That reliably blue-collar Milwaukee lager, later adopted by unbearable hipsters on the coasts, has turned up in China. And P.B.R., best known in the U.S. for being the cheapest beer on the grocery-store shelf, has—like so many expatriates before it—taken the move as an opportunity to change its image. For a beer, that appears to involve an elegant glass bottle and a fantastically ridiculous price tag. One bottle: forty-four dollars.

The foresight here is unbelievable, especially for a brand that almost went extinct. I think a lot of brands, and a lot of companies, look at China as this price sensitive market that they can't compete in, but fail to realize that the sheer size of China means there is now a market of nearly a million people with more than 10 million yuan. That number is just going to continue to grow, by factors really, and the same thing is happening in India. Sure, both countries have a disproportionate number of very poor people, but they are not markets that brands—both large and small—can afford to ignore. And the brands who establish themselves today are going to have tremendous amounts of power in the future.

I hate Forrester. Let me say that again: I hate Forrester. This article on ReadWriteWeb is a great example why. They love to say things like, "You're measuring social media wrong," and then they present an equally wrong solution—and this feels like a recurring theme in their reports.

At some point you realize that measuring ROI for things like social media is too complicated to fit into a small chart. You can't just make up numbers and throw them into simple equations. Here's a tip: If you really want to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign, hire a statistician. Hire that person before you begin planning the campaign, because it can be measured. Is it difficult? Sure, but it's possible with a bit of planning. The harsh truth is that most agencies don't want to know if their work actually moved the needle, since they will say it did either way. I'm guilty of this myself. But if anyone is going to win in social media, and I mean really win, they are going to start measuring things properly—the way we do for everything else. Otherwise clients will just bounce from shop to shop, from buzzword to buzzword, flavor of the week, month, etc..

I also hate when Forrester ends on a note like this, as they often do:

Many marketing investments are not intended to furnish immediate financial results but instead create long-term brand value. The greatest and most valuable brands weren't created in one quarter to the next but with an eye toward building lasting relationships with customers.

That seems to me like a cop-out. Good marketing should result in measurable financial results. If it doesn't, then it probably wasn't that good—and that's okay—but let's not pretend like "created long-term brand value" should be used to cover up bad advertising. After all, if you are creating long term-brand value that should be measurable too, just in a future time period.

"For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. ... Like intelligence tests, Torrance's test — a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist — has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect — each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. 'It's very clear, and the decrease is very significant,' Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is 'most serious.'"

I don't know that I actually believe in something like CQ. I don't know that creativity is measurable like that. If it is, it seems to me like IQ and CQ should be highly correlated. It's always the smartest people I know that end up coming up with the most creative solutions to unexpected problems.

But if creativity is on the decline, I'm curious how trends like this might impact the price of creativity. It's no secret that you can make good money working for a creative shop, but in a world where people less creative does that also mean that there is less appreciation for creative work?

Has there ever been a more dramatic example of the right and wrong of how to do social media campaigns than what we’ve seen in the last week?

Two campaigns, one great, one not so much

First we had Fast Company’s “Influence Project”, which has been nearly unanimously panned as exactly the wrong way to “measure influence”, which was of course, the entire aim of the campaign.

Then yesterday, we broke open the story about a social media campaign that will very likely go down as one of the best ever (results directly from the agency behind the campaign below)- the shirtless Old Spice guy responding hilariously to just about anybody through a personalized video. Both very well known brands; one doing social media oh so wrong, the other oh so right.

We’re not going to focus on the negative here (i.e. The Influence Project), first of all, because a number of high quality articles have already been written about it, and second, because negative is boring. To make a long story short, it was done nearly entirely wrong, and it completely backfired into a very negative meme for Fast Company. If you’d like to disagree with this, please let us know in the comments and we can have a debate.

So let’s talk about this amazing Old Spice campaign.

I couldn't possibly agree more. On one side you've got Fast Company's incredibly stupid project designed to essentially find the world's best social spammers, and on the other hand you've got W+K showing the world that there is value in understanding, and appealing to, the geeks of the world who are out there on YouTube, Digg, and Reddit actually making things "go viral".

Right before I left Freestyle Interactive I gave a short presentation on Internet memes, where they came from, why the communities that build them are important to understand, and how we might think about leveraging them as part of larger campaigns. I wish more people in the tech space took this seriously. 

You can't force something to go viral—but you can try. You don't do that by trying to find the person with the most followers on Twitter or the most fans on Facebook. You don't do that by putting "like" buttons everywhere. You do it by creating good content. And good social media content is that which is aware of where it lives, and how it travels across the tubes.

Old Spice and Wieden + Kennedy are well aware that they have a serious megahit on their hands with Isaiah Mustafa, aka "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." He's done the two main TV spots, as well as the mustache clip, and now, in a truly fantastic addition to the campaign, he's doing a slew of personalized videos in which he thanks individual people—bloggers, YouTube commenters, Twitterers, celebrities—who've complimented his ads online.

I've been waiting for someone to do this for a while now. Pretty awesome how well W+K has done this. It's contextually relevant to all the right online communities and sub-cultures.

Perhaps my uncanny knowledge of memes and internet sub-cultures will one day be valuable. Probably not, but one can hope. :)

It is precisely at a moment like this—when Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has made it legal for corporations to spend unlimited monies on political advertisements—that we must talk about our relationship to corporations, and to one another. We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse. We must learn above all to distinguish between the better and the worse. Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.

This is one of the best, most grounded, and most well thought out articles I've read on social media in a long time. It explains everything that we know is somehow wrong with applications like FarmVille but can't seem put into words. Mr. Liszkiewicz, I salute you.

There's no point in trying to summarize it. Just go read it. If you work in advertising, technology or media—read it twice.

I'm not one for long presentations, but I found this to be a good one. Plus, it has fun comics. #43 for the win.

The one problem I've noticed with creative briefs, that's not really addressed here, is the lack of input from technology. I understand that a brief isn't supposed to be a closed sandbox for the creative team, but when you look at the kind of documents that pure-strategy firms put out they are often ridiculous and outside the realm of what is technologically (or economically) viable. Too many clients get to see briefs before there is any talk about technical capabilities or limits, because no one wants to say, "We can't do that," or, "It can't be done." Everyone gets excited about a strategy that can't be executed against. By the time you are done with concepts you've created something that is now completely impossible. The technology team does the best they can, and everyone is a little disappointed at how off brief it ends up being at the end of the day.

Does it make sense to have the people who are ultimately going to "make it work" involved at the very beginning? Is that crazy?

Wow. I'm amazed at how well it works. Huge props to Sapient for doing such and incredibly job. It's kind of scary, really.

As cool as I find this from technology perspective, I also find the privacy concerns alarming. What are they doing with all those faces? At what point will advertisers be able to recognize people by their face at a distance? Will you start to see signs with a privacy policy posted when you walk into public spaces?

The future portrayed in Minority Report isn't that far off. In ten year's well have passed Spielberg's vision and no one will have batted an eye. And if you do, the machines will know about it.

FACT

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