But B2C marketing is primarily focused on so-called lead generation and customer acquisition. After all, the best way to get critical mass for your app or web service is to spend most of your marketing investment attracting eyeballs so that the ad server CPM model will work to your advantage. That’s a relatively static paradigm that’s been in effect for quite some time in B2C that promises to stick around for the foreseeable future.

B2B marketing, however, at least in the high end enterprise datacenter world that I’ve lived in for the past several years, is less about lead generation and capturing volumes of qualified names, as it’s not that difficult to identify the right customer segment profile, say, for network switches or routers. Vendors like Juniper and Cisco know exactly who those people are – but their challenge now is way more dynamic, as it's one more predicated on how to tailor the right conversation with compelling, exclusive content, even better if the selection and lifecycle of topics can be automated with a robust customer listening platform . . . strategic, differentiated content that’s relevant to very rapidly shifting market conditions, primarily driven by faster moving start-ups, emboldened by open source technology, with the will and daring to bet their company on the pursuit of bold innovation.

And what happens if you are the Cisco of your industry, a networking vendor that enjoys a dominant market share (today) of high end enterprise IT infrastructure, but rather than facing merely a positioning and messaging challenge to a captive audience of essentially the same products and services you have already been selling, you’re up against a tsunami-style computing trend that threatens to wash away your massive legacy installed base, incumbent advantage?

That’s exactly what happened in the last year and a half, when the competitive landscape shifted under Cisco’s feet, away from an expensive (hardware) device-centric purchasing and deployment model to one that cares less about the underlying physical infrastructure and more so about the ability to dynamically provision network capacity for virtualized applications. The SDN (software-defined networking) movement, predicated in large part on an open standard called OpenFlow, not only threatens to commoditize Cisco and other brand-conscious networking device-centric vendors, but to a certain degree, also represents a threat to VMWare as the primary platform for virtualizing IT infrastructure (see Nicera acquisition).

And thus the race is on in the strategic marketing domain within the networking industry to see who can create the best ‘marchitecture’ positioning to capitalize on the SDN computing trend. What are some other examples of how B2B marketing is being challenged to reinvent value proposition storylines?

Network Security: Up until very recently, and fairly consistently for the last several years, the prevailing orthodoxy was that antivirus and antimalware software were required to fully protect all clients or devices in the enterprise from malicious attacks. However, many CIOs woke up to the fact that the license fees they’re paying for subscriptions and maintenance are not only exorbitant but show little evidence of actually working – the so-called malicious threat environment is as bad as it’s ever been, and multi-threaded client-device screening for malware attacks, while impeding your employees’ productivity, that may or may not disrupt the continuity of your enterprise is, perhaps, a dubious business benefit. One very prominent large enterprise CIO recently sent out the first salvo, basically saying his company would turn off all such client-device screening and live with the consequences.

Another good example is what’s happening in storage; for years, the generally accepted protocols for provisioning network-attached storage in the enterprise – NFS, CIFS, iSCSI etc. – were considered sufficient to highlight compatible support for. However, again largely driven in the open source community and by Internet giants like Yahoo and Google, and the advent of Big Data everywhere, the Hadoop standard has very quickly become the requisite storage/computing trend to show relevancy for.

Finally, look at the movement to cloud computing – no serious business model can sustain competitive advantage without a portion of its IT infrastructure “outsourced” to the cloud, and yet, very few C-suite business leaders understand the broad implications of doing so from a security and management standpoint. For example, in order to expose a piece of corporate infrastructure and underlying data so that third parties’ applications (via APIs) can interoperate in the cloud (and across mobile platforms, too), the enterprise must create a tightly controlled, secured, managed and compliant API.

Let’s take a look at how the grocery shopping experience has significantly changed for Mary, a mom of three, starting with the planning stages of her shop.

Circulars

Then: At one point in time, browsing the sales circular for all of her favorite stores meant digging through piles of paper and taking note of any interesting deals and specials. Once that daunting task was complete, it was time to figure out what to do with the stack of potential savings. Should she find recipes based off of these sales items, choose recipes first and hope some of the ingredients overlapped with the sales, or just wing it, going to the store with no particular plan? As a result of this timely and downright frustrating practice, most of the circulars that she received ended up in the recycle bin.

Now: While consumers like Mary once had to be highly motivated to find deals, the deals now find her. Deals can automatically be matched to her grocery list, or she can browse the recipes that use the most on-sale items. Smart phones have also given her the ability to browse digital circulars from all of her stores straight from her smartphone. Adding sale items of interest to her grocery list or searching for recipes that include those sales is made possible with the quick tap of a button. This simplified, integrated mobile process has given sales circulars new life, finally delivering on its intended value. And with this new mobile medium comes new opportunity – opportunity for brand advertisers to get their messages out in the context of helping the shopper accomplish her goals, versus just alongside what she's doing. This also gives brands and retailers access to a mobile audience that is difficult to reach with other forms of digital advertising. And it doesn’t stop with circulars; brands can highlight promotions, discounts and other product messages directly to the consumer.

Safeway has done just that with its mobile loyalty program, Just for U, which tailors digital coupons to shoppers based on individual purchase history and buying patterns. As they continue to see success in their digital program, they move closer to discontinuing print ads completely. Besides Food on the Table, companies like Grocery Server, MyWebGrocer, ZipList and Pushpins are also using aggregated circular data to help consumers, retailers and brands take advantage of this digital change.

The grocery list

Then: When Mary used to make her grocery list, she used a number of formats – the back of a receipt, a piece of scrap paper, a notepad on the kitchen counter or a list spread across all three. She would try and add to that list throughout the week, but would regularly think of needed items when that list wasn’t around. More often than not, she would end up at the store with a list that was either: a) unorganized and missing several items that were eventually forgotten – until she found herself back at home and in need of said forgotten item, or b) at the store with no list at all, racking her brain for all the things she needed. Once at the store, she would make her way up and down the aisles only to realize she missed something at the front of the store – having to loop back to the beginning at least once during her trip. All of this to say, keeping up with a grocery list was less of a time saver and more of a hassle.

Now: Mary’s grocery list travels with her. If she’s sitting at work and suddenly remembers that she’s on snack duty for the soccer game this weekend, updating her list takes only seconds. With the ability to sync her list across multiple devices, she can start building that list on her tablet, and pick up where she left off on her smartphone. It also makes it possible for her to share her list with her family members, so that when they make a store run, they can check a few things off, too. When she’s browsing recipes on her phone and sees one she likes, she lets technology do the work for her by populating her list with the recipe ingredients. And when she makes an unexpected run to the store, she never finds herself without it. Once at the store, the ability to re-order her list based on the layout of that particular store makes her trip faster and more organized.

Now that we’ve seen what the planning stages of Mary’s shopping experience look like, let’s move to her actual shop.

The store run

Then: A quick grocery trip can quickly turn into a stressful chain of events. Because most grocery runs take place during peak hours, experiencing a relaxing stroll through the store to pick up a few necessities is highly unlikely. Between the crowded parking lot, busy aisles, out-of-stock products and long lines at the cash register, more often than not, Mary leaves the store with more stress and annoyances than actual food.

Now: On the days Mary is too busy to make it to the store, the store can come to her. Today's grocery delivery services aren't the Webvan of the dot com days past. Companies like Walmart, Amazon and Google are combining technology and logistics to provide grocery delivery services to their consumers in big ways. New companies are also being created for the sole purpose of digitizing the grocery shopping experience. Retail Relay Inc., one of the many e-commerce grocery startups that have emerged in the past year, matches local farmers, artisanal bakers and major grocers with the community to provide one-stop pick ups and deliveries to consumers’ doorsteps. Grocery delivery is not only greener and more convenient to consumers; it creates a more efficient marketplace.

Technology has made its way to the grocery store, and its arrival is responsible for bringing convenience to the masses. These technologies make it possible to engage the consumer when they first show intent. When Mary is in the planning process and at the store, retailers and brands can reach her at the most relevant point. Booz & Co recently reported that 52 percent of U.S. consumers use technology in their grocery shopping experience, and 31 percent use their mobile phones while at the store. Why assault the consumer with thousands of shopper marketing pieces, most of which are irrelevant, when it is possible to deliver the exact piece of information they need in their hands at the most relevant step in their path to purchase? Simply put, technology is impacting the grocery industry in substantial ways, and the brands and retailers that move to adapt will benefit with higher sales and increased loyalty.

Data is driving decision-making in more businesses and sectors, and in ways that would have been surprising just a couple of years ago.

As in: Oh my god, when you really get down and think about it (and read this article), Netflix’s development of the new buzzed-about show House of Cards was totally driven by data and insights they obtain from mining the habits of their subscribers. In fact, their entire business is only possible through the hyper-intelligent use of data.

And, that’s nothing, it’s just entertainment. Take a look at how that most basic of human drives — the desire to find a mate — is being shaped and recast, made efficient and effective through data wizardry. If, as the online dating companies claim, “20% of us meet our future spouse online,” then eHarmony, Match.com, et al are mining a lot of data with massive impact on the lives of many.

Data is critical to winning in the future of marketing.

As digital ad spending outstrips print and is poised to be the big dog in marketing, data grows right along with it. Down the road, nearly all forms of marketing will be digitized in some way— addressable and targetable. What this means is an even deeper trough of data for marketers, brands, agencies and media companies to mine for insights.

In short, all marketing relies on data but in the big game, the winners will be the ones who can sift through the biggest pile of sand and extract the gold nuggets. We’re seeing more marketers look for solutions to get a handle on the vast trove of data available to them and leverage it for smarter business decisions.

Facebook has a billion consumers on its platform, China has hundreds of millions of folks on mobile phones. All of these people, preferences and actions create data points that are of potential interest to marketers. How do we all benefit from our data being used? Why do we care? In the great value exchange, people will get better targeted messages from brands, some offers and savings, and maybe some interesting (ad-supported) content.

More facets of our lives are being impacted by data — mostly for good — and the onus is on each of us to understand what that really means.

Like the saying goes, “knowing is half the battle.” It’s an established fact that our data is being known, used and monetized by enterprises and entities far and wide. We all have a horse in this data-stakes, a few examples of which are:

• Politicians and government are using data in the democratic process, as in the data-driven Obama election victory in 2012.
• Insurance companies are using tons of data to model and predict who will get sick and cost them more money; or who should get lower car insurance rates.
• The growing use of wearable devices such as the Fitbit. They read our physical status and imagine what we (or others) will do with the data they throw off.

While there are many critical reasons to reform education and job training in this country, here’s one thing we definitely need to do: start preparing a generation of data scientists, analysts and engineers who know how to work with and leverage data to build our tomorrow. I know for sure that our future depends on it. We’re all data now.

There are more connected devices than there are people, roughly two per person in the world. And the number of devices is only going to increase as our homes, and the gadgets and appliances in them, become even more connected. A big theme amidst the tech mayhem at CES this year, the Connected Home is turning into a real-life domestic internet.

What exactly could your home look like by 2020?

Clean the house
Robotic vacuums weren’t enough, now our vacuums are cleaning and connected. Taking cleaning to the next level, the next phase of robotic vacuums are streaming live HD video and can be controlled remotely via our smartphones. Washing machines will be able to provide targeted ads and relevant coupons when your detergent is running low.

Heat the house
Our thermostat will optimize based upon our habits for maximum energy efficiency and comfort. Are you going to be home early or maybe you have to head out of town for a last minute business trip? There’s an app for that.

Get into the house
Unlocking our doors can be done with our devices as well. In fact, you can be notified when someone knocks at our door, and even unlock your door remotely. No more surprise guests!

Get in the mood
Imagine controlling the lighting when you walk in the door. Your fingertips may get lazy - you won’t have to flip any switches when you’re coming home from a night out with a special friend and want to set the mood.

Get in the food
Refrigerators aren’t just for keeping the orange juice and veggies cool anymore. The fridge as we know it is being reengineered with connectivity to simplify your life. For example, manage your grocery list in Evernote on the fridge via touchscreen, and another app will supply you with recipes, and of course, a rotating landscape of your kids’ postmodern fingerpainting.

The super intelligent home
Your home could know more about your life than you do. What if your home was your central command center for your life? It knows your schedule, knows who’s expected to walk through the door – and who is not – what you are wearing, when you need to do the laundry and if there’s enough food in the fridge for dinner tonight.

This deeper level of personalization will start hitting the mainstream in the next five years, and over the next decade will see mass adoption as folks begin upgrading their appliances. Last year we saw TVs that recognize who is in the room, and now we are creating home automation for individuals.

Connected home, happy couple
In my house, I like lots of light and the thermostat on 70, but my wife on the other hand likes rooms to be dimly lit and warmer temperatures. With the connected home of the future, we could each get what we want. Except when we are both in the house, then of course her settings override my preferences. It’s nice when technology incorporates what I've learned through nearly a decade of marriage.

This all comes down to efficiencies – both personal and energy. You save time and energy. With these new connected (and interconnected) devices and appliances the opportunity for marketers to connect with consumers to truly deliver smarter messages and provide value on these new screens will be huge.

So in a world of creating names and acronyms, the question begs – what would this home of the future marketing opportunity be called? Digital-in-the-home (DITH)?

Regardless of what we call it, the success of the connected home will rest with device manufacturers making sure these “smart” devices don’t make consumers feel dumb.

Ryan Manchee is DG MediaMind's resident technology visionary and creative strategist for North and Latin America, providing agencies, marketers and technology partners with a prescient and strategic perspective on the shifting media landscape.

Follow Ryan on Twitter at @rmanchee

The Phone That Never Dies: Fully Charged with Qi
Until we can get through several days of a show like CES without charging up, we’ll constantly be looking for a better method for charging. Enter Qi (pronounced chee). This is a newish wireless charging standard that Nokia and HTC have included in recent mobile phone releases.

Imagine your phone charging magically by just placing it on your coffee table or even in your car’s cupholder. No more wires. No more cords, adapters, or charging stations. TDK is rolling out a Bluetooth boombox that even has a Qi plate so you can charge devices while jamming out. Since Apple may not ever enter the Qi party, aftermarket manufacturers have embraced the technology, and I was able to test a few cases that brought Qi charging to my iPhone 4s. It was simple and easy, plus it gave me a few more percentages to breathe life to my nearly dead device.

And while it didn’t use Qi, it is worth noting Qualcomm’s wireless charging mat showcased with an electric Rolls Royce. Cars are a mobile device, right? Imagine pulling into your garage and it charges up automatically. Again no plugs, connectors, or popping the power hatch – vehicle wireless charging…at least for the .01% (for now).

3D Printing: Print a Pizza for Dinner?
Printing isn’t just for boring documents anymore. There’s a huge growth of companies rolling out 3D printers – around every turn I was greeted by a freshly printed robot, deer head, life size human skull, or even an electric guitar. From talking with many of these groups it will be nice to see some of the experimentation beyond plastics and into metals, and even edibles!

This year and years to come, I expect we will see 3D printing expand beyond the "makers" and hobbyists and into the mainstream. I foresee a future not too far off where my son can buy a new Lego set online and print it out at home. Or maybe it’s my sister printing out a pizza for dinner.

We had a flip from brick and mortar stores to online shopping, and very soon we’ll enter a new phase where we can design, build and buy just about everything online and immediately have the object in our hands. Going into a store, next day delivery, or even delivery in 30 minutes or less will be a thing of the past.

Vapor Touchscreens and Smartphones Dipped in a Drink?
You’ve heard of a smoke screen, you’ve heard of touchscreens, but what about a touchscreen made of vapor? Kudos to DisplayAir for one of the coolest pieces of technology at the show. What I liked about the vapor touchscreen more than a pure gesture or camera-based approach (which were oddly missing from CES as far as I could tell) was the fact that even though you weren’t touching anything, you felt something as your fingers glided through the mist. And because it was projected on a fluid “screen” it felt 3D-like.

I’m not sure everyone will have one of these in their homes, but this type of novel approach does open some possibilities for how a user can interact with an interface. Plus it ties in nicely to all this working in the cloud talk.

Going from air to water is something of a lifesaver, or rather a device saver. HZ0 has come up with a way to block water and moisture in electronics. By nano-coating devices, they are impermeable to water – whether it is in the air, a splash, or even completely submerged. I witnessed iPhones and Androids dunked into water (and beer!) that kept showing video or playing audio while underwater. Luckily, my smartphone has always stayed dry, but I have plenty of friends whose phones have gone swimming in pools or toilets. It’s great to see a solution that doesn’t involve putting your device in a waterproof bag.

Multi-view TVs: TV for Two
The absolute highlight of the show was the multi-view 3D TVs. Imagine sitting on the sofa next to your significant other, and instead of one of you having to suffer through the other’s favorite show – you are each watching a completely different program. Same TV, two different shows. If that sounds awesome, it’s because it is.

Or what about playing a game? Why settle on a split-screen for each person, when each player can view their own player on the screen?

Now take this beyond just content and look at ads, or even product placement. Think about today’s online ad management systems with dynamic creative optimization. Let’s take this a step further into the future by including user profiles integrated in the 3D glasses, the 2nd screen device of the user, visual recognition, or even a combination. Hyper-targeted TV advertising. Yes, this may mean I may never see another feminine hygiene ad and my vegan wife may never have to see another meat product advertised.

Coupled with the new 4K/Ultra HD quality TVs, you’ve got realer than real life video that not only has the high quality but also the sweet spot of hyper relevancy to each consumer.

Let’s hope that all that was shown in Vegas doesn’t just stay in Vegas, and we start to see these new products and technologies available sooner rather than later.

I can’t wait to print out my sausage and mushroom pizza for dinner.

Ryan Manchee is DG MediaMind's resident technology visionary and creative strategist for North and Latin America, providing agencies, marketers and technology partners with a prescient and strategic perspective on the shifting media landscape.

Follow Ryan on Twitter at @rmanchee

And personal finance is something that could use a little attention in the US. Many Americans are currently mired in debt and some 16% have no idea at all of what their spending habits are.  What is of more concern is interest in personal finance, it seems, tends to deteriorate as people age and finances become more complicated. Only 10% of baby boomers are truly engaged with their finances.

The Rise of Mobile Apps for Personal Finance

In many ways, the ways in which users are now able to revolutionize their finances are endless. Thousands of different applications currently exist. For example, the most popular personal finance app, Mint, helps their 9 million users who want to keep track of their spending, like Jennifer Hudson, make a budget and track their spending by category, which makes it much easier for users to see when they are overspending. Mint also informs users of their purchases over time by using historical data and, because of this, users are able to stay focused on their goals. Users will be able to see every time they splurged on a purchase and every time they choose to save. This helps keep the “cheat” purchases in perspective.

Many users say that what makes the program successful is the fact that it is based in the cloud, so they can access it from many different devices. Users are able to get real time balances on their phones, so purchases aren’t piling up without their knowledge.

In addition to budgeting, there are mobile apps that help consumers make smart decisions when complicated math is involved, like buying a home or a car. Two of the most popular are Mortgage Calculator for Android and CalcsFree Mortgage Calculator for iPhone both help users get quick calculations of the real cost of their purchase, an activity that helps consumers avoid purchases that are beyond their means and helps identify predatory salesmen.

One unexpected result of the rise of personal finance apps was they helped curb the tendency for Americans to eat in restaurants. There has been a downward trend in American restaurant spending since the year 2008. In 2010 Americans spent $2,505 less than they did in 2009 in restaurants.

Note, Not a Lifestyle Revolution

However, mobile applications are not the silver bullet in the battle against credit card debt and the poor state of personal finances in America. Personal finance apps cannot make you use them – many of those who download these apps only use them for a short while and because of this, the applications do not make any long-term improvements to their finances

Apps can also be harder for older users. Currently twice as many in Generation Y use apps compared to baby boomers even though baby boomers have far more complicated finances. Min users, for example, generally do not have a home mortgage. This leads market analysts to believe that most Mint.com users are not baby boomers as 76% of baby boomers own their own homes

Mobile applications also do not give counsel on how best to use money or which investments to make, although they can deliver share prices to user. And, the biggest complaint of all, mobile applications don’t foster good decision-making. Apps can only show users the money they’re spending; they cannot prevent users from spending it.

Recommendations for Personal Finance Apps

·    Creating a Budget:  Mint.com
Considered the best aggregator app, Mint can be used on either iPhone or Android and provides consumers account balances in real time and helps users divide up their expenses by category to help them better understand their spending

·    Getting the Best Price: ShopSavvy
Used on either iPhone or Android, this money saving app turns user’s phone into a camera that searches the Internet to see if there is a better price available

·    Finding a Deal on Everyday Purchases: Shooger
Also available for both Android and iPhone, Shooger has a database of over 80,000 coupons and a multivariable search system that allows easily navigate the database. This app also allows users to set up alerts that alert them when favorite stores get release new coupons.

Most of the inventions in book were creation of Christopher Hutton, an employee at MI9 government agency. The other gadgets listed in the book were cigar boxes with in built radio and silk maps. These manuals were printed and distributed to US intelligence officers as they were far behind British intelligence in espionage design.

London printing company’s dummy version guide with 76 pages is now on auction for its buyers.

A rare book of World War II has been discovered recently that documents the smart equipment by British intelligence system to let war prisoners get out of them.

This 1942 classified document lists out the secret intelligence designs for the James Bond style equipment that includes coat buttons and gold teeth that hide  tiny compasses inside them.

Most of these were brainchild of Hutton, who worked on the M19 government agency. Some of these instruction documents (less than 100) were distributed among US intelligence to let them reach the heights of British intelligence in espionage design. The dummy 76 page book retained by a London printing company explains what the gadgets were and how they were built and hidden in normal domestic equipment.

These gadgets were sometimes placed in food parcels and mailed to British PoWs in camps like Colditz. Some interesting gadgets include silk maps of Germany so they can be folded and hidden inside pencils, cigars, pipes or vinyl records. Another smart idea was the hidden maps under the 54 playing cards that form a large map of Germany and Europe when pieced together. Dartboards hide small hacksaws while a cigarette lighter carries a tiny camera inside it and cigar boxes were equipped with small radio.

The rare book ‘Per Ardua Libertas’ meaning liberty through adversity has been discovered but this was a dummy version owned by the London printing company. Devon inherited this book from one of the company executives has now set it to auction for sale.

The playing cards page in the book explains that each pack has one map with 48 cards making the whole map. The Europe map is on 4 Aces of the pack and the joker forms the key. The instructions are on the outside card.

The instructions on the gold tooth reads that the gold tooth fitting made to measure inserts a small compass on left side jaws and map slides or message inserted in thin gold tube are placed at the bottom on the two prongs. These are hidden between the gum and cheek.

These days, even CCTV security systems are built in small models to accommodate them in tiny domestic items. Such cameras are being used by journalists in countries like India to catch criminals’ red-handedly.

Auction specialist, Lionel Willis, Bonhams said it was really a rare fantastic book. He added that the M19 department started in 1939 was to help prisoners to escape. So the two key elements to escape in a foreign country were a compass and a map. They build maps on small silk pieces to roll and hide in small domestic items such as pencils and lighters.

Every sixth parcel of the rations packs and food parcels sent to prisoners contained these hidden gadgets that helped them to escape from the prison.

These smart gadgets are credited with helping 316 people to escape from their prison. The book is being sold by Bonhams next January with a pre-sale estimate of £800.

But loosening up now and then could pay off. Especially in marketing and communications, this can help you hire and retain talent, keep new ideas flowing, and stay ahead of the curve (instead of stuck in a rut). Whether you’re a start-up or not, there is real data behind adding a little “start-up culture” to your office.

3 Big Reasons to Do It
If the argument, “wouldn’t you be happier working at a place like this?” isn’t enough to convince you, here are three big reasons marketers should embrace creative work environments.

• Engaged employees = more productive employees. Gallup research shows significant differences between organizations that engage employees and those who don’t. Top-performing organizations make employee-engagement a foundation for how they operate, and have employees who are more productive, more profitable and more customer-focused than their counterparts.
• Your employees will be engaged, enabled and energized. The co-authors of the best-selling “The Carrot Principle” and “The Orange Revolution” analyzed a 300,000-person workforce during the recession and found that top-performing companies have cultures that encourage open-mindedness, transparency and positive accountability, which leads to their employees being more engaged, enabled and energized.
• Open company culture = empowered employees + fresh ideas. DPR Construction in California is known for its open culture and every employee – from top to bottom – can attend quarterly meetings. As a result, employees feel empowered and listened to, and aren’t afraid to bring new ideas to the table.

How You Can Make a Difference
Not everyone can afford to run a daily lunch buffet and do every employees dry-cleaning like big-tech-companies-who-shall-not-be-named. But ultimately it comes down to how you’re making a difference in your employees and co-workers’ lives, not how much.

A great example is online clothing retailer ModCloth. Its brand portrays a fun and stylish culture, and they want employees who embody that. The company’s leadership keeps their employees actively involved in the brand with regular perks like themed apparel days, a dog-friendly office and an employee discount program. They also reinforce their image on social media with by sharing pictures of employee-style and dogs around the office.

ZocDoc is another company that understands how important it is to prioritize office culture. They stay frugal where they can, like buying their office furniture second-hand, and instead spend where it will make a difference – ZocDoc caters lunch every day, so that employees interact on a daily basis.

Not Sure How to Get Started?
Here are a few ways your business can add a little creative buzz.

• Make the irregular regular: put someone in charge of it or make it a rule. TerraCycle has a C.N.O. – chief NERF gun officer – who issues NERF guns and ammo to all new employees, so they can join the periodic battles that let everyone blow off some steam. Warby Parker has an official “fun committee” to plan events, so that office fun doesn’t fall to the bottom of everyone’s to-do list. Etsy gives every new employee a $100 credit, so they can decorate their workspace. This gives everyone some creative freedom and adds atmosphere to the whole office.
• Consider what benefit is most relevant for your office. For some offices, day care facilities may not be relevant, but for others, that could make a big impact on employees’ daily lives. The Container Store has a “family friendly shift” from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., so that parents can drop off and pick up their kids from school. Zynga recognizes that desk jobs aren’t known for keeping you healthy, so many of their office perks relate to healthy eating and free exercising options at the office.
• Change up your space. MailChimp embraces a fun atmosphere in a number of ways, but they know meetings are still necessary. They suggest minimizing the number of big, top-down meetings you have to hold in conference rooms, and instead try to get things done during hallway conversations or just in different, less-structured spaces.
• Give everyone some creative time. Your best ideas don’t always come at a desk or when you’re staring down a problem on your computer screen. And neither do your employees’ ideas. Companies like Google and TurboTax give their employees a few hours of “unstructured time” each week. In addition to providing a much-needed mental break, it allows people to build out ideas they wouldn’t otherwise have had time for.
• Ask. When all else fails – ask. The whole idea behind keeping an open and engaging workplace is that your employees and co-workers will be able to share their ideas and be a more productive part of your company. Ask them what would make a difference at your office. From painting graffiti on the conference room walls to a weekly root beer float party, give your office a little culture of its own.

If you’re considering a technology channel partnership, here are the top three tips for a successful channel relationship:

• Confidentiality – Ensure your channel partners that the terms of your agreement and their usage of the technology will remain confidential. While there are some companies that are comfortable disclosing their channel arrangements, many prefer the security and privacy that is associated with white-labeled relationships.

• Support – Although channel partnerships are most successful when the technology easily complements a company’s product suite, reselling a technology, may not come as easy to the reseller’s sales team.  Therefore, it’s important to equip your channel partner with the sales tools necessary (e.g. collateral, training) to make selling a breeze. Your partner company is already busy enough staying current with their own products/services, so provide them with clear and concise positioning to help them simply integrate your technology.  Additionally, it’s also helpful to provide some kind of reporting functionality to sales teams in order track technology usage and other customer behaviors. These metrics will serve as great feedback for sales to better target customers.

• Benefits – In conjunction with providing succinct training, you need to clearly show your channel partner how your products/services benefit their organization. Show your channel partners that they can save on product development costs and hiring additional staff while adding a new technology or increased functionality to their product portfolio. In addition, be sure to articulate that the channel partnership will help deliver the product/service to market much faster than if the company developed the technology from scratch. All of these cost savings will help increase revenue. What partner wouldn’t want to hear that?

Developing channel relationships can be an effective way to increase business and generate revenue. However, these partnerships require a clear, mapped out strategy to outline the benefits of the relationship and determine how tasks, information and money are distributed between the two organizations in order to be most effective.

Too many partner relationships die on the vine because the new products are treated as an additional menu item. It is important to truly integrate the new item(s) with the existing suite to drive sales and customer retention. Both sides of the relationship must view each other as a true partner and continue an ongoing relationship that drives revenue for both sides.

Yesterday I bit the Apple. I did what I was warned never to do. I put all my technology down and walked away. For twelve hours.

I'm blessed to commute by ferry. Having left my iPhone, iPad, and laptop locked away in my office (as much from me as from any would-be thieves) I set out on foot for the fifteen-minute walk from my office to the boat.

I played with the now impotent headphones in my pocket nervously. The first thing I noticed was the birds. Spring had sprung and they played call and response even amongst the office buildings and industrial landscape.

The next thing was the sirens. Goddamn but there are a lot of sirens in the city. Who knew? I wondered which were Police versus Fire or Ambulances. I feel sure I used to know. Was it my imagination or were some more urgent than others? Maybe just nearer?

I soon passed the Children's Museum (lots of chortles and squeeeels) and arrived at the boat.

That's when it hit me.

I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge tripping back through time or Patrick Swayze in "Ghost." That's a bad feeling. On so many levels.

Virtually everyone was heads down. They took no notice. Most wore headphones. Some scrunched over mobile phones (still lots of Blackberries!). Technology is not improving our posture, I can tell you. Many tapped away on iPads or read Kindles. A few Type-A's banged away on laptops but they were high-achiever showoffs.

I could have been butt naked and on fire and nobody would have been the wiser. Every person was locked away in his or her own little Private Idaho, alone and oblivious to everyone and everything surrounding them.

Even the boat's bar had been compromised. A crowd of mostly financial types stood around in club ties, vodka sodas in one hand and phones in the other. Every thirty-seconds or so-- regardless of whether or not they were mid-sentence-- they not-so-furtively glanced and scrolled.

Certainly ten years ago this would have been social ineptitude of the highest order. Now nobody batted an eye.

Hmm.

I got off the boat a half hour later. A light drizzle was falling. I wondered if my daughter's soccer practice had been interrupted and dismissed early. Did my wife pick her up? Did a teammate's family drive her home? Was she standing there under a tree, mop of soaked red hair pasted to her forehead waiting, waiting, waiting for her Dad to arrive?

How would I know without my fu*&ing phone!?

I put on the radio to distract myself. I normally stream from my phone via Bluetooth. I don't even have the pre-sets programmed in the car. Oh my God. What an audio wasteland of cheese and snake oil. My ears wept. I found NPR and thanked my Maker.

I screeched into the parking lot like Burt Reynolds in "Smokey and the Bandit." Practice was still in session. No calls had been made to Social Services. Whew.

I got home. Had dinner. Was noticeably distracted by the lack of distractions. This must be what it's like to wake from a coma after many years. I finally found focus and learned many things I didn't know about my kids' school, our dog's incorrigible prey drive, and the neighbors. Bucolic my ass!

After dinner and dishes we checked homework. It's hard to be a role model where complex fractions are concerned. Can't we just check Khan Academy and...

Doh!

After the kids went to bed my wife and I talked. Not skyped. Talked. While hard at first, this was prime iPad hour after all, I nevertheless got the hang of it after some time. New Analog Me and my wife talked about plans for the summer, projects we'd like to do around the house, how Mormons could possibly be Christian... You know. The usual.

We had a glass of wine or three and went to bed. I felt tired but very much awake.

I woke up once during the night thinking I'd heard the phone vibrating on the bedside table, but fell back to sleep with surprising ease.

Then morning came. Like the picture of God reaching for Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (and missing it by 'that much') I reached reflexively and futilely for a phone that was not there.

I showered, dressed, and had breakfast with the family. We talked about what we might do over the weekend in between their various activities. I prepped to leave at once not really wanting to but simultaneously feeling like things were very much in a good place at the same time.

I headed to the boat with a very "quiet mind" I think the Buddhists call it.

I hopped the ferry and in forty-five minutes was back in the office. I unlocked the desk drawer like Pandora (the myth, not the app-- wait, that's weird) and pulled out the iPhone first. No calls. Two texts. Both stupid.

I fired up the laptop. Emails were something different altogether. Hundreds of business emails and dozens in my Gmail since 6PM the night before.

With a mighty wave of my mouse I mass-deleted like a man (self) possessed. I ended up with a handful of "important" emails that certainly could have waited and did.

I was back in the saddle, but changed. The rest of the day I didn't check as much, didn't click so often. I began to sit apart from my 'stuff'.

I wrote a lot. I made phone calls. Get this-- I even thought about stuff deeply.

For me, technology had addled my mind to the point where I was becoming a mile wide and an inch deep. I made incremental progress on dozens of things but finished the final nail on precious few.

Putting it all down. Leaning back. Stepping back. It gave me a feeling of satisfaction and wholeness I hadn't had in some time.

Technology is awesome and getting better every day. There's just too goddamn much of it.

Left unchecked it had moved from a tool, to a crutch, to a vice. That's no good.

So my advice to you is try going cold turkey. Walk away. It will still be there when you get back. When you bite the apple you won't fall from grace. You'll be happier in the garden.

Instead of discussing well-worn topics, such as the value of contextual placements and contextual targeting, I’d like to touch briefly on another effect of content dynamics.  You see, the content of a website changes.  It changes all the time.

Dynamic content implies that the environment in which your ad displays is constantly shifting. In turn, that means that the level of distraction around your ad is constantly in flux. Does this detract from the delivery of your message? What about a poorly written article? What is the affect on your advertising of a highly engaging writer?  Does this lead the consumer to be more likely wooed by your message?

I am not touting the presence of unique technology to solve for this problem. I am speaking to the fact that algorithmic optimization, “silicon”-based optimization, so to speak, is a far-off notion. There are just too many variables. Once you think you have the answer, something in the environment changes, and all your calculations for content go awry.

Making a display campaign work in today’s environment is still a combination of art and science. You need to have the technology to hone in on your target audience and improve your ROI, while providing the visibility to apply art to the equation. The level of engagement of a consumer with the environment significantly affects the ability of an ad to garner their attention.

If technology can rapidly adjust your landscape and offer visibility, you can bring to bear the human mind to help determine how to jump to the next level without wasting a lot of money.

Optimization is art and science. Changing [dynamic] content and its impact on performance is just another example of the multitude of variables that must be considered to maximize ROI.

If there is one word to describe me, it’s obsessive. Give me a lemon; I will make lemonade, lemon cookies, and lemon cake! So when a friend told me about Pinterest, I immediately became consumed. The plethora of visual stimuli became a realization of all things I love. If you have not discovered the amusingness of Pinterest, I highly suggest you browse.

Pinterest is a social media community to share collections of things you love. It has become a mix of Twitter, Facebook, and blog sites with its ability to follow fellow Pinterest owners, its connect ability, and the capacity to share what you like with others. What makes Pinterest different than Facebook and Twitter is that it is all via visual dialogue. There aren’t any personal pictures of you and your friends, or a written update of what you did today, but rather organized pictures using a scrapbook approach.

For those crafty individuals, Pinterest is THE place. All of the DIY craft ideas and recipes options, just to name a few, makes sharing ideas easy. It is like creating one big scrapbook and having the ability to share your interests with others. Pinterest is a way of feeding off other’s ideas, which leads to becoming more creative. Pinterest does a great job with its capturing layout. It is overwhelming at first, but then it becomes visually stimulating, and that is when it becomes engaging and eventually addicting.

Advertisers and the media gain their consumers first and foremost through a visual connection. Pinterest has successfully immersed their visual consumers by having all pages organized through images. The ability to “repin” and “like” gives brands free traffic and free advertising via the Pinterest community. The everyday consumer likes things to be easy and accessible, that is what makes Pinterest so appealing.  The photo board aspect of this site gains visual attraction instead of having to read status updates or blog posts. Even when you pin a certain picture to your photo board, it will display who originally pinned it and what site it was pinned from, again, giving you free traffic and advertisement. What a perfect way to advertise than through pictures themselves. Who thought it would be that simple to obtain someone’s attention and become so thoroughly engaged?

I think Pinterest is the most creative social media development we have seen so far and I am sure that it is just the beginning of what’s to come. It is a great medium for creative individuals especially in this day and age of DIY projects and trying things on a budget. Pinterest creates a community of sharing easy and affordable ideas through a series of pictures.  Therefore, a lot of us crafty folks are intrigued by the infinite new ideas. It’s like having one website full of a million new ideas. One can learn from this conventional idea that everyone likes visual dialogue, and I don’t think I am far off for assuming that more consumers are visual learners.

I have officially given in and succumbed to the popularity of Pinterest. Therefore, my thoughts are bias, but if you are a fellow Pinterest lover, you have no choice but to agree.

So think about applying this to your mobile marketing strategy.   Is how you engage with end users aligned to their daily routines – what they do day in and day out, how they actually behave – or solely based on ‘who’ they are?    We’re all familiar with traditional segmentation.   But what’s more helpful – knowing that I’m categorized as a “suburban sports enthusiast” or knowing that I make the same drive, around the same time each day and am 73% more likely to respond to a SMS offer in the morning rather than in the afternoon?

One might argue that marketing to ‘segments’ isn’t much better than mass marketing.  So, what is the alternative?  The alternative is having a ‘dynamic understanding of the user’.   What is that you ask?   Bear with me and let’s break it down:

dy·nam·ic/dīˈnamik/ (of a process or system) Characterized by constant change, activity, or progress

+

un·der·stand·ing/ˌəndərˈstandiNG/ the power to make experience intelligible by applying concepts and categories

+

us·er/ˈyo͞ozər/ one who consumes or employs a good or service to obtain a benefit or to solve a problem

=

Delivering an experience aligned to an individual’s needs which is driven by continuous analysis and application of learnings over time.

Taking a snapshot of a user delivers little value for a mobile marketer.   Sure, someone standing on the street corner in NYC may be interested in an offer from the local Thai restaurant.   But they could also hate Thai food, be visiting from the west coast, and have zero time in their schedule to swing by for your Pad Thai lunch special.

With mobile, it’s about being able to determine patterns and habits – and just as important – aligning how you engage with the user to that understanding.    Easier said than done, right?

It’s not an easy task but the good news is – it’s not an impossible task either.   Mobile marketers are beginning to use technologies that not only aggregate the massive amounts of ‘big data’ that mobile brings in, but also continuously analyze the data to determine a user’s behavior (aka: habits) and time series (aka: best time to engage the user).   With ongoing analysis that takes into account changes, patterns, and actions taken, marketers gain insight into a user’s lifecycle – versus capturing a mere snapshot in time – and are able to base customer engagement off of the predicted action of an individual user.   For the mobile channel, this is the golden ticket.   We’re bombarded by email and snail mail but with something as personal as our mobile device – which is with us constantly I might add – none of us are as forgiving to irrelevant, impersonal communications.   By determining the dynamic understanding of a user, marketers can move beyond one-off, hit or miss mobile campaigns to delivering ongoing experiences that are valuable and relevant for the user.

Let’s go back to the user on the street corner in NYC.  By leveraging analytics we can go beyond the fact that it’s 11:23 am on Tuesday morning and determine that this user works in a business park three blocks away, is more likely to go out for lunch on Mondays and Fridays, and has a higher probability of opening a SMS offer with a dollar discount versus a percentage discount.

Yes, it’s possible.  It just requires a shift from traditional segmentation to newer techniques that incorporate an ongoing and dynamic understanding of a user’s needs and the best contexts to meet those needs.  For those who are doing it, the results speak for themselves – dramatic increases in conversions and revenues and reduced cost of revenue.

Whether you’re a mobile operator, brand, retailer, or other mobile marketer, leveraging the data (ALL of it) to engage with your users when it matters most can make or break your mobile marketing success.

So ask yourself – are you delivering experiences that are aligned to your individual users’ needs and habits?   Are you engaging individuals in ways that drive the behaviors you’re trying to influence e.g., accepting an offer, driving them to your retail location, building awareness of your brand?

If not, now’s the time to rethink your strategy.

Facebook is more than just a platform, it’s an experience – and it has changed the way we live our lives.

Marketers are looking to do the same – build connections with their consumers in a more personalized way. These marketers often look to agencies for advice on how to successfully engage and connect with their audiences on social networks like Facebook. What better way to show marketers how to leverage Facebook’s platform than by Facebook using itself as a marketing tool?

With the release of Timeline Movie Maker, Facebook as a brand is leading by example, showing marketers how to use Facebook as a platform to connect with people on an emotional level. Built in collaboration with Facebook and my agency, Definition 6, Timeline Movie Maker is designed with the user in mind, highlighting the most significant moments in his/her Facebook life into a one minute movie. By bringing their personal journey on Facebook to life through a customized cinematic experience, Timeline Movie Maker provides users with a preview of their Timeline, and how it tells their own story. This gives users a reason to update their profiles to Timeline early to make their own video and view their story.

This personalized video experience speaks exactly to the core of why Facebook users use this platform at all – to share their experiences. By highlighting a users’ most engaged content, it provides a snapshot into their story and creates mini movies that they can share with friends and family. Based off of Facebook’s introductory video, the Timeline Movie Maker is a strong example of how the combination of technology and marketing can produce stellar content that resonates with people.

Once a person has Timeline, the technology evaluates the person’s content they have shared, and then identifies the most engaging, relevant content and life moments to build a chronological story for their customized, shareable mini-movie. With one-click curation, a highlight reel of a user’s Facebook life is revealed seamlessly in a one minute video recap, creating a personal scrapbook of a person’s Facebook life.

Timeline Movie Maker is initially available in four languages including English, French, Spanish and German and will allow for five different music soundtracks from which people can choose to create their mini movie. People can also customize their music selection, images, videos or check-ins at the end of the first automated video view to truly see their personalized Facebook story unfold before their eyes after first viewing.

After creating my movie, I realized I need to wear shirts more often (in pictures)  and I've started a 40 day detox from drinking.  So what did your movie say about you?

Getting mobile payments to market will be a 4-way fight. The contenders will be banks and credit card co-ops (Visa & MasterCard), Online Merchants (Amazon, eBay and Google), Telecommunications carriers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and handset builders (Nokia, Motorola). Each segment brings a different perspective and different set of skills, competitive advantages and perceptual baggage to the game.

Mobile payments will be data-rich and complicated. Not only will players have to move transaction data around securely, they’ll have to instantly interact with multiple networks, process and bill payments and handle tricky customer service issues.

The contenders track record in each of these areas is a mixed bag. Most are counting on large installed customer bases to give them a going-in posture and to piggy-back marketing efforts and reduce marketing costs. Many have exclusive phone models, like Verizon’s Galaxy Nexus, where they can control access and how the payment functionality actually works and the partners in the processing chain. Nobody wants to miss out on the huge potential revenue pie and nobody wants to pay the other guy transmission, access, systems or processing fees.

Mobile payments will be a real dog fight since carriers, credit card issuers and online merchants have serious digital and CRM experience, big data bases and partners or affiliates in-place. The Banks will be the weak sister in this battle both because they are conservative marketers and because this is an extension or add-on service, that rarely gets the backing needed. But the scale of the potential market – everybody in the US buying virtually everything using a pocket-held device -- is too big a pot of gold to ignore.

Different technical approaches and framing compelling customer value propositions by creating reasons to believe or claims of superiority for one method will require considerable creativity.  The horse race will draw consistent press attention and buzz, since it’s hot, a natural extension of mobile service and something that is very useful for consumers. The branding and lead generation work will have to be extremely creative and will live at the nexus of social-digital-mobile.

The sleeping giant is Starbucks; not exactly one of the usual suspects. But Starbucks with 7000+ stores and concessions in Target, Barnes & Noble, airports and countless other locations has been doing mobile payments on smart phones for a year using a proprietary app.

Customers loaded $110 million onto their iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones in 2011 and completed 6 million mobile transactions at the point of sale. Starbucks has enjoyed a hockey stick growth curve in the acceptance and use of both pre-paid cards and its mobile app. They have processed more than 26 million individual payments.

Essentially Starbucks taught early adapters and average customers how to use mobile payments. They set fundamental expectations about ease-of-use, speed, utility and the overall mobile brand experience. Anyone promoting a mobile wallet will have to meet or beat Starbucks on these dimensions to get serious consumer traction.

If I were a retailer I’d want to ally with Starbucks and use their system to jump-start a mobile payments program. And while there are probably some technical and legal gating factors, who wouldn’t want the Starbucks crowd visiting your locations and swiftly completing mobile transactions?

Stay tuned. Let’s see how Howard Schultz plays his hand.

Well who needs more intoxication among the leadership?

Today's best-in-class online destinations are much different. They are far more experience-rich and data-loaded than the brochureware that carried the Internet through its adolescence. Mobile computing brings multiple interface geometries and uncertain connectivity to the party. Now add in the further disruption brought about by the lack of consistent performance and user experiences between apps, the mobile web, and what can now be called the "conventional" web.

Maybe the leadership is right to seek intoxication after all!

When planning for the development of a new online destination or feature that delivers a superior user experience, it seems like a good idea for digital marketers to approach any and all technology recommendations armed with three questions:

1. Can this project be done with the technology you propose?
2. If it can be done, is it something that should be done with the technology you propose?
3. Then, with two positives, we must ask how should we do it?

The answer is found in the nearly forgotten proof of concept.

In an age of interactivity when there is true manipulation of the interface as well as the contents and data, building a proof of concept (POC) is the most effective and efficient way to showcase the benefits – and demonstrate any trade-offs – of a leading-edge feature, function, or interface. POCs can take on many forms, and they need not be employed to solve only massively complex constructs. Often times simple ambitions can be vetted and plussed by a POC.

A POC helps make the project feel that much closer to being complete because all stakeholders can experience for themselves how it will work. And it's great to share with leadership as a way to solicit feedback - and set expectations - at a fairly early stage.

Are you into the waterfall approach? Or is agile more your style? Just keep these two tips in mind:

• For a waterfall approach it's best to adjust the staging of milestones to cover the main functional elements first.
• For agile projects POCs become their own sprints with a deliverable.

To properly track and account for one or several POCs the development stage of the project must be brought forward and started while wireframes are still in progress. Those hours that were reserved for development then start to be recognized earlier in the project than normal. While budgets need not necessarily be expanded to accommodate a POC, it's a good idea for the contract to be written such that the development stage is either entirely or partially included in the wireframe stage. It is also worth noting that the "normal" allocation of hours balanced between development, QA and user-acceptance testing will likely shift depending on the type of project in question.

All the really cool online destinations and applications are blissfully simple on the surface, but devilishly complex under the hood. Incorporating a POC into the project plan delivers benefits for all stakeholders and results in a better user experience. What a concept!

Numerous brands advertise nationally in all media formats, but every single one of them is intensely focused on attracting the highest amount of foot traffic to stores in local markets. While they all spend in local media, they may or may not need to flood those sectors with more dollars. But they should get smarter about making sure that spend is deployed for maximum effectiveness.

National campaigns are good for raising awareness and brand building but the real activation happens on the local level, and national ads should contain those ancillary media plans and buys. This concept is not news—marketers and media buyers have always explored ways to make the media spend work as hard as possible.

If a retailer has 15 locations in Missouri, it makes sense to have a larger marketing budget there than in Nevada where they may be only have three.

Yet it’s surprising just how much inefficiency still exists in local media buys even in this day and age.

As any media planner knows, the whole local marketing process can be tedious, and the ROI imprecise enough so that marketers sometimes take the most perfunctory approach to local-market spending or turn it over to a third party. A lot of manual labor is associated with localized media plans because they require meticulous oversight and hands-on management.

In the recent past, planners would have had to conduct a lot of research to buy locally at scale. An advertiser in suburban Chicago who is putting together a media buy for a specific group of ZIP codes in New York is usually hard pressed about how to start.

Technology is making local media buys more acceptable to more advertisers because finding out the local media options in any market is becoming less cumbersome. New tools now enable a plan for 15 local markets comprised of 75 different local news outlets with the media company getting just one bill and point-of-contact for that service instead of having to deal with 75 different people at multiple vendor companies that handle different parts of the process.

With hyperlocal targeting tools, one person can handle 15 or 50 markets.

National advertisers need to understand physically where their target audience is located. Geography is the foundation on which to build out your media plan across platforms, then proceed to add layers of information about gender, age, likes, dislikes, household income, and purchasing behavior. There are still some media planners who think, “If I run on Yahoo! I’ve got it covered.”

The fact is, after this basic information is established, advertisers must tweak the creative to speak to the local market. If the creative piece falls short, it’s a waste of ad dollars. You must speak to each market in its local language.

For example, a national car company could take advantage of local advertising by featuring a photo of a specific dealership showroom or their salesperson of the year in a local market. They could combine this custom, local message with an offer for low financing or another special incentive. Keeping a standard creative message in other markets could help the national dealer measure ROI and show lift.

These geographically-targeted ads then become content for local news outlets. An ad touting a back-to-school sale at the local branch of a national chain store is going to be much more pertinent to the readers in that area than a less customized branding message that doesn’t speak to a specific location or address a community issue.

Newspapers and magazines have been doing this forever. The Macy’s ad in the local newspaper has always listed the store hours, coupons, and address of that Macy’s store alongside ads for the local lighting store, carpet store and pizza place.

For more than 40 years, MNI has taken national brand ads and customized and placed them at scale in local markets, first in print and increasingly in web display ads and through SEO/SEM.

Technology enables advertisers to target differently. All national advertisers should have a local branding initiative. It’s silly not to when it’s all at your fingertips.

I wasn't much of a sweet tooth until I tried the www.takethislollipop.com site. Or is it a video? A game? An ad? An idea?

Therein lies the glorious dilemma, the terrible beauty of media's future. It can't be categorized. It's creativity, media science, and technology whipped up in a blender-- served shaken and stirred. And a heady cocktail it certainly is.

Back to the lollipop. I love it. It's unexpected. It's elegant. It's memorable. But what it actually is I cannot say. Nor can I say who it's for or what it's for. And that's why I'm so drawn to it. It's the mesmerizing dark-haired stranger with the subtle accent I can't quite place. It doesn't look like the other shiny things I'm confronted with each minute as a consumer (to say nothing of the dull things). Therein lies its awesome attraction. In a world of crass, overthetop bombardment, it's elegant. I wanted to watch it. I watched it again. And again. When's the last time you wanted to watch something commercial again?

And what exactly made it so comely? Vanity and unpredictability. Rather than yet another dissertation about a product USP this was a story about me. People love to see themselves and this made me the star. It featured me and my graph and watching us in a highly polished narrative was cool. Technology made that possible and took it one step further, enabling the story to morph in pace with my social action. As I add to my social narrative it incorporates that into the story-- literally. So cool. (I'm letting alone the astonishing speed and ease by which Facebook can access my every move. That's a different story.)

I don't have the balls to say that creativity that does not leverage technology is doomed to failure. I will say this: they're better together than apart. The idea that showing not just saying what a product can do falls right out of Lee Clow's beard. It's axiomatic in commercial creativity. Conversely, rather than just clear-cutting social media with bad ads as we have nearly everywhere else, working with the technology to actually tell stories better seems surely to be the winning formula. Demonstrating knowledge of the audience creatively as well as targeting-wise is the long sought-after 1+1=3 equation. Goodbye focus groups. Hello actual understanding. Facebook is not just the canvas in this work; it's the paint. To a degree, it might actually be the painter. And on the backend, every bit of this is data, and data is required today. How long I spent, how many times I watched, who I passed it to,who they passed it to... Those are fast becoming the sine qua non of digital advertising and all advertising is becoming digital.

This lollipop struck me as something different than the rest of the candy shop. Different will win, I believe. The same will lose. Every single day people are developing platforms to circumvent "advertising" and hordes are adopting it. This kind of execution seems a good compromise. If you want attention, share of mind, and ultimately share of wallet, there had better be a consumer benefit. And that benefit needs to begin with the execution. It must reward its audience for consuming it-- sharing it even. As I write this over 8 million people have liked www.takethislollipop.com.

That's a lot of licks. And if, like Charlie in Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, we act with integrity and some restraint, this sweet treat might just last a long, long time.

The way 'the establishment' rolls its eyes and draws the blinds remind me of something: the way some traditional media powerhouses are digging in their heels in an attempt to hold back the inevitable change technology ushers in. It's like a scene from Braveheart.

Before writing me off as some leftist, which I'm not (really), let me say one thing clearly: I get both sides.

Is it really so hard to figure out why these incumbents are either ambivalent about change or downright hostile to it? Seems perfectly clear to me. Reasonable even. If you did something successfully for decades, printing money and getting bouquets from ‘followers’, would you really want to change? Would you really want to learn new tricks, make potentially significant investments, and willingly walk away from the fortune you’ve amassed?

I probably wouldn’t. I’d probably fortify the castle. I’d have archers in every tower and fill the mote with alligators. That's what many wealthy 'land owners' are doing. I get it. What’s mine is mine. If you want it, you’d better eat your medieval Wheaties. I'm not going down without a fight.

Self-preservation is an incredibly powerful motivator.

Conversely, so is the passion generated from being marginalized. Incumbents can trot out all the data they want about things not changing for them or improving even but we all know the score, don’t we? "Move along. Nothing to see here," just won't cut it any more. Meanwhile, most of them are readying for the inevitable battle for hearts, minds, and advertising dollars. So it becomes a matter of calculation inside the castle. What kind of food stores do we have? Ammunition? Willing and able warriors? Strength of will? And what of our 'opponents'? How many barbarians are there really at the gate? How many are bandwagon gatecrashers and how many are true insurgents in it to win it? How are they armed, rationed, and financed? Critically, who has the wind of the will of the people behind them? (This last point is the Magna Carta for the rebels. Given the choice, people almost always take more choice over less. Technology means more choice.)

Where it will really get interesting is when the insurgents finally do take control of the castle (and they will--they always do.) Then the fun begins. Oh to be there when they turn to realize that the bull’s-eye is now on them—before they even had time to redecorate the place!

They’ve become the incumbents and that storm of dust on the horizon isn’t sheep out for a stroll. Such is the short, happy life of the insurgent. They're going to 'occupy' something alright— the hot seat.

In recent years, smartphone use among Americans has skyrocketed. As consumers become increasingly more reliant on digital outlets for shopping, information gathering and social interaction, advertiser engagement through print media has become a challenge to say the least. That’s where integrated marketing, specifically QR codes, come in. By placing a QR code on print material, consumers can use their smartphones to scan the code which can then lead to a website, contact information, pre-determined text and more. But QR codes have left a lot of marketers questioning – do people know what they are? Do consumers actually use them? And which audiences are they most effective on?

In July, Levelwing, a data-driven digital agency, performed an online survey to gauge consumer awareness and usage of QR codes. Coincidentally, two separate studies were released around the same time – one reported by Advertising Age and one by comScore – that actually found emerging trends similar to those found in the Levelwing survey. Both studies found the demographic for barcode scanners was more likely to be a male between the ages of 18 and 34. The study reported by Advertising Age only looked at magazines and found scanning percentages ranged between 4-17% of all readers. The comScore study, on the other hand, looked at codes scanned across all mediums and found 6.2% of the total mobile audience scanned a code in June.

Using a short questionnaire, Levelwing surveyed 928 respondents on their awareness and use of QR codes as an emerging mobile technology. The respondent demographic profile was mostly male, educated beyond high school (71% had earned a college degree of some kind), and earned less than $100,000 annually.

The survey found that, while respondents were familiar with and using mobile technology, many of them had yet to scan a QR code. This could imply QR codes have not yet attained optimal tipping point level of exposure, despite the fact that respondents noted seeing QR codes from an average of three sources (mostly magazines, on the Internet, and on in-store displays).

Not surprisingly, 76% of respondents who had scanned a QR code did so using an iPhone or an Android smartphone. The most common reasons for scanning the code were to obtain more information, visit a website, get a coupon, or acquire contact information. Interestingly, of the respondents who have scanned a QR code, the 22% who have made a purchase after scanning did so similarly via online and in-store channels.

Levelwing was also interested in finding out about the likeliness of future scanning. When asked how likely they were to scan a QR code in the future, respondents who had never scanned a code before had mixed reactions, with responses closely split between likely, neutral and unlikely.

Because QR codes are still gaining traction among US consumers, continued research must be performed to gauge ongoing awareness and usage. As with any new technology, educating consumers about how and why to use them should remain a top priority for digital marketers incorporating QR codes into their integrated marketing campaigns. Click here to obtain a full copy of the Levelwing research report, QR Code Mobile Technology: Consumer Awareness & Usage.

Image Source: Levelwing