, I was asked if I would be interested in interviewing Dan Ariely for my Forward Thinking podcast. Dan is a well-known behavioral economist. He was also about to publish his first book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, in about six months’ time. I had never heard of Ariely (his book was not out yet), but I liked the idea that he was going to bring some different thinking into what motivates people to do things.

We immediately hit it off. By the end of our conversation, I was recommending that he get in touch with my speakers bureau and he suggested that perhaps I would be interested in connecting with his literary agent. At the time I had met with a few literary agents but nothing had really clicked. So Dan made the digital introduction. At that point, his literary agent, James Levine from the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency, hopped over to my company blog and started snooping around. He checked out my speakers bureau’s Web page and dropped me an e-mail expressing an interest in meeting to see if something could be done.

We met at his Manhattan office. I showed him some of my presentations and top-line concepts for the book. But here’s something Jim doesn’t know: I could not concentrate. Sure, there’s a palpable energy in the air when you’re sitting with a Manhattan-based literary agent, and the thought of having him hunt down a serious publishing deal was equally exciting. But in truth, I could not keep my mind off of his socks.

Yes, his socks. They didn’t match—not even close. Now, let’s be clear, Jim is not a young guy (but he ain’t old, either) and all I could think was, Is this guy wearing Little MissMatched socks? I first heard about Little MissMatched socks on Seth Godin’s blog. The premise of Seth’s best-selling book, the Purple Cow, is that brands can’t afford to be ordinary. According to Seth, in this day and age you’re either remarkable or invisible.

To illustrate the story in live presentations, Seth talks about Arielle Eckstut. Arielle started a different type of clothing company—she sells socks to young girls. The big idea is that you can’t buy a single pair of socks. You can only buy them in sets of three. Oh, and one more thing: none of them match. It’s a remarkable idea that has grown Little MissMatched into a unique franchise of clothing, furniture, books, and beyond. While the philosophical spirit of the business is about empowering young girls to be different and creative, Little MissMatched works because little girls like to talk and show off their new and freaky socks.

I had to ask: “Jim, are those Little MissMatched socks you’re wearing?” He looked almost as surprised that I knew what they were as I was that he was wearing them. It turns out that Little MissMatched was not Arielle’s first venture. Her first gig was working alongside Jim at his literary agency. On top of that, the LittleMissMatched offices were only a couple of floors down in the same building. During our lunch break we went down to meet Arielle. In a strange twist of good timing, just that week I had blogged about Little MissMatched because someone decided to make a Seth Godin action figure and the toy is decked out with mismatched socks (no, I’m not making this up). Arielle had not heard of the action figure until I brought it to her attention.

There’s a point to this story.

What was nothing more than a step above a hobby for me (my Foreword Thinking podcast) had led me on this amazing adventure that includes a book deal with one of the biggest publishing houses in the world and personal encounters that have not only been interesting, but have led to new business opportunities and introductions. All of them were perfectly linked through my activities in online channels (blogging, podcasting, online social networking, etc.).

My point is, if I can do this, so can you. Every single pixel in that story was connected to me—either through someone I follow online or someone who follows me—and while those looser pixels had never directly connected, I was suddenly confronted with four connections that linked perfectly together. Ultimately, your business needs to sell more stuff and sell it fast.

You may be thinking that you simply don’t have time for all of this online stuff or you’re equally jaded because of the many “time suck” articles you have read about these channels in the traditional media. Let’s look at some reasons why you should care and take the time to understand this new medium. It will change your business forever. Here’s why.

This excerpt, adapted for Sparksheet, is from SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION by Mitch Joel. Copyright © 2009 by Mitch Joel. Reprinted by permission of Business Plus, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, NY. All rights reserved.

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.

• Liking We want to do business with people we feel we can relate to. But watch out for those phony compliments.
• Authority ‘Who’s the boss?’ Demonstrating impressive credentials, experience and knowledge makes others more likely to listen to what we have to say.
• Scarcity We all want what we can’t have, which explains the effectiveness of limited-time offers and collector’s editions.
• Consistency/Commitment Charities use the “foot in the door” technique when they have us sign a petition, then follow up with a donation request. Shady car dealers use it to jack up the price at the last minute.
• Reciprocity We all like to return favours. Think free samples, cause marketing, and customer service that goes beyond the call of duty.
• Social proof ‘Everyone else is doing it.’ Testimonials and “best seller” labels can add value to products, while providing customers with useful information. But padding the tip jar or collection plate with $20 bills just isn’t cool.

And now for our Q&A with Dr. Cialdini:

At Sparksheet we’re fascinated by the concept of the transumer—the consumer in transit. The idea is that we behave differently and have different expectations and leisure and spending habits when travelling. How does the travel mind frame and environment affect our ability to be influenced?

Travellers often find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances—on a plane, in a hotel, in a city they don’t know very well. When people are uncertain they are influenced by two principles, or sources of information. The first is what we call authority. ‘Who are the experts in this situation? Who are the people who are most informed about this particular product or service or circumstance?’ If marketers can present content that describes what experts have to say about a place or situation, people will be especially inclined to listen.

The other source of information people look to in a travel environment is their peers. We call this principle “social proof.” ‘What are people just like me doing in this situation?’ I read that if a restaurant owner lists its most popular item on the menu, that item immediately becomes 20 percent more popular. If you want to engage the transumer, let them know what everyone else in the plane or hotel is up to. That reduces the uncertainty they may feel and moves them in a particular direction.

How would you apply the six principles to the online social media landscape? Do the same social rules apply when people aren’t interacting face to face, or when identity is in question?

People interacting in the social media are still responding to the same principles that have been instilled in them from childhood. We like those individuals who are most like us, who have common experiences and background and traits. There was an interesting study done in which people were asked to negotiate a fictional budget via e-mail.

In 30 percent of instances people walked away from the project without reaching any agreement. But when the negotiators were asked to send each other a short bio detailing their background, college majors, where they grew up, whether they had any kids and that sort of thing, the number of stymied negotiations dropped from 30 percent to 6 percent.

Sharing that kind of information causes people to personalize and like each other as if they were face to face. In this context, the social media environment can be just as influential as the ‘real world’.

What are some examples of brands bungling their attempts at influence, thereby turning off potential customers or partners?

We’ve done some research recently in hotels. In most hotels I stay at, I’m asked to reuse my towels and linens via some card that’s placed in the bathroom. Well, here’s the question that I asked myself: ‘What should they say on the card? What should they say that will convince me to help that hotel save money on water and detergent and personnel?’ And so we experimented with what that little sign said. Most hotels say, ‘Do this for the environment, do this to save the planet.’ We looked to see what percentage of people on any one night would hang up their towels for reuse. It was 38 percent, on average.

Now, some hotels tried something different. In keeping with what’s called social cause marketing, they said, ‘If you reuse your towels and linens, at the end of the year we will donate a percentage of our savings to an environmental organization.’ The idea was to give something and expect something in return for it—we call this the principle of reciprocation. What we found was only 36 percent of guests hung up their towels. There was actually a reduction!

Why? Because they got the sequence of reciprocation backwards. They said, ‘If you will do this for us, then we will do something for you.’ That’s wrong. They have to go first. So we made a third sign that said, ‘We’ve already donated in the name of our guests to some environmental cause. Will you join us and help us cover the costs of that donation by reusing your towels?’ Now we got 48 percent of the hotel guests to do it.

How do you distinguish influence from manipulation?

Influence involves change, the ability to move people in a desired direction. The difference between influence and manipulation is that we move them in our direction by giving them honest and accurate information. Putting your most popular item on a menu isn’t in any way manipulative so long as it’s the truth. If we educate people, and don’t coerce or deceive them, we earn their trust. Ethical influence allows us to be successful in the short term, and to protect our long-term interests as people continue to come back and do business with us.

Does this explain the power of content in building relationships between brands and consumers?

There are two principles at work there. First, you’re establishing a rapport, which leads to liking. We want to do business with people or brands that we like and have forged a bond with over the years. But content also builds on the principle of authority. You’ve demonstrated your expertise in this field, and so customers will rely on you in the future. They don’t have to constantly worry about your competence because you’ve already demonstrated your knowledge, your creativity and your credibility. They can trust you.

Check out http://influenceatwork.com for more on the Cialdini Method.

Disclosure: Emirates is a client of Spafax, Sparksheet’s publisher.

Brannelly is Vice President, Passenger Communications and Visual Services, for the Dubai-based airline.

Your customers have a strong relationship with social media such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. What are you going to do to facilitate those relationships in flight?

Social networking is becoming more important although it is clearly still niche at the moment. Some say that it is unlikely to ever become mainstream with the frequent business traveler, but it is probably too early to come to that conclusion.  Some social networking solutions allow groups to have serious conversations in a more efficient way than using email – resulting in five replies to one email, which are time-consuming and hard to assimilate.  Emirates has invested in upgrading our aircraft to allow passengers to use their own mobile phones or PDAs, and this will obviously be the channel through which the bulk of passengers will communicate. We could easily add Facebook or Twitter to the seatback software but the current user audience is more likely to have a gadget in their pocket they’d prefer to use.

How have the Web and social media inspired the Emirates customer experience with in-flight entertainment (IFE)?

All industries have to be influenced by what is going on in the world vis-à-vis the web – that’s why we have connected cars, hotels and airlines. The evolution of seatback systems from being simple ‘entertainment’ systems to the current connected platform offering passengers live communications and information has clearly been influenced by the Internet evolution. Initially we offered SMS and email chat, then live news headlines throughout the flight. Any product manager who doesn’t engage with the world of his customers is underperforming, and demonstrates a worrying lack of curiosity. I am worried how few service companies in this industry don’t seem to understand what’s going on.

What impact will the advent of inflight broadband have on the customer experience with IFE in general—and on Emirates specifically?

Universal inflight broadband is not a done deal in terms of technical or economic viability, although clearly it is extremely attractive. The airline industry operates on very small margins and passengers have a low tendency to pay for services in flight. It’s extremely complex to achieve, but passengers don’t truly appreciate that and expect it to be very affordable.  Sure, some will pay $20, but will that be enough to sustain this incredibly expensive network?  Emirates is keen to offer broadband, but we want it to be affordable, globally available, and  profitable for the supplier.

Emirates has recently led the development and adoption of onboard mobile telephone use. How have your customers responded to this?

Our seatback telephone service has always been a success, contrary to comments from other airlines and industry commentators. On some flights we see over 40 or 50 phone calls, especially on longer flight segments. We’ve seen good traffic, partially because we’ve marketed it well but also because we’ve priced it competitively and not sought an operating profit from what we see as a service to passengers. The move to allowing passengers to use their own phones was obvious and with over 100 flights a day offering the service, we’ve not seen any of the nightmare scenarios. Usage growth is huge month to month, and feedback to cabin crew has been overwhelmingly positive. The attitude from passengers has been, “why wasn’t this done sooner?”

How does your IFE fit into your overall product spectrum and Emirates “attitude”?

The airline industry is a very tough business. There can sometimes be 50 airlines to choose from between two points and while some choose on price, some on product, some on schedule, some on loyalty programmes (etc. etc.), most choose based on a mix of these. IFE is clearly part of that. But it’s no good having great IFE and bad food, service, or crew – we need to get everything right. Not just right – we need to wow our passengers, to exceed their expectations so next time they choose us outright, first time.  Everything we do after the ticket sale, is really about generating loyalty for the next ticket purchase.

Is there any way for the customer to take the Emirates IFE experience home with them?

Watch this space!  I loved receiving an email from a yacht builder, saying his client wanted Emirates ICE [the airline’s award-winning inflight entertainment system] onboard the super-yacht he was building.  I’m also personally proud of our Magnum Opus project, which is a serious audio documentary of the last 600 years of Classical music.

Have you seen any change in audience content preferences over the past few years?

Today, customers expect more of almost everything, including international content that is more relevant to them—not just US or UK comedy and movies. Passengers who like classical music expect to have more than one two-hour repeating program to choose from. I believe they also expect to find something that is new to them.

Do you see a role for advertising in the IFE experience?

Inflight advertising helps meet the high cost of providing the inflight entertainment, but it is unlikely to ever pay for it all.  The quantity of advertising needs to be monitored so it does not impact detrimentally on the passenger experience, but done well it can actually create a more natural, familiar, live TV feel to the inflight experience.

What are your thoughts on the future of inflight magazines? Will they be around in 10 years time?

Yes – but they’ll evolve or die.  I read that there are over 250,000 magazines being published in the US alone – that is not sustainable. I don’t like the fact that when advertising revenues are strong you see so many new magazine titles being created to soak up that money. Inflight magazines were invented in an era when there was nothing to do on a flight. These days there are so many other distractions on full service airlines that I wonder if they’d be invented today. They need to improve to survive.

Notes from 140 Characters Conference

When he’s not doing the visual note-taking thing, Goldstein works with companies to create short animated videos that explain the clients’ products or services. We thought his “Og the Caveman” cartoon made a rock-solid case for why we are all publishers:

©istockphoto.com/james steidl

With the rise of social media, message control is firmly in the hands of consumers. Marketers and PR people once felt like they were in charge and developed mission statements, “About” pages and press-release boilerplates, but the notion of corporate control in a 24-hour YouTube/IM world is absurd.

The idea of customers and employees spreading “marketing messages” via blogs, forums, chat rooms and social-media sites terrifies old-school marketers. For decades, companies have left messaging to a handful of authorized and highly trained spokespeople, such as their public-relations director and their CEO. Companies have used one-way communications – mostly advertising and press releases – to issue formal announcements and have generally forbidden rank-and-file employees from saying anything at all.

Social-media tools have enabled anybody (company insiders as well as customers and critics) to say anything about a company. Yet, many organizations persist in the old command-and-control methods of the past. Just as bad, many organizations ignore what appears about their company on blogs, forums and social-media sites.

Okay, let’s be honest. Marketers and executives aren’t really scared of social media. They are scared of the unknown. People are comfortable doing the same old rubbish every year. They spend tons of money at tradeshows. They spam their customers with inane email “campaigns” that include “offers” such as free shipping or discount pricing. They invest in television commercials and Yellow Pages ads. They pay PR agencies the big bucks for a mention on page 60 of a local newspaper, for a laundry-list inclusion in an analyst’s report or for a quote in the tenth paragraph of a story in a trade magazine that nobody reads. Then they cry, “Woo hoo!,” celebrating that they scored press “hits.”

Think about the last few products you purchased. Did you answer a direct-mail ad? Go to a tradeshow to learn more? Turn to the Yellow Pages? If you’re like most people , you didn’t do any of those things – you went online. So why are we marketing in the same old ways?

What works online is creating our own content – content that people want to share. And we should be encouraging our employees, customers and other interested stakeholders to tell our stories and spread our ideas. We should be celebrating blogs, forums and the tools of social media, not clamping down on them.

And let’s continue to be honest: we must admit that we no longer control the sales process. We can depend on million-dollar direct-mail campaigns that target top sales prospects, big-budget advertisements that cast too wide a net and message-driven PR campaigns directed at media insiders whose audience is shrinking by the day. Or we can try something that might actually work.

©istockphoto.com / Emrah Türüdü

What do we mean when we talk about media today?

I think when we talk about “media” today, the word that normally follows it is “fragmentation.” There was a point when media was an expensive concept. The ability to have a message that you could broadcast to even a small group of people had many barriers to entry for the average person, and so we subsidized it through advertising. If you look at what the Internet has done – bulletin services, then the idea of a GeoCities website where you can build your own webpage, then blogging and podcasts and down to Twitter – what you’re looking at is a landscape that is making it easier for people to publish their thoughts to the world, and by publishing their thoughts, to have an audience. There is still a mass-media model, but there is also a me-media model, where every individual who has anything from a social network to a blog or Twitter account is actually broadcasting or creating media.

Is it ironic that all this is happening just a few years after we were all worried about the concentration of media ownership?

I actually think about those moments a lot. Being Canadian, and having a background in the music industry, there’s always the whole question of whether CanCon [Canadian content regulations] worked. The answer is almost, who cares? Media now has a global base, or can have a global base. And the global base is almost irrelevant. I produce this podcast called Six Pixels of Separation and I call it the audio community – people can call in and they leave their message, and I broadcast it on the show. On any given show, you’ll hear people from Singapore, Russia, the States, Canada. At first, you’re like, “Wow, that’s crazy, there’s somebody in Australia,” and then after a while, it doesn’t really matter because you realize that’s almost as stupid as saying, “I sent Arjun this e-mail and then I sent this e-mail to my buddy in Singapore and they both got it, isn’t that crazy?” You don’t really have that frame of mind when it’s digital; it’s like, well, no kidding it got there.”

Is there such a thing as the media getting so diluted that it doesn’t matter any more? Or is that even a “who cares” question?

First, we need to understand that there is huge value in real journalism and real creation of media that goes beyond me filming a dog licking a bowl of peanut butter and putting it up on YouTube because it looks like he’s talking. But we’re all lumping it into media. But we also need to be aware of something we call “the attention crash.” At what point, having all these access points and feeds, do you just shut down and go numb? I think Twitter is a little lightpost saying, “That’s the whole thing – you’ve got to get shorter, smarter, quicker, and understand that it’s disposable.” We call it “snackable” content. Now, we can say, is that a problem to society? I think they said the same thing when video games came out, like, “This is going to kill kids’ attention spans.” What we actually saw was great leadership come from that generation, great hand-eye coordination, great problem-solving skills.

I was listening to someone compare where we are now with the Internet to the beginning of TV and how, at the beginning of TV, you basically had people doing radio dramas, but with a camera. And it took TV a while to figure out that you could actually do something more than just have two people standing in front of a mic with scripts in their hands doing a show. And he said that’s where we are with the Internet, which is probably the first media that affects every single bit of media because it can do audio, it can do video, it has words so it affects the print. So, I guess we’re sort of at Internet media 1.0 and we’re at Web 2.0 – when we get to Web 3.0, what happens to online media?

I heard a great quote yesterday from Chris Anderson, who’s the editor of Wired magazine and the author of the book The Long Tail. Someone asked him about the future of print and he said: “Where print adds value to the Internet, it will remain.” I’ll also go back to something Clay Shirky said this week at the Canadian Marketing Association’s National Convention. He said, “A lot of people are looking at the web and saying, ‘How does the web fit into the current ecosystem that we have of media?’” And his comment was, “Maybe it doesn’t.” And maybe the Web is its own ecosystem and we have to figure out how the content we used to make is going to fit into this ecosystem.

So, is it a question of us not understanding it or us not having absorbed it yet?

I find the best way to explain it is we’re in purgatory. We’re in this middle stage where we don’t want to go back and we can’t necessarily go forward, and so, several things have to happen. Those include investments, those include divestments, it includes bankruptcy, it includes innovation. I think to a larger degree it involves education. If you think about it, kids go to school and they have books and notebooks and all this sort of stuff; soon they’ll go to work and use a laptop!

I like the image of us being in sort of a media purgatory. Is there any other time in history that is like this one in terms of media? I think back to the invention of the book and Gutenberg and the movable printing press – that took a long time to be disseminated.

In the past we always said, “Content is king,” and the follow-up line is, “Yes, but context is queen” – very romantic, right? The reality is that there’s been a slight shift in this idea that content is everything and we’ve moved towards this world where everything is content. You take a picture of your kids, you upload it to Facebook, it’s content in some way. I think this is a classic case of the inventors not knowing what the invention is for. So, when we had movable type and the Gutenberg press, it seemed clear what you could do with it. Now you realize that’s not so true, because people started publishing magazines and picture books. It wasn’t just about education—it became a matter of entertainment. So we need to remember that it’s very, very nascent. I would argue that the Internet’s only been commercialized in the past 10 to 15 years. I sit down with a lot of newspapers and they’ll say to me, “You know, okay, Mitch, we hear what you’re saying and you’re very, very passionate and you speak very fast about this, but where are the dollars?” And it’s such an unfair question because, how long did it take to monetize the newspaper model? I would argue, as an advertising guy, that it hasn’t been monetized efficiently yet. You’re going to compare something you took 200 years to figure out to something that’s been around 8 years? It’s not even a fair comparison.

Everyone’s been lamenting the end of reading for so long, but it seems we’re reading more than ever because there’s so much media out there.

Well, yeah. People always say, “I’m really worried about my kids, they spend all this time on the Internet.” And I’m saying to myself, when I was a kid I used to come home, plop my school bag down, and sit in front of the TV watching Batman until I was drooling. I look at my 14-year-old niece on a tablet – forget a laptop, she’s on a touch-tablet – and she’s creating videos with her schoolmates for projects, she’s reading a ton, she’s creating things on Facebook, they’re uploading pictures on Flickr; on top of that, she’s texting in one hand and has her iPod in the other. And, we laugh at that, we sort of go, “Ah, kids today.” But I was never reading or that imaginative or that creative with technology – or just even work – ever in my life. I always argue that I would probably be a much smarter guy if I were growing up now, because I would be reading a lot more.

Well, I think we’re all done.

I’m getting so riled up. I’m sitting here sweating!

Is there anything you wanted to add to finish this conversation?

I think that in order for big, traditional mass-media companies to succeed, they need to understand that they’re still going to make a lot of money – it’s just going to be a significant amount less than what they’re used to. Because if something is everywhere, it loses its value.

And, I wonder if “media” is even going to be the right word…

There are lots of really deep thinkers who are looking at why media was like this in the first place. Well, because of the technological limitations. And if we move away from that, maybe even the base metrics we use for considering media success – reach, frequency, things like that  – will go away. I mean, do reach and frequency really matter if I’m just targeting 100 chief information officers?

Is there any country or place where we’re starting to get glimpses of the future?

In the mobile world, we use areas like Korea as a benchmark. You have people who subscribe, for example, to stories on their cell phones. This device becomes ubiquitous to the point where it’s where all your passwords are stored, it’s your credit card, it’s what you use to watch TV or communicate with friends. A lot of those applications exist in North America, but the adoption isn’t there. In Korea, they never really had a big Internet infrastructure, and so they just skipped right to hand-held. Something I’ve been grappling with is the idea of “The Great Untethering.” The idea that stuff should all be connected no matter where you are. So let’s say you’re watching a TV show on your iPhone and, when you come into your office, it’s already on your other screen, or it’s in your house, or it’s everywhere at once. Like you said, the media, the content becomes air itself. That to me is exciting and interesting and unique – a sort of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash future.