Does “tweeting” mean you’ve figured it out? Does knowing how to “friend” someone qualify you as a modern marketer of the new advertising age? Hardly. In fact, reaching that lofty goal is less about the tactics we employ, and more about our overall approach to the complexities of the modern consumer.

Our jobs are becoming more demanding. Big businesses now operate in a multi-market, multi-lingual, and frequently multi-brand world. A world filled with commercial and cultural nuances. The modern marketers I respect are finding ways to address these nuances by developing cross-market and cross-brand efficiencies. They’re fostering smarter collaboration across teams, agencies, and disciplines, producing big brand ideas that transcend tactical executions and work in markets of varying sophistication, and they’re leveraging their scale to lower costs while focusing their marketing dollars in the right growth areas. All while producing great work.

My personal fascination lies in the fact that digital marketing — and at a minimum Internet based technology — is helping to drive this evolution. Digital marketing is at different stages depending on which markets you are working in around the globe. But in almost all instances, it seems to function as the great connector that helps to bring cross-channel experiences to the consumer.

Digital, once deemed complex and expensive by the rest of the advertising world, actually offers the ability to produce re-usable libraries of common tools that can be shared across markets and brands, empowering them to focus their budgets on brilliant creative ideas instead of unnecessary technology that had been used multiples times in the last year by other agencies and brand teams.

Social media monitoring tools can be set up for enterprise businesses and deliver intelligence to multiple brands across multiple markets at reduced costs while facilitating a deeper understanding of the consumer. Web based collaboration tools are helping to produce better ideas, faster, with equal input from brand agencies, digital agencies, and media agencies.

I’m not discrediting the importance of innovation. I’m the world’s worst culprit for loving new exciting platforms in digital marketing. I just think we need to step back and reevaluate what makes us pat someone on the back for being in a “digital master class” that understands modern marketing. Some of the biggest companies in the world who frequently get accused of being laggards are realizing how scale and digital marketing play VERY well together, and could form the cement in their global marketing initiatives.

In the end, modern marketers are putting their money where there mouth is and, as a result, giving their agencies what amounts to a thinly veiled, but no less justifiable ultimatum: show us results, the analytics to support them, and develop creative in a cost effective way, or we’ll find someone who can. We should all heed the warning. Those who don’t? Well, then they don’t know “tweet” about modern marketing.

Alabama's Local 15 News Live Twitter Billboard

A few days ago I found this shocking blog claiming “Live Twitter News Billboard Leads to Social Media Fail“… go ahead, read it and see if you agree.

First, the fact that they pulled off a digital billboard with live tweets is awesome.

So now ask yourself, what was the cause of this event? live tweets? twitter? social media?

The answer is none of the above. The only reason this happened is due to organizational readiness. There are two factors here:

1. Are they ready to accept that people talk? Does it really matter if something like this shows up? how much is it really going to affect their brand? is it really a failure? what are the thresholds and limits?

2. If it is a concern, why didn’t they implement a simple keyword filtering? Any simple profanity filter would have caught the word ‘rape’.

3. If simple keyword filtering is not enough, they could easily have hired a moderation company. Moderation could have been pretty simple to do … would require a person/company to approve every tweet to go live on the billboard. Depending on the refresh rate and how real-time this billboard gets the data, this task could be really simple. Just refresh it every 10 minutes, select 140 tweets per day, done.

So did Twitter lead to failure? I don’t think so … they agency should have added a few precautions, but even without anything in place, the fact that I’m blogging about this and giving props to their agency for innovating digital out of home advertising is great for a local news station … I think it was well worth it.

Simply put, I’m excited about the potential of mobile marketing and particularly the convergence of social networking and mobile. New capabilities on phones are opening doors to limitless new marketing innovations and, simultaneously, developing countries are having entirely new segments of their population enter the digital world. I spend a lot of time in the day dreaming about how to bring entirely new digital experiences to people, but I think we need to proceed with caution. Marketers, the frequently reckless group of individuals we are, are in danger of screwing it up (again).

Consider the lessons from social media. One of the factors that caused so many marketers to fail in this space is they forgot basic web etiquette and lost sight that all successful marketing (on the modern web) is some form of value exchange. Consumers must be approached in a way that is not disruptive or disrespectful of their time. Social media was never free — the buzz created around your brand or people’s willingness to come together as a community was earned. They would tolerate a certain amount of advertising if it was a reasonable value exchange.

Mobile, the ever-present digital touch point, is for many of us not only an essential daily tool, but also a place of great privacy and perceived intimacy. We’re far more sensitive about the “value exchange” in the mobile world. In addition we don’t click ads as often because, in my opinion, we’re frequently trying to get quick digital or social experiences on the mobile device in between other events. We have frequent interaction with our mobile devices, but the sessions might be shorter.

Sometimes I like to talk about the “paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.

The next great mobile revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks, geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing. We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast point.

There’s so much new technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they are primarily disruptive in nature.

The “techies” have done a great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as forgiving.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to tell you: We’re in a recession.

The doom has advertisers hanging signs along the lines of “Will Work For Food” on their agency walls, and marketers continue to face facts and figures like these, from Forrester’s 2009 Global CMO Recession Survey: 71% of marketing budgets have been reduced this year, and more than half reported reductions greater than 20%.

Now here comes the curveball: I think this might be the best thing that has happened to our industry in decades. Yes, I said that. While I have empathy for those that have lost jobs and the extra pressure many of us are facing, it’s also forced us to innovate, reinvent ourselves, think more strategically, and, most importantly, bring a level of sophistication and maturity that, in my opinion, has been desperately missing from digital advertising throughout most of the industry.

There are five trends I believe are reshaping the face of marketing.

Brand as an enabler
We’re moving away from short-sighted, highly sales-driven marketing campaigns in favor of long-term brand platforms that use evergreen content to add value to your day. Examples include Nike+, whose latest effort serves as an enabler of self-discovery and health and delivers a sense of community within the running world. Bank of America’s Small Business Online Community is also a great example in that it helps business owners to share knowledge. A final example is Kraft’s iFood Assistant iPhone app, which adds convenience to recipe planning.

All these initiatives gave something while asking for little or nothing in return. But they’ll ultimately help foster a relationship with the consumer that builds brand value, loyalty and engagement for less money than the cost of repetitive ad campaigns.

Distributed content
This trend moves us more in line to the modern digital ecosystem. It’s fragmented and complex, with consumers interacting through many devices and sites. Modern digital marketers have recognized that in terms of the consumer, the center is everywhere. As a result, digital content is now designed to be syndicated, reskinned and reformatted while still remaining relevant. This evolution is pushing advertisers away from building million-dollar microsites and toward smart, tactical ideas that revolve around specific needs or even communities. Now consumers can access similar content across primary websites, partner sites, widgets, applications, social presences, blogs and mobile devices. They can even enjoy entire rich experiences without ever visiting a primary brand site.

Customer service as marketing
While a great product or service backed up with great customer support or service remains your biggest asset in achieving success, never before has the vehicle of customer service become one your best methods for connecting with consumers in a social-media-driven web. Big business is taking notice, with brands like Comcast and Dell changing consumer sentiment around their brands and engaging them in the communities in which they reside. Better yet, they are doing so in a way that feels natural and adds value to the conversation, all while driving additional sales, boosting loyalty, and lowering operational and marketing costs.

Next-generation listening and targeting
As the way people spend their time becomes increasingly fragmented and marketers continue to face growing pressures to demonstrate the value of our services, the tools we are using to do so have undergone a significant evolution. More than 100 technology firms are offering variants of social-media-monitoring tools that measure not only references to key search terms but also the sentiment of the messaging around them. In doing so, these tools not only provide insight into customer behavior that extends miles beyond surveys and focus groups, they help to inform media strategies that include both media buying and influencer marketing.

As an industry we have moved beyond basic web and campaign analytics. Marketing firms are now able to monitor the entire customer life cycle with significantly more accuracy and then track the correlation between traditional, digital and commerce channels and customer conversion.

Meaningful metrics
Deep analytics and tracking are enabling meaningful insight. As a result, in its ongoing path to full maturity, digital marketing is finally adopting meaningful metrics that we can equate back to real business value. Now marketers are moving beyond digital-campaign measurement standards such as traffic and are instead mapping key performance indicators back to metrics and ultimately the conversation funnel, which includes the different levels of engagement — awareness, consideration, purchase intent, purchase and loyalty.

A massive recession is never a good thing, but it’s safe to say that someday, when the marketing sun is in full shine, we will find that some good came from it.

(As Featured on AdAge.com)

This is one of those instances, and I can’t believe I was not able to verbalize this before.

For most of modern marketing, we have operated on a constantly revolving cycle of campaigns, the goal of which has been to pique interest and in doing so drive sales, ensure retention, or create awareness. In most instances these campaign run and spark a quick burst of conversation or buzz, which then diminishes over length of the campaign. In the end what are you left with? One word: Silence!

Although we’ve lived in a marketing world dictated by campaigns that launch with a bang and then fade away like the credits of a film, the script is changing. As you have read countless times before, social media is playing an ever increasing role in media and brand strategies. In this world consumers demonstrate loyalty and brand evangelism through a variety of social media behaviors (i.e., becoming a fan on Facebook, following the brand on Twitter) but most of all through, you guessed it, conversation. Truly great campaigns — those that will stand out in a digital-savvy world — are the ones that incorporate countless iterations, and in doing so keep their brand in the limelight. These campaigns all have one thing in common: They enable long-term, sustainable conversations.

The key to creating long term sustainable conversations is picking a campaign position or theme that encourages multiple points of view that are equally viable. Just think about it. If no one can ever be “right,” the conversation cannot end and in turn will evolve into an endless debate with the brand positioned directly in the middle.

Great campaigns that embody this ongoing discussion include Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.” This campaign is centered on widening the definition and discussion of beauty. It’s a topic that literally has no definitive answer as it represents many things to many people. Subsequently the conversations around this topic are endless, as is its connection to the brand.

MasterCard has also established a brilliant long-term positioning in its “Priceless” campaign. You have seen the commercials about the memories of taking your child to their first ballgame or watching their first dance recital. Priceless moments are different to each of us, and they are intuitively experiences that people enjoy sharing and comparing with each other. Also, just like the Dove campaign, the conversation around “Priceless” moments is everlasting.

The next example comes from Nike and its positioning around various sports and the best way to achieve “athletic nirvana.” Again, this is an endless debate that sports enthusiasts will engage in with tremendous passion. Best of all, at least for Nike, is that there is no right answer, so the discussion, or argument, will most certainly go into extra innings.

Each iteration of these campaigns doesn’t create buzz; it reshapes the campaign, inspires further debate, and fuels a conversation that would exist with or without the brand.

Some brands, products and services are strong enough that consumers will argue their virtues regardless of their campaign. However, for the rest of us that are in the business of helping sell financial services or soap, it’s important that we find some meaningful human truth in the things we market. In doing so we allow people on both sides of the fence to create a dialogue, not just between brands and consumers but ultimately between consumers and other consumers, which, if you ask me, is the true definition of beauty.

Bob Garfield wrote a passionate article today about why he thinks Cannes is dead. Although I agree with Bob that many of the ads that have been celebrated at Cannes don’t represent the future of advertising, I don’t believe for one second that Cannes is dead.

The last year has been a rough year in advertising and this coming year is likely to be just as bad or worse, but I don’t feel this has left a gaping void in advertising. It only left a gaping void if you’re staring in the same direction you were last year and the years before that. We’ve all recognized that digital has been a catalyst for a massive change in the way we market, but our industry’s biggest challenge, after dealing with technological and cultural implications of our new wired world, has been learning how to deal with a world in a true global recession. It’s not just our budgets that have been reduced or shifted, but the consumer has fundamentally changed.

Like those that had lived through the great depression, the people that are experiencing this global recession are learning the value of frugality and economic maturity that comes with these experiences. It’s forcing us, as marketers, to evolve our message in conjunction with the way we’re delivering our message.

Broadcast, print and radio will continue to suffer as it becomes increasingly hard to be innovative in these mediums, especially when you compare each to the digital or any of the other emerging media channels. With that said, and in support of what I believe Bob is really looking for, watch the Titanium and Integrated short list. These lists will feature fully integrated campaigns and the most exciting marketing innovations where agencies demonstrate how they’ve evolved in this significantly different environment since the Lions in 2008.

I’ve always been firmly entrenched in the digital and emerging media world and believe that all major award shows are in a state of transition. From what I’ve seen, the Lions are more in touch with the digital world than all the other awards including the Clios, One Show or D&AD awards, which are miles behind on digital. Combine that with their international jury system that prevents any one country (like the US or UK) from swaying the vote and I believe you have a better chance of real global work pushing itself to the top.

Crispin certainly does get more then there fair share of attention at Cannes, but my hat is off to them, as they’re not only willing to explore any new medium as a form of advertising but in my opinion will also inspire others to try something new, bend the rules, and challenge conventional thinking. The shift I in work is happening already, although not quick enough in my opinion, and I’m just interested to see how Crispin will like sharing the spot light. Hopefully we’ll have another great winner like UNIQLO this year. My hopes are on Nitro’s “Best Job In The World” campaign.

Like any festival you have to get past the “creative masturbation,” after which you will find out that there is still some great work being done out there. Some festivals are going to survive this transition and I for one will be putting my money on the Lions. In the meantime I look forward to my time at Cannes this year. The main party might be a kegger on the beach or they may end up serving Natural Light and Cheese Doodles at the Calton. I’m not sure I care. The bottom line is that I’m still going to get to run into some of the best and brightest creative minds in the industry – and while I’m there, instead of discussing the industry’s doom, I’m going to talk about the things we can do to change the industry and discuss new and innovate ways to connect with consumers.

Maybe this recession is just the taste of reality we all needed.

The past year, although troubling and difficult for many people, has been a fascinating period in advertising. It has caused fundamental shifts in the balance of power between traditional and digital shops and, more important, changed the way that most savvy agencies approach marketing. Results are still king, but budgets are becoming more and more scrappy and if that wasn’t challenging enough, the client is standing behind you with a pitchfork just to make sure that you stay on form.

This new marketing climate has businesses and brand teams embracing blogs and open-source content-management system (CMS) platforms to drive their new sites. While this shift is being viewed as a reaction to tough economic times, using tools like Drupal, Wordpress, Ping.fm, Twitter, Facebook Pages and others doesn’t have to mean you’re trying to take the cheap route. The fact is that these tools embrace open architectures that have a lot of work (particularly social media integration tools) already built into them.

Creating basic blogs, allowing comments and uploading photos is not some new and revolutionary idea. Brands should have been embracing these kinds of initiatives all along. I think the driving force behind this delay was the time it took for many companies to finally get the ear of their internal stakeholders and receive not only their social media “buy in” but also a genuine vote of confidence that this medium could be vital to their brand.

Now the stakeholders are enamored with social media and its ability to enable brand-focused conversations online. The issue is that they are looking to spark dialogue through destination sites and campaigns that have a very short shelf life (i.e. campaigns that allow their brand to stay relevant until the economy improves). What they should be doing is treating them as permanent sites through which they can build a community, provide thought leadership and encourage ongoing discussion.

Now the question is, if conversation is really the goal and low costs are the requirement, what are your next steps? I say you take the conversations to the communities where they’re happening. How do you do this? Dedicate a full-time person to engage people in the social-media space by discovering conversations through free tools. This approach will cost less than a typical agency site and I can guarantee you that it will generate more conversation.

Marketers should also be sure to put more emphasis on strategy behind these efforts, as this kind of upfront thinking — the kind not limited to creative executions — can save the business money and lay a clear road map for success. Clients are demanding results and are most likely seeking reductions in fees in places like account management and general oversight, places where they don’t perceive ROI.

As part of your social campaign, empower your clients to do more work in-house to maximize budgets while enabling them to be successful. This can be achieved by sharing links to free online tools or providing guides or knowledge-sharing tools to handle things like digital engagement. And seek out low-cost production facilities and don’t have your agency make online videos for $100,000 when teenagers around the world are making successful ones for free.

Even if your budgets aren’t being reduced, you should look at these kinds of solutions. Why? Because right now there’s someone trying to get a meeting with one of your clients and they’re going to underbid you. But if you can do your work more economically, you can produce more of it and help the client to be exponentially more successful. Inexpensive doesn’t have to mean less intelligent.

As featured on AdAge’s Digital Next Column.

Sapient launched the first part of it’s digital campaign for Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory 3 last week. The project, one of my lifetime favorites, was truly built on the blood, sweat, tears, ingenuity, and smiles of a lot of people. The site took a very large team of creatives, designers, developers, IA, project managers, animators, and 3d specialists to create. Check it out here.

I’m thrilled to announce that it won an FWA today! Hopefully this is a good sign and indication of a successful campaign that resonates with all who see it.

I also recommend checking out the HF3 MSN Messenger games we created with Microsoft. Microsoft said they pushed the boundaries of the platform and the multi-player experience is pretty amazing.

We’ve got some more stuff in the cooker, but you’ll just have to wait till it launches.

The “Laptop Hunters” story presents an interesting case study around the importance of being transparent and honest in today’s digitally connected word, particularly if part of your audience includes what I like to call the tech savvy “fanboys.”

What the fanboys discovered is that Lauren, the average person supposedly invited to participate in this quest for a sub-$1,000 laptop, is not just some random person. She is actually a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild.

The boys then took the time to analyze every frame of the commercial in detail. They noticed, for instance, that a random person passing by the Apple store when Lauren walks in is in a eerily comparable position when she walks out, which lead them to question whether the whole event was staged or if she even walked into the store at all.
 

The final blow came when we then learned about the multitude of negative reviews on this particular HP Pavilion laptop and how that particular setup delivered what could best be described as a poor Vista experience.

Amusingly, an Apple PowerBook user offered to give “Lauren” his laptop free of charge via the Gizmodo blog just so she could understand that everyone “is cool enough to be a Mac person.”

For the record, I’m generally a fan of CPB’s work and I actually want them to be successful with their Microsoft ads. They’re smart and very digitally aware, but I think they forgot that in today’s social-media-centric world it’s imperative that you’re transparent, honest and authentic.

I’m not going to argue with Microsoft’s logic of using price as its big differentiator as opposed to focusing on establishing itself as a premium brand alongside Apple. That’s not the point. But I will say that if you are going to argue this point, which is something Microsoft could do, then you have to do it right.

What this means is going out and really finding the best laptop you can for under $1,000 and then ideally recommending one with your latest operating system on it. Next, find someone who’s not in SAG to be in your commercial.

What’s interesting is that there are also times when a brand can find itself on the other side of this coin — a brand launches a campaign in which it is telling the truth yet gets called out as a liar.

Recently I saw a commercial for the Olive Garden that claimed that the chain had a cooking school in Tuscany, Italy. I couldn’t believe they would make a statement like and do it on prime-time TV, where folks like me could easily check and find out that it is a complete lie. As it turns out, it does have a school in Italy. What was far more interesting, though, was the number of people that were online having the same doubts as me and were poking fun at the brand, even though unlike the “Laptop Hunters” example above, The Olive Garden did nothing wrong.

Whether you are Microsoft or the Olive Garden, brands have an excellent opportunity right now to tap into a variety of free social-media-monitoring tools, as well some more advanced tools. Whichever you select, these tools enable you to discover misinformed consumers and politely engage them and let them know real facts about your business. They may also help tip you off that the public has caught onto your little web of lies and give you a chance to right the ship before it’s too late.

Sometimes I just don’t get it. Is this honesty, authenticity and transparency thing really that hard?