Well – this came out today. I’m always hesitant to reference surveys where I don’t know the methodology, but it does seem to suggest that Adidas’ consistent, multimodal approach is outpacing Nike’s single event.

“Half the game in buzz is ‘fanning the flames’. The Adidas football facebook page, for instance, is now up to over a million fans and they are dropping new content several times a day, all while the average post is generating upwards of 100 comments. At the end of the day, brands need to keep the buzz ball in the air as long as possible – sponsored or otherwise,”
- Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of digital strategy at Nielsen.

Too often advertising gets confused with marketing, and the result are efforts that focus on single spikes of awareness rather than long-term affinity. Making a commercial like Write the Future is incredibly expensive and while it generated a lot of buzz early on, without support, there are just too many other things happening all the time for it to remain front of mind.

More over, this style of marketing lacks any ability to react or adjust. WK and Nike took a big gamble that least ONE of the players in the commercial making it deep into the World Cup, now it would seem they’re stuck with a commercial that is irrelevant. You’d think both WK and Nike would have learned their lesson after the Kobe/Lebron playoff commercials.

I wonder how much better that budget could have been spent developing projects to actually connect with fans regardless of the outcome of the games rather than a mini-movie. It’s not that great advertising isn’t important, but it’s not a replacement for being there, interacting with your customers and creating the kinds of experiences that can last over time.

Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.

Not so much.

Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone – the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it – they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.

Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:

“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”

Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”

What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.

I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?

If you missed it – part one is here.

Here is how I responded:

I think the author is well intentioned, and in a lot of ways, dead on about the issues of advertising online. My issue is that I don’t think fixing advertising is going to be what ultimately helps brands online.

My view is that advertising isn’t just a tactical approach, it’s also a way of thinking. It has fundamental notions of how the marketplace works and how brands relate to their customers. Advertising is about punctuating one narrative stream with another, something that doesn’t exist online. There is no stream online. Agencies, I think, often underestimate the power of the hyperlink. It defines the way people conceptualize the web, and it’s non-linear.

The web has fundamentally changed this brand/customer relationship though, and presented brands with opportunity to not just talk about themselves, but to actually provide a real and meaningful experience rather than just the promise of an experience at some later time. If a brand wants to know what the future is, or an agency for that matter, it’s not contained in the mindset of advertising, rather it’s in the world of product and service design.

There is a reason restaurants don’t advertise their food IN THEIR OWN RESTAURANTS. So much better to give them a great meal with great service once they’re already there. The web is a brands restaurant, the people are there. Give them something to love.

Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things – worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville – “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge – how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions – installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water – that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

You can listen to part one here. And Part two here. For you convenience, I made sure to annoyingly tap on the table in both, so you don’t have to worry about missing that.

Bret has interviewed some other really interesting people (most with far more pleasant voices than mine), so while you’re there, you should check some of the other interviews out.

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that – as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years – aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web – pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay – so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.

All that said, there is a reason I got into this. I love brands, and I love advertising. It’s this love that makes me so aware of how much more culturally important I think advertising used to be. Allowing for the possibility that I have an unhealthy relationship with this industry, I pulled some examples I love that I think demonstrate this.

First – two classics. The first one is very likely why I got into advertising in the first place.

I think this one may be one of the more perfect commercials I’ve ever seen.

But it’s not all nostalgia. Here are a couple from around 2006 and 2008 respectively.

When I was watching these again this morning, I realized a few things about them. First, each one I think uses the medium pretty much perfectly. When I was in college I took a short story writing class and the professor described the method of short story writing not as shorting a longer story, but as telling the entire story by fully rendering one single moment to become a metaphor for the entire narrative. I think each of these does that perfectly. They’re each 30 second spots, but each one is a complete story told through one single element or theme.

Second, each them is unrepentantly ernest. I was listing to the Talk of the Nation interview with Bob Garfield a couple weeks ago where he was talking about what he called “advertisings worship at the alter of comedy” and it struck me how true this is. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but I miss when an agency and brand where not afraid to say “yes, this is culturally important.”

Looking back now, it occurs to me how balls-y these ads actually where. Comparing them to something like the current Nike MVP ads, there is a safety and a distance in the humor. For me, there is something wonderful about the ads above that take the risk of saying “yes, sports matter, Nike matters.” They wore their convictions on their sleeves and in doing so took on a level of noble vulnerability.

So there you have it, proof I don’t hate advertising.

As a bonus, Ishtar makes an appearance!

The bad thing about a dictatorship is that once the leader looses it, the whole thing starts to come undone. And they always lose it. There’s always something, some person, some event, that starts to place seeds of doubt and in the end, that single point of vision becomes a tyrannical mess of paranoia and irrational behavior. It’s clear Jobs hates Google. Not in a competitive way, but in some deep, personal and increasingly irrational way. For a guy who seems to have never made much of a bad decision, this target fixation has seemed over the last months to begin to take him off his game.

iAd is, for me, the first real manifestation of this unraveling.

Thursday morning, I tried to get out of the house early so I could stop by Voodoo doughnuts on my way into the office. One of the advantages of having your own agency is that you can declare any day that Steve Jobs is on stage as a company holiday. I had made it known early in the week that we’d be taking the morning off and taking over the conference room to project various tech blogs, eat doughnuts, and talk about Apple magic as it happened. For most of the presentation, for 6 “tent poles”, thats exactly what we did. Then came tent pole 7, iAd.

Here is my fundamental problem with iAd: It’s make no sense from a brand strategy point of view. It’s irrational, and philosophically counter to nearly every previous decision Apple has made under Jobs. To be clear, it’s not crazy in the way that most people will ever notice, after all, most of us have spent the last 15 years being trained to expect display advertising as just a way of life. But advertising is fundamentally user hostile. That’s the core nature of it, it’s why it works. It makes you stop whatever you were doing and look at something else that you didnt choose to. While it probably seems histrionic to take something so seemingly small and blow it up to this size, I do believe this marks a fundamental change in motivation for Jobs and Apple.

What Id like to do is agree with people like John Gruber that Apples motivations are to preserve the overall user experience of the iPhone, and honestly up until iPhone 4, that has always been what I believed. But iAd negates that premise on fundamental level. This is the first time I can think of Apple has chosen to make money at the direct expense of it’s customers product experience. People can, and have, argued for a long time that those of us supporting Apple and its draconian control of it’s platforms we’re just begging for this to happen. But I think it’s critical to consider that until iAd, the goal was to create a specific notion of quality user experience. For many of people, it wasn’t the experience they wanted, but that it was customer focused is hard to deny.

Of course there are already ads in applications so it could be argued that iAd doesn’t really change much. Or, to Jobs’ point in the presentation, this is a chance to make those ads better. This line of reasoning doesn’t seem to hold water though either. For a company allegedly so focused on preservation of good user experience that they’re willing to through Adobe under a bus, why would they invest so heavily in making intrinsic to the iPhone experience a system that would invite what is arguably the worst aspect of user experience on the web into their device? I can’t think of a reason. But the real difference here is that with iAd, Apple has actual financial motivation to have the iPhone/App UX degraded. Previously, Apple could take no position on in App advertising, but now, with a 30% cut of each ad, the more ads that go out, the better Apple does.

One could argue that Apple introducing iAd is better for their customers in that it allows more developers more opportunity to create applications and make a living off them. And this is true. But if Apples motivation were bring more developers into the fold, why on the same day they announce iAd would they choose to proactively lock out Flash as a development platform. Gruber’s take on this, as it has been from the start, is the Flash is simply not capable of producing a user experience at a level Apple feels is on par with the overall device. Fair enough. But if UX is the central issue, it’s hard argue that in app advertising, ads Apple will not be vetting, produce any better UX than Flash. After all, iAd gives huge amounts of iPhone user experience control to ad agencies, people with no track record of being able to produce anything other than bad UX and no motivation, monetarily or otherwise, to do anything other than throw away work.

Rather than spending their time and resources to update the App Store, something thats been asked for from nearly day one, iAd seems to be an investment by Apple in a race to the bottom. Tying application developers’ livelihood to the same display ad system that has left huge parts of the content creation industry on the web in shambles. Why not instead invest in making structural updates to the actual purchasing process to help elevate the developers doing the best work, and then help them find a way to actually charge a living wage for their work? Why not take the same, revolutionary approach Apple always has and find a way to free developers from having to find ad real-estate in their applications so they can focus on continuing to make their, and Apple’s, products even better?

The only logical answer is clear: To beat Google.

But given that a company whose name has always been tied to changing the game, such an investment in playing someone else’s game leaves me wondering: does Apple have the cultural and organizational underpinnings to manage a system that is both open to outside development and the clear frontrunner in a category, while maintaining their history of a clear focus on user experience? If iAd is any indication, the answer is no.

With Mac, Apple has always been able to be the contrarian second place. Making huge profits while catering to a smaller, but vastly more loyal base of fans. The iPod on the other hand is clearly the industry leading platform, but it’s closed. Apple has always had top to bottom control of everything that goes it save for the music. iPhone is something different though. It’s neither the plucky niche product of Mac, nor the highly controlled iPod.

In Apple’s seemingly desperate effort to control this rapidly expanding system, the strains on the dictatorial system are becoming evident, and it’s not clear Apple has the systems in place to stay sane. In fact, it would seem this new found position has resulted in increased paranoia and a fixation on beating specific competitors in specific ways rather than making revolutionary advancements. That they would try to lump iAd in with other user focused features is either completely disingenuous, or evidence of increasing detachment from reality. For whatever reason, Jobs has decided his mission now is to beat Google first, beat Adobe second, everything else comes third, including Apple user experience.

This isn’t to say that Apple will stop making good products, they’ll likely continue to for a long while. But as a post-Jobs Apple moves nearer, the questions of what drives the company without him become more important. iAd is a strong signifier of the kind of brand confusion that I think is beginning to emerge, and without Jobs in place, the “do what it takes to make money” path is now just viable as the “make great products” one. We’ve all seen “money at any cost” Apple of the 90′s, and it wasn’t pretty.

The good news is this: if you do manage to punch the monkey, you’ll win an iPad.