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.

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.

Coca-Cola Europe launched an interesting project for Sprite earlier this month that I think is worth noting.  “Green Eyed World” is a video series revolving around a 23-year old singer from London as she looks to fulfill her dream of becoming a star. The audience is able to influence her choices as she journey’s through the music world by commenting and voting on the site.

The audience can follow and interact with this 23-year old singer from London as she creates new opportunities for herself by following her dream.  By joining her journey online, the audience can influence her choices through commenting and voting directly in the GREEN EYED WORLD videos using their own Facebook profile.

The interesting twist is that the highly customized YouTube channel doesn’t include the familiar comments that we’re used to using, but only allows users to comment by logging in with their Facebook credentials via Facebook Connect. This function makes each comment act as a seeding element for the campaign across your friend’s list as well as allows you to easily see what your other friend’s have said about the episode.

This use of Facebook Connect stood out to me because it was completely replacing a very familiar commenting system, but I think it works for this branded entertainment campaign. The quality of the video looks solid. The videos views aren’t particularly high yet, but I think this could be very interesting to see how it plays out as it’s too early to see how successful it’s going to be.

The “Episode Zero” show will be immediately followed by several viral extras on YouTube and Facebook updates from Katie leading up to premiere “Episode One” of “Season One” on May 1st. Viewers can also download a free application for their iPod/iPhone in time for the beginning of the season.

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.

There’s been a common misconception for quite sometime that social networks were only filled with teens and young adults, and although this still applies for some very youth focused networks like Habbo, the reality is social network use is now mainstream.

Inside Facebook ‘s latest data reveals some fascinating details about the Facebook’s user base. For example the number of US users over the age of 35 has double in the last 60 days, women over 55 years of age are the fastest growing demographic in the last 90 days, and the 26-44 year old age group now account for 41% of Facebook’s audience.

Facebook is just one of many social networks undergoing comparable demographic shifts. We’re living in an age where social networking and social media destinations site are big business and are easily as recognizable as major portals of five years ago. The concept of “social functionality” is being built or has already been built into most major sites and this trend will only continue as social networks de-centralize through tools like Facebook Connect.

What does all of this mean for marketers?

 
In a nut shell over 25’s are now open game on Facebook and not only are they are there in numbers but there substantially more comfortable with living in a socially networked online world.
 
I don’t think the marketing world has caught up and there’s a huge opportunity for brands to leapfrog their competition in this space.

If you look at the types of applications, groups, and friend pages that are being created in the social networking space they have a tendency to be focused on youth.  There’s a fairly wide gap in quality apps, groups or destinations that have been created by brands, as opposed to user generated, that are focused on subjects, needs, or desires that the over 25 age group have.

A quick word to the wise – if you represent an adult focused brand either internally or as an agency – you might want to look for user generated success stories first and participate in their success as opposed to starting from scratch. I think Coca-Cola hit the nail on the head recently. They leveraged the success of their existing fan base. They brought some of their best advocates and brought them even closer to their cause and inevitably made them fanatical advocates.

These kinds of shifts are not without repercussions. Our teenage kids and young adult children probably don’t want their parents watching witch boys or girls leave messages on their page, show up in photos with them, or even seeing if they’re answers on some kind of “booze” app.  Facebook has made some admirable attempts to allow us to isolate our friends into different groups to stop attrition and allow people to decide which information they share with which friends, but I don’t think this is going to be enough to stop youth from seeking out a new place to hang out in the virtual space.

The important thing to note though is that unlike a couple of years ago I don’t think youth leaving a social network is a sign of the end. Social networks are now mainstream enough to survive without being the next exciting thing (at least for a while).

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?

1. Search Retargeting for Display Ads — lets advertisers target display advertising based on a user’s search activity. So a user that searches on a term like “sandals” could be served a display ad for footwear elsewhere on Yahoo’s network.
2. Enhanced Retargeting for Display Ads — allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site. Going beyond standard site retargeting, the new technology would allow an advertiser to target users who visit an airline website to check offers for flights from SFO-JFK, and serve them a personalized offer for that specific flight when they visit a page within the Yahoo Network.
3. Enhanced Targeting for Search Ads — adds capabilities for Sponsored Search and Content Match ads, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search. New features are designed to extend the advertiser’s control over where and when an ad is shown at both the campaign and ad group level, including what time of day and day of the week an advertiser would like campaigns to run (ad scheduling), and what age and gender they’d like to reach (demographic). Advertisers will be able to vary their bids for different segments in order to increase their ability to reach the desired audience.

Much of this technology was developed through Yahoo’s BlueLithium division, which was acquired by Yahoo in September 2007.

My question is, why it took so long to get these capabilities available? Google and Yahoo should have been providing contextual and behavioral targeting to marketing for years … especially based on search keyword history and click-through history … Anyways, Kudos to Yahoo to pioneer this space in the search engine battle. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Google maintains control on the search engine space, and growing … almost 82% market share, up 4 points from 77% a year ago.

So what does this mean for Yahoo?! Well, as much as they would like to see is as increase in ad spend, this improvement attracts advertisers and marketers, not end-users, and therefore Yahoo will see a shift in the spend patterns, but not an increase. Yahoo needs apply the same innovation and thought leadership to provide better tools for the end-users and capture back some of the market share they’re quickly loosing.

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.