Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: Mashable)

A full-page ad in USA Today and in the New York Times marks the next chapter of the never-ending “the conversation is your brand” saga. Trident, the chewing gum maker, bought the placements, and instead of using them to promote its latest product (Trident Layers) with the usual mix of emotionally resonant narrative, sharp copy, and persuasive imagery, it chose to feature select tweets about the product under the tagline “The people have Tweeted."

Trident says that the ten tweets featured were discovered by the Trident team using Twitter Search, and that they used Twitter to contact each party to secure their approval, but it is hard to suppress the perception of them being fabricated. Notwithstanding the question of whether or not the ad deserves the notion of authenticity, it presents an interesting twist in the democratization of brands. We‘ve seen Skittles (introducing the “Interweb," an aggregation of third-party conversations about Skittles, on its homepage), creative shop Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, social CRM provider Get Satisfaction, or Seth Godin’s Brands in Public embrace real-time Web-branded conversations – on the Web. Trident, however, can now pride itself with being the first brand to apply this principle in a mainstream print ad.

But not only that: The "People have Tweeted” ad mashes up the Trident brand by not so subtly borrowing iconography from other brands. The first thing you notice is that it leads with an oversize “hero shot” of the “naked” gum, staging it like a slickly designed consumer electronics device and making you wonder if this is indeed just a gum or the next, much-awaited Apple product. Moreover, the ad not only features content from Twitter but also somewhat overtly leans on Twitter’s brand, citing recognizable brand elements such as font and colors while downplaying those of Trident (there is no display of a Trident logo whatsoever). It is almost as if Twitter, Apple, and Trident merged and became one superconvergent uberproduct – which is, one would suspect, exactly the impression the advertisers aimed for.

Perhaps this ushers in the next era of advertising, one that is fueled by the paradigms of the social Web but applicable across all media: Brands that understand and capitalize on the insight that they’re not only shaped by the conversations of their consumers (fans and followers, that is) but also increasingly by the personas of other brands. Social, in this sense, means not only inviting employees and customers to co-create your brand, but also, openly or discretely, hybridizing, mashing up, or collaborating with other brands.

(Credit: Google.org)

At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, announced a cloud-based method for analyzing deforestation around the world in a much more up-to-date manner than previously possible.

Using Google's terabytes of satellite imagery, it lets scientists look back over time at any location in the world and see how the forest has changed. Going beyond visual comparisons, it uses the power of cloud computing to do actual measurement of deforestation. Much more rapid analysis of the images than is possible on a single desktop computer pinpoints locations of most recent activity. This lets authorities locate illegal logging precisely and within days of the activity.

"With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing."

For more information, check out Google.org's blog.

(Credit: disfruteconpoco)

I attended the Trendforum in Munich last week, a two-day conference that gathered European innovation, marketing, and R&D executives to explore emerging technologies, social trends, and innovative business models. The program was eclectic and the content mostly of high quality. I was particularly intrigued by the opening session that intersected macro-economic forecasting with geeky trend evangelism as well as a humanistic pledge for meaning-driven business (in fact, the other sessions didn’t even come close, including special guest Ray Kurzweil, whose remote keynote, given by way of 3D-holographic projection, remained utterly flat).

As the first speaker, Markku Wilenius, senior vice president of economic research and corporate development with Allianz SE, set the framework by introducing overarching future themes, key challenges facing mankind, from climate change to water scarcity to demographic developments. Forecasting the economic development over the next two decades, he predicted redefined notions and metrics of both societal progress and individual success, and heralded “true-value accounting” that would ultimately “decouple consumption from growth.” In 10 years, he argued, easy and seamless sustainable choices would have become the norm, as would have “smarter systems.” Wilenius identified four key consumer trends, all to be filed under Consumer Empowerment: Downshifting (simplicity -> value for money, price sensitivity, discounts); Transparency (clarity -> open communications, clear essence); Selfness (control -> self-governance, tangibility); and Age of Less (substance -> long-term thinking, lightness). Despite the daunting challenges in these times of crisis, his outlook remained optimistic: “Material scarcity always creates an abundance of ideas.” If that is true, we can look forward to innovative times in which creativity will not only become a crucial skill but an existential means of survival.

Christine Woesler de Panafieu, founder of CoSight, an international trend research and marketing consulting firm in Paris, picked up the ball and described how the macro-trends Wilenius had pinpointed would alter the lives of consumers. She argued that we were moving from "post- to ultramodernity," resulting in a renaissance of the renaissance: “the man as measure of all things.” This neo-humanistic mindset would bear a new spiritual quest--“an individual, open-path-seeking direct resonance with the sacred,” as she put it. The number of pilgrimages is indeed on the rise, as is the number of new religions (and meta-religions such as the recent Charter of Compassion or the portal Beliefnet). “The 21st century will be spiritual or it won’t be at all,” Woesler de Panafieu said, quoting a French philosopher. Morality is in high demand, but doing good is shifting from convention to conviction, from a humanitarian to an empowerment approach. For brands, this means they need to become the “right thing to do.” And one only has to look as far as Foursquare to see that converting social currency into real value will the business model of the future.

Nils Müller, founder and CEO of TrendONE, a trend research firm, finally took the audience on a riveting tour de force through much buzzed-about emerging tech trends, envisioning the future in 2020 as a seamless blend between the real and virtual worlds, dominated by location-based, real-time, and social computing applications that turn the Internet into an "Outernet" and “every interface into a surface”--from printed electronics to face recognition to augmented social shopping. He depicted an evolution from “lean back” to “move forward” to “jump in” to “always-on” to “plug in” media. And he showed tons of videos: the "Siftables" (see picture above); the inevitable Microsoft Natal clip; a demo of brainwave-based voiceless communications (theaudeo.com), and a clip on augmented vision enabled by eye chips (tat.se). Their common thread: technology in disguise, with front ends that are becoming touchable, intuitive, and human-centric. Mueller coined the term “Shytech” for this phenomenon: technology that can afford to be nonintrusive because it is fully immersive.

In the concluding panel discussion, Woesler de Panafieu was asked what’s left to do for designers when everything was immersive and one great computing cloud. “Designers’ task will be to make the invisible visible,” she said, “creating the new interaction codes of our societies.” That again alluded to the big mega-trend of Good Computing--without Computers. Designers are the ones who can translate data (and meta-data) into meaning and make morality tangible amidst a flood of information. As they visualize the dematerialization of products and services, how long will it take before the dematerialized world becomes the ideal one?

Ford Fiesta

(Credit: Ford Motor Co.)

I was driving along the other day and saw a lime green Ford Fiesta--a car that is not currently available in the US, but which launched recently in Europe. It's combination of good looks, driving fun, and low prices has quickly made it the second-best-selling car there after the Golf.

Ford is planning to bring the Fiesta to the US in 2011, an excellent move, as we need more good "economy" cars here that are not boring and/or ugly. Ford is doing an interesting viral/social campaign ahead of the launch. It has engaged 100 "agents" to drive the cars around and blog and tweet about their experiences (the car I saw was evidently driven by one of them--it had a fiestamovement.com logo on the back bumper).

80,000 people volunteered to be agents, according to MarketingVox:

The online program has also generated 6 million YouTube videos, 740,000 Flickr views, and more than 3.7 million Twitter impressions to date, according to the company. Additionally, name awareness for the model has risen to almost 60 percent, according to Jim Farley, Ford's vice president of marketing (via the Detroit News).Ford will officially debut the 2011 Fiesta model at the Los Angeles Auto Show today.

Each round of agents produces videos that combine into "chapters" that will play out over the following months. It's the most extensive social/viral based marketing campaign that automakers have yet undertaken (good enough to get me to write about it anyway), and shows the importance that Ford is placing on the Fiesta. According to the Detroit Free Press:

The Fiesta represents a seismic shift for Ford. The automaker, best known for its F-Series pickups and SUVs, hasn't sold a subcompact car in the United States since it discontinued the lackluster Aspire in 1997. What's more, Ford hasn't sold a car with the Fiesta name since 1980.

Ford said it will offer 15 technologies in the Fiesta that are not typically found in subcompact cars. That includes keyless entry, push-button start and its Sync wireless communications and entertainment technology.

(Credit: Billpapa.org)

Reading the business section of yesterday's New York Times, you couldn't help but notice the juxtaposition of two seemingly different companies, which, at second glance, have more in common that you might think. One is Bloomberg, the financial data juggernaut that has enough cash to aspire to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” The company has placed its bets on the acquisition of the venerable BusinessWeek, trusting that it will broaden its reach into a mainstream business audience. A few pages later, Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross reveals Apple’s pending patent application for a new advertising pop-up technology that forces users of devices and web sites to acknowledge the reception of the commercial message.

What Apple calls “enforcement routine” is basically a radical ad-based model that offers consumers to use Apple’s products and services for free or at a discount if they “watch ads they may not want to watch.” Stross writes: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad--it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.” As Stross points out, other brands went down this path before and utterly failed, and he is stunned that Apple, if it is serious about this technology, seems to be willing to risk its  reputation of consumer-friendly “cool.”

One story can be read in the context of the other: Bloomberg and Apple not only share a zealously rigid culture and a “walled garden” business model based on selling high-grade packages at a premium price; they are also both media companies. Both have strong communities driven by the Three C’s of Communities--connectivity, content, and context--and both are wondering which of these parameters they can exploit more aggressively without jeopardizing the integrity of the community that is the foundation of their business. Both Apple and Blooomberg create value by heavily relying on network effects within an ecosystem that they tightly control. Both are distributing content to raise demand for their products. And both have a strong brand to extend – and to lose.

With the acquisition of BusinessWeek, Bloomberg’s strategic trajectory is clear: Owning a proprietary technology platform (it sold 300,000 terminals to date), the company is looking for ways to reach more potential buyers (and sell premium services). Apple’s “terminals,” on the other hand, are its iTunes store and its user interfaces, and the recent patent application indicates that the company might explore the exploitation of attention generated through these properties. Bloomberg is buying attention to open up new sources of revenue, Apple might be selling it.

The two brands have one last trait in common: They are not really embracing social media, to put it mildly. Apple, as a company, does not engage, and Bloomberg even discourages its employees to engage. Apple and Bloomberg, in some ways, are the antidotes to a marketplace that – propelled by the forces of the Social Web – is becoming increasingly atomized, hyper-distributed, open, and transparent. Secrecy, compliance, top-down hierarchies, rigid communication policies, and walled gardens are characteristics that may be somewhat outdated in this era, and yet they seem to be the very cornerstones of Apple’s and Bloomberg’s success as the two firms thrive as the surprise champions of their respective categories. Both came to save ailing industries, ripe for innovation: Apple reinvented the music industry and the Smart Phone market. Bloomberg is determined to reinvent the news business. But in the long term, can Apple sustain its community of loyal users without becoming a more transparent organization? And can Bloomberg really emerge as “the world’s most influential news organization” without going social?

(Credit: Victors & Spoils)

It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."

V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives." The press release promises that "perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd" but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.

In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble "Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let's Change An Industry") is "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.

Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results, who knows? It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.

Forrester is about to release a new report on “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” in which it proposes replacing “brand managers” with “brand advocates.” Advertising Age provides a sneak peek at the ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, and participation. Other core elements include: “embracing an expanded role for consumer intelligence, focusing on strategic brand platforms, and empowering a federated organization."

A fervent advocate of marketing as a cross-organizational catalyst for change myself, I wholeheartedly agree with BBH Labs which believes the Forrester report points to a potentially larger opportunity for the discipline: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

This view is really becoming a groundswell, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano from the Dachis Group (“Social Business Design”), Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

Further reading:

HSM Interview with Amazon’s former Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend on the four P’s of marketing

Ogilvy and Acision white paper on advertising in 2020

Jones and Bonevac: "Should We Be In the Advertising Industry?"

Dave Evans: "Social Business: the New Black" 

John Ellett: "Marketing has changed"

George Potts: "Political Campaigns: The New Paradigm for Marketing Organizations in the Social Media Age"

Rob Rose: "Stop Being a ‘Data Driven’ Marketer"

(Credit: Modernism Gallery)

The overlap with the title of this blog, Matter/Antimatter, is completely coincidental, but since most meaningful events are coincidental, it makes perfect sense that it prompted San Francisco-based conceptual artist Jonathon Keats to send me a note pointing to his upcoming exhibition "The First Bank of Antimatter."

Keats' previous artistic enterprises include applying string theory to real estate development, and in the wake of global economic collapse, Keats is now introducing a hedge against future catastrophe by creating a mirror economy designed to skyrocket as world markets plummet: the first holistic response to the great recession.

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth," explains Keats. "My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

Backed by private Swiss funding, his scheme will be implemented beginning on November 12, 2009, when the First Bank of Antimatter opens in San Francisco's Monadnock Building, the location of Modernism Gallery. The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. "But our first order of business will be printing money," says Keats. "Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception."

Issued in three convenient denominations, ranging from 10,000 positrons to 1,000,000 positrons, and initially trading at an exchange rate of $10 to $1,000, the anti-money will be backed by antimatter stored in the bank's vault. Because matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, antimatter positrons will be continuously produced on location by decay of the radioactive isotope potassium-40.

"We want our customers to be confident that the antimatter is available on demand, but we're advising clients to conduct transactions strictly in paper currency," says Keats, who has used his artistry to design the money in multiple colors including red, blue and green. "The paper is cotton rag, archival enough to survive economic Armageddon" he promises. "It's an essential asset in any balanced portfolio. Antimatter is a natural haven for wealth when everything becomes worthless."

Like advertising guru Rory Sutherland said at TEDGlobal: "Most of our problems are problems of perception." And: "We need more intangible value." I always knew we could rely on artists (and advertisers!) to (re)-build an anti-economy of meaning, and I am thrilled to see this vision finally materialize.

Gary Hayes little flash application shows how active the social web is. Hayes built the application based on data he pulled from a range of social media sources, which he compiled at the end of September 2009.  You can download his Social Media Count here.