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)

Move over “Beatles: Rock Band.” Step aside “Max Payne 3.” Look out “Resident Evil 5.” Twitter and Facebook are coming to Xbox. That’s right, on June 1, the people of Xbox 360 announced they are integrating these leading social networks to Xbox Live, the company’s online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service.

When pitted against the likes of a motion controlled system, Twitter and Facebook are fighting an uphill battle for buzz. In fact, from what I can see the news that these social networking giants are coming to Xbox has been met with virtual silence. But if you take a few minutes to glance over the official company statements concerning these integrations you will quickly discover why this move is one of pure genius. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Microsoft might have just have just announced what could be the real deathblow to the competition.

Says Microsoft: “By bringing Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm to Xbox 360, we’re not only extending the walls of your living room beyond your home to your friends all over the world, we’re creating the definitive social network, uniting more than 300 million people to share thoughts on music, play games and tweet.”

By incorporating these social-networking tools into their gaming device, Microsoft is uniting a passionate community that comprises hundreds of millions of people and, in large part, revolves around its brand. Just think about all the possibilities this creates.

First Microsoft’s Xbox team will be able to more efficiently interact with their audience, alerting them to new games and features, unveiling unknown secrets and hints and rolling out the red carpet to upcoming gaming events, all directly to the gamer’s couch. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

More interesting is the ability for Xbox gamers to easily and effectively communicate with friends (both gamers and non-gamers), advocating both the Xbox gaming platform and new games via Facebook mini-feeds and Twitter. The new Xbox additions will allow gamers to easily comment on games they’re actively playing and share in-game screen shots with ease.

Now thousands of new messages and game images will enter these services daily and in doing so will forever change the way games are marketed. But how will it impact the in-game advertising market when the likelihood of in-game ads getting more and more media exposure thanks to these shared screenshots? The fact is these ads are going to become a hotter weapon.

Even the most dedicated gamers have interests and passions outside of the games and Microsoft has made strides towards establishing the Xbox as the definitive media hub of your home. That’s where services such as Last.fm come into play. Now gamers can turn their Xbox into a music center that has access to millions of songs that can be streamed through their device, which undoubtedly is connected the best speakers in the house. Another soon-to-be-released feature includes the ability to watch movies as a group via Xbox Live and communicate via microphone and your avatars. Combine this with the recent addition of the Netflix moving streaming service and you have one very powerful device that is finally leveraging the power of a social, tech-savvy community.

Frankly, I’m sick of talking about social media. I’ve had a long-standing view that eventually everything online would have social functionality and that it would become a commodity function of the web. For me, this is a clear indication of how much I may have underestimated how far this could go. As more and more electronic devices become internet enabled and the concept of sharing our lives via the social web becomes more commonplace, how many other devices in the near future will take on similar functionality to what Xbox is pioneering? For example, adding this functionality to a DVR could change the broadcast or movie industry profoundly as it would allow them to use social media far more effectively as a marketing channel.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t be talking about social media in the next couple of years, but as this evolves from device to device maybe this is not the end but just the beginning. Stay tuned.

And you thought my giant robot prediction was crazy....

Earlier this month I was able to visit CeBIT, the world’s largest technology show case, in Hannover, Germany. The exhibition space is absolutely enormous totally over 5,000,000 square feet. Imagine the biggest convention center building you’ve ever seen then imagine at least 20 buildings of that size and you’ll have an idea of how big CeBIT is.

I was able to meet some brilliant people from around the world, speak on a panel about social media, and be exposed to some great bleeding edge technology. All in all it was a great couple of days (even though I missed my flight on the way back).

Most buildings were focused on one subject that included green technologies, security, enterprise network technology, mobile, GPS, computers, gaming, or my personal favorite “the future parc”. The future parc was focused on innovative new technologies whether they had been productised or not. You could look at technologies at an early stage with the potential that you might see a new opportunity for it’s use.

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite items below that I saw during the conference. Some are really far out and some are fairly simple – I hope you enjoy the quick summary.

AIPTEK – This German company has produced a very small lightweight project that fits into the palm of your hand. It’s got no where near the kind of power you’d need to do a full blow presentation at good quality, but it would be great for projecting movies from an portable device like an iPod or iPhone onto the wall. Another nifty feature includes an oboard memory card so you can just store movies in the device and avoid the third party portable device all together. It’s still early days, but very cool none the less.

Global Emotion – This wasn’t actually a piece of technology, but it stood out to me for two reasons. One, I have full intentions of living in Asia this year and two I just thought it addressed a very interesting issue for westerners trying to do business in China. iWays is offering a course that allows you to learn to understand the body language and facial expressions of the Chinese people in comparision to some western body language that might cause you to mis-understand a business situation. I could see how this could be invaluable in today’s world.

GestureTek – These guys are doing some amazing interactive displays. They’re doing everything from massive table top displays that allow you to drag content around with your finger and close and expand additional content at will to touchless screens that react just based on the movement of your hands. It’s starting to feel really futuristic.

Another cool product they had on display was called “The Cube”. It was a self contained and portable system for doing projected interactive displays that react to gesture control. Imagine for example projecting a bunch of lilly pads onto the floor that when you moved near them with your feet bounced and rippled in reaction to your motion. This is definitely eye catching stuff. I still think they haven’t unleashed some top level creative talent onto it yet, so they’re still a lot of room to do some amazing things.

Fraunhofer Institute – The Fraunhofer Institute booth took the cake for me for most mind blowing innovations (with actual working prototypes). Some of the highlights included:

• Flat panel TVs that displayed near perfect 3D imagery without the need for 3D glasses.
• 3D digital dashboards for automobiles that also reacted and tracked your eye movement.
• Real-time facial expression analysis that could identify your gender and mood.
• A digital wardrobe where you could change the color and design on your clothes by just standing in front of  a special mirror.
• A bathroom designed to help manage the elderly (for example) in terms of making sure they’ve been doing their bathroom routine and taking the appropriate medications. It then reports back to any caregivers to alert them of abnormalities.
• An image search that allowed you to dynamically search for “simliar images”. The system was smart enough to identify properties like number of people in the image, consistent colors, a positioning of objects in the frame.

I’ve included some of the photos I did manage to take. I should probably also do a quick shout out to the people that invented the massage chair with matching audio and light stimulation. I couldn’t relax as well as I would have liked while testing their product because I kept thinking about how much I wanted to buy one…

Photos after the jump…

Quite a bit of buzz has popped up around the new Skittles.com over the weekend and today. If you haven’t seen the site, it’s based on leveraging different social-media sites linked together by a very simple menu navigation that floats on any of the sites. For example, the home page and “chatter” section is the brand’s Twitter page, the video media page is the brand’s YouTube page, the video images page is the brand’s Flickr stream, and the “friends” section is the Facebook fan-page profile.

This is almost certainly inspired by Modernista’s brilliant redesign from about a year ago. Does that matter? Definitely not. Modernista had it right then and now Skittles does too. Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.

If you want an easy indicator of how this site does, check out the number of Facebook friends it already has in place (an impressive 582,604 at the time of this post). Other measurements, such as the number of comments it has on its YouTube videos and images, and general comments and sentiments can also be helpful indicators, but I think the Facebook figure serves at the simplest indicator for most casual observers.

The reality is, Skittles has done this completely right. This solution was quick to produce, leverages existing communities that have great interest in the product and creates a platform that further engages the consumer. I would recommend any brand with minimal budget and the right kind of audience drop the brand sites they currently have, which I’m guessing aren’t terribly effective. The problem is that such a scenario raises an interesting dilemma.

What happens if everyone shifts their current strategy and starts launching these kinds of sites? Don’t worry — it isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but some trends will develop.

In a nutshell, I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers. These people certainly want their social media and a big part of a brand’s focus will be on creating great quality websites that encourage discussion, communication and participation. The social-media aspects will be achieved by using the web services and integration tools of sites like Facebook. Deep integration with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will become more prevalent and brands with budgets will use all of these social features that Skittles has embraced.

However, while social aspects will become more prevalent, brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value and will work to make sure they retain the ability to at least control the brand visually. They will also differentiate as they always have with great creative and fun concepts that leverage these same social communities. Sites will also be more conscious of usability and not adding complex layers that inhibit the social functions of the third party web services like Flickr, YouTube or Twitter — which are frequently botched today.

I don’t think the age of the microsite is over. The successful microsites, both low and high budget, will undoubtedly have one thing in common: a simple open infrastructure for integrating into popular web communities and leveraging their social nature.

Again, I commend Agency.com for paying attention to great ideas, Modernista for doing it first, but most importantly Skittle’s brand team for having the courage to get out there and embrace the web and the new creative process so wholeheartedly. (Of course, Team Skittles could be terrified to death. But, um, congrats anyway…)

As featured on AdAge.com.

I was out with some friends having a drink tonight when the conversation sparked a memory of a big prediction I had a couple years back. Everyone thought it was a bit nuts, but in the interest of making it public record I’m going to share this prediction with you. Why do I need to make it public record? Well, according to my friends one or all of the following thing will happen if I’m right:

• They will immediately pay me $1,000,000
• Pigs will fly out of their asses and do some form of aerial acrobatic show.
• Hell will not only freeze over, but Satan will open some form of ice skating rink that also serves free heart shaped lollipops.es

Now that I’ve got that out of the way I’m going to share one of my most far out predictions for the future. Call me crazy, but I truly believe this will become reality in our lifetime.

Does anyone remember  BattleBots? It was a series of tournaments where remote controlled robots loaded with weapons and a healthy dose of armor kicked the snot out of each other in an arena. It reached it’s cultural peak in 2000 to 2002 when 5 tournaments were aired on Comedy Central.

The advancement of robotics over the coming ten years (and ongoing generations) will allow us to  build some fairly sophisticated robots. They’ll be bigger, faster, be able to handle bigger weapons and sustain more damage.

I predict that in ten years time robotic combat will become a more frequently viewed televised sport and in the coming decades will become a major spectator sport.

The reality is we love violence and competition. It’s evident in the sports we like from American football to Ultimate Fighting Championships. What boy wouldn’t love to watch four eight-foot robots rip each other to shreds with machine guns, flame throwers, and modified chain saws?

Apparently ESPN has just licensed them for another seasons that’s coming out in the spring of 2009. I’m interested to see how an updated version feels after 7 years off the air. Additionally it will be interesting to see how a sports network approaches it as opposed to a comedy channel.

Hopefully, you don’t mind my deviation from trend watching in marketing and simultaneously don’t think I’ve gone mad.

(I’ll have the last laugh though…. Oh you’ll see…. You’ll see…)

Google is not going anywhere … People have been predicting that Google will go down for years, but they’re still the best company out there, in terms of financial stability, innovation, culture, and business strategy … Google has 81.5% of search engine market share:

Granted, and this could take an entire post by itself, the web is getting too crowded: social media, user generated content, web 2.0, read write web, call it whatever you like, it’s generating such an huge amount of content that it’s impossible to find anything with traditional keyword based search anymore. The ideal search should be totally personalized (and again, Google has been working on this for a while and I’ve been a beta tester for some personalization features), but it should also take into account search history, relevance, social bookmarking, micro-blogging, and contextual relevance … Web 3.0 or semantic web will allow search engines to tell you what you’re looking for before you try to find it …

I digress, the point I was trying to make is that as the web grows, utilities and tools get created daily, content is generated everywhere, search will have to adapt as well. So back to Borthwick; he says that real time search will kill traditional search … How does a 140 character opinion relates to a full lenght article on Wikipedia, or to a 30 seconds video, or to a corporate site, or to financial or stock info … I mean, really Borthwick, we know you are a twitter and tweetdeck shareholder, but do you really have to make sure an absurd comment?

One of the ideas behind web 2.0 is openness… Everything has open APIs nowadays, and there are many companies using them to monitor social media … So if you really want a real time search engine, it wouldn’t be just twitter … twitter is gaining huge momentum, but they only have half a dozen million users… a real time search engine would monitor twitter, joost, brightkite, facebook, linkedin, myspace, just to name a few:

There are companies already doing this; granted, they charge some good money for these services, but it’s only a matter of time until someone (Google) taps into this and make it freely available… That said, how would Twitter kill Google again?

I’ve seen some nice analytics powered by Twitter, like the chatter during the Super Bowl mapped by state over time to match the exact events on the 4h period … I love it, don’t get me wrong, but how is that really relevant to search? Imagine pulling up search.twitter.com and all you get back is: “cardinals, steelers” … What am I supposed to do with that data? Completely irrelevant … Data was king, but now we have too much data … Context is king now …. Twitter search provides no context whatsoever, and thus is completely useless…

I almost forgot to mention, Google actually is trying to enter the micro-blogging space bundled with their really strong initiative to penetrate the mobile space … Google launched latitude last week, that combines geolocation, micro-blogging, and tap into their existing gmail user base, the Android platform, and their deal with Apple / iPhone …

Micro-blogging, mobile, open social …. Innovation is the key to success, real time search is not ready for prime time, and whoever figures out how to combine all social data with some context will have an opportunity on the search engine landscape.

I’ve mentioned over the last year that I’m a fan of Kluster. Kluster is a group decision-making tool with its roots firmly set in social networking. It allows you to set up private or public groups focused around generating ideas in a democratic and collaborative environment enabled through technology.

Read the full article at AdAge.com

I don’t think that many people would argue with me that this generations MTV is YouTube and it’s lesser cousins. The highest viewed videos on YouTube represent a large number of musical artists. Social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and to a lesser extent last.fm are connecting artists with their fans in more rich way then any fans in history.

How big is this aspect of an artist’s success online? Britney Spears is hiring a full time social media expert and she started by posting on Harvard job boards. My point is that the music industry has changed, the way fans are interacting has changed, but the way we consume music videos hasn’t for the most part.

Music videos are still, even on YouTube, just broadcast video. They might drive people back to a website or a myspace page, but for the most part lack any form of interactivity. Why aren’t people pushing the envelope?

For starters the budgets in the music business are impossibly small for online marketing, they’re shrinking, and I feel that a huge portion of the big labels are in state of atrophy as they continue to panic at how their industry is changing. There’s an opportunity to do something wonderful and really cut through the clutter, but someone is going to to have take a risk. Dear music industry, here’s a suggestion: Use your music video production budget to produce an interactive music video that in it’s primary formed would be viewed on a website. It would extend the artform of music video production, leverage your video production budget to aid marketing, and interact with fans in a way that is obviously successful in all other aspects of your online interactions with them.

Luckily some people have taken some interesting experimental attempts at this. The indie band Arcade Fire released two of the singles off their last album in this form last year. They created quite a bit of buzz considering the fairly low profile of the band (in comparison to some mega-artists). MGMT also released an interactive video using Quicktime.  I guess no one had heard of Flash at their managmenet group. Aside from that minor jab, they deserve respect for making the effort. Check them out below and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.

I think they’re all interesting and add a new dimension to the music. What excites me is that I know there is so much more potential there in terms of breaking new creative ground.

Arcade Fire – Black Mirror
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
MGMT – Electric Feel (Interactive with Quicktime)

One of the things I learned recently is that the music companies are getting paid royalties now for the number of views on their music videos by video sharing sites. If it’s actually a revenue stream for them – doesn’t it make sense that they’d want to create more versions of their videos personalized by the fans and up online?

There is no doubt in my mind that this is the natural evolution for music videos. The sad part is that someone like Madonna will probably be the first big artist to come in and do this in a big way and get all the credit for it.

Four marketers are teaming up to air two commercials in super-fabulous 3-D as part of a special “event” during this year’s Super Bowl telecast on Feb. 1 to run the first-ever all 3D Super Bowl commercial break. The ads, which will run at the end of the second quarter will mark the debut of DreamWorks Animation’s premier 3D movie trailer for its upcoming feature film, “Monsters vs. Aliens” and a 60-second spot in 3-D for PepsiCo’s SoBe Lifewater. The other two marketers involved are Intel, which has made 125 million pairs of 3-D glasses for the occasion distributed by PepsiCo through the SoBe Lifewater brand, and NBC, this year’s Super Bowl broadcaster, which will also air a 3-D episode of Chuck the following day (to be promoted under the slogan “Don’t Chuck your glasses”).

NBC viewers will be alerted to the SoBe Lifewater Super Bowl Displays via a series of tune-in spots airing beginning on January 19th. Displays and tune-ins will instruct viewers to use their 3D glasses on Super Bowl Sunday, with additional messaging, “Don’t Chuck Your Glasses,” prompting viewers to re-use them during the special 3D episode of “Chuck,” which will feature a special guest appearance by NBC Sports analyst and Super Bowl champion Jerome Bettis.

When I came back from Singapore I had the pleasure of finally flying an Airbus A380 – the largest commercial airliner in the world.

I was deeply impressed with the aircraft. It flew gracefully. It was incredibly quiet. The cabin was amazing and spacious.

All these things withstanding, probably because I’m a massive nerd, I was most impressed with the in-flight entertainment system.

I have taken a series of (bad) photos of the system below. Some highlights include:

• A USB port to allow you insert a thumb drive. Most spreadsheet, presentation, or word-processing documents can be opened on the screen and modified using a full QWERTY keypad on the back of the system controller!
• An ethernet port to allow for limited Internet access (when it’s available).
• A video input jack to allow you to play video on the screen from a third party device like an iPod, iPhone, portable DVD player, or video camera.
• Language tutorials. I believe there were 19 languages available. Not a bad thing to learn on your way to Asia!
• Loads of a games with a controller that reminds me of a Nintendo NES controller. They’re some 3d games in there, a bit laggy, but not a bad way to pass the time.