It’s that time of year again and I’ll be heading out to another interesting week in the south of France checking out some of the best work in the world, meeting with the media, and trying my best to get myself and the SapientNitro crew into the most fun parties. This year has a new unusual twist for me on a personal level. I’ve quit drinking so that I can successfully quit smoking. No smoking for one month as of tomorrow. If I can make it through the Lions without drinking or smoking I’ll be feeling more confident that I’ve finally kicked the world’s worst habit…

On the work front I’ll be running a workshop with Nathaniel Perez, SapientNitro’s social media whiz, focusing on location based marketing called “How To Create Location-Based Mobile Marketing (Shhhh … Without An Expert)” on Friday morning. If you’re in town I encourage you to check it out. Also Laura McFarlane will be leading a discussion with Ian Maskel from Unilever featuring our next generation vending machine that utilizes facial recognition technology for a very unique customer experience.

We’ve also got a very unique location based game that works in the spirit of the childhood favorite game Marco Polo. Rob and I will tell you more in an upcoming post that will really break the details down.

In the mean time enjoy this wonderful comic from WordsAndPictures. If you don’t read them already visit their site and subscribe to their content. It’s fantastic.

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I’ve always been wondered by how brands are not just using anything as media, like plazas, buildings, the sky … but it’s actually happening … within the past month, first Samsung and then BMW using 3d projection mapping to display a full HD3D display on top of buildings. I don’t know the laws and regulations for it, but I’m sure there are some, otherwise we would see add projected on every building – ad saturation.

Samsung introduced 3d projections in Amsterdam to promote their new to-be-launched 3d tv’s. I would _love_ to get one for the world cup, but I could only hope.

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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.

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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).

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