And so another personal venture into the new is complete. Following in the footsteps of services such as Second Life and Pointcast, I have now decided that Foursquare is no longer for me. It has gone down a personal “hype cycle” in my life–going from interesting to integral to ignoble in just a few months. Where once I was checking in with glee and sharing my whereabouts with new collections of friends, now I’m moving on with life and onto Facebook Places. My personal journey is one that others have also reported, and I think a look into why Foursquare worked for a while, and how others continue to be a part of my life, shows a path to meaningful platforms.

What I Loved About Foursquare

I got into Foursquare big-time back in March 2010 during the annual SXSW event. I attended with a small group of Bridge people and we had fun checking into new places and tracking each other’s locations around Austin. I was immediately attracted by the fact that you could walk into a restaurant and find a digital trace of other people who had been there in the months, days, or minutes before. The app allowed me to share my experience with Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and I was delighted by the chance to earn fun badges. And as a digital marketer I also saw firsthand the promise of location-based services.

Over time I tried to build Foursquare into my routine around town. I would meet people for a drink at a bar and excuse myself to check in, and I would dutifully add new locations to the service in order to “get credit” for my appearance. As a digital marketing consultant, I also began to speak glowingly of the possibilities of this new service

Where It Fell Apart

But soon the bloom came off the Foursquare rose for me. The first negative came in my attempt to work with the company on behalf of some of our very large clients. Phone calls went unanswered and scheduled phone calls ended with me sitting on the line waiting for their side to pick up. I quietly advised my teams and clients to wait until the company got its act together before we went further down this road. As a user, I also started doubting the value of this once-cool toy. I began to hear stories of people getting burglarized when they were not home, and my wife wondered why I was telling the world when I was out of town and she and my girls were alone.  The “Honey, I need to understand what’s new in digital because it’s my job” excuse goes only so far, especially when there is no real utility in Foursquare at the end of the day.

And here we come to the real issue: There is no clear reason to install and use Foursquare. It is a toy that entertains for a few days or weeks, but at the end of the day there is no reason to make this a habit. Hardly any stores or restaurants pay attention to the service by, say, offering free offers with check-ins. The mayorships and badges seem silly after a while.  And your friends tend to get tired of seeing where in the world you are.

Meanwhile, Facebook has come into location services with something that works much better. You can utilize your current friends list rather than starting from scratch with a new network, and check-ins can link directly to the Facebook pages of where you happen to be. Stores and restaurants can do marketing on their Facebook pages and offer information or special deals. Foursquare is still figuring out how to build a business and service users and marketers. But Facebook has this down already.

The Lesson: What New Apps Need to Succeed

In looking at a wide range of new digital services, I believe some patterns begin to develop. And the biggest one that I see right now, across everything from mobile apps to social media services, is that success comes in degrees based on whether the new company has the following:

1. The Toy Factor — When people can download your app, try something new, and show their friends you have yourself a great “toy.”  Foursquare is a toy. It has novelty, a link to the real world, and some games including the chance to earn badges. This is enough for people to download and play with for a few days or weeks, but it won’t last forever. The gang at Foursquare is still keynoting conferences and now has some investment dollars, but I believe the time has gone. The company should have built these next two factors into their initial design.
2. A Valuable Tool–Once past the toy factor, your app needs some kind of useful service in order to succeed. Facebook, for example, started out for most of us as a clever toy that allowed us to play with self-expression. But many of us started using the service to communicate regularly with our friends. And because it was so useful, we built it into our daily habits and rituals. Foursquare could have created a simple way for retailers to communicate with the people checking into their businesses. Or it might have been launched with a focused purpose of helping people find money-saving offers on the places they visit. Now an app called Shopkick is showing it the way in this direction.
3. Meaningful Marketing Model–Here’s where a lot of services have still not cracked the code, and where there is still tremendous opportunity for today’s start-ups. For marketer-supported services, you need a business model in which the advertising itself adds value to the service. Facebook is a great tool, but it still hasn’t shown that the little-seen ads on the right-hand side can drive marketers’ business. The best example of success here is Google and its AdWords service. The company started with a new search algorithm based on human link sharing. This was immediately a new “toy”–and because the results were so much more accurate, Google became a valuable tool. When the company created an advertising model based on search, everything came together; Google search ads are relevant to the searcher, and the marketer pays only when a desired action takes place–so there is a win-win-win that has created a +$20 billion business for Google.

I’m obviously simplifying the world of digital services and apps here, but I think this list helps to put a lot of things competing for our attention into their place.

Like a lot of people in the digital marketing industry, I’ve spent a lot of time looking ahead into new advertising formats to help my team and clients understand where the future might take us. Mobile is one specific area that has taken a lot of my attention lately. Starting with the iPhone, we have seen how a well-designed device, fast (3G) connection, and app development/download platform have done for mobile users what broadband did for Internet access. Consumers are used to upgrading their mobile devices rapidly, and the draw of smartphones is expanding rapidly. Nielsen recently projected that U.S. smartphone penetration will surpass 50% in 2011.

Naturally, with the growth in users and their use, marketers want to connect with consumers, and big and small companies alike are jumping in to fulfill this new need. Google and Apple are at the center so far, with an ecosystem of technology startups and traditional marketers leaning in to play ball. But their approach so far is much different, and shows some of the challenges of launching a new marketing platform with meaning. I wanted to take a few minutes to explore their choices and differences so far.

Google Mobile Advertising

Google got in recently with its purchase of AdMob, a company that has worked with many common apps to place ad units onto the screen.

What Works

• Google has applied its $20 billion-a-year AdWords model to the mobile space by creating a simple, self-service advertising process that allows big and small companies alike to put ads on the market in minutes.
• These ad units can be served according to location, fit well with the existing measurement services that companies already use Google for, and results can be compared easily across platforms.

What Doesn’t

• The consumers’ experience is pretty poor at a “moment of truth” when ads start to appear on their favorite apps. Because anyone can advertise on Google Mobile for pennies, it will attract some of the worst advertisers in the market. Chegg textbook rentals are relevant for a tiny percentage of Pandora users, and several friends of mine have been served an “Are you the father?” banner ad.
• There is no room for creativity in the platform so far. The simple text ads look starkly poor when placed within some of the best apps, such as Pandora. Such companies are ceding their precious pixels to ad units that degrade the experience for their users. Is it any wonder that I recently saw the ad below on Pandora, advertising its ad-free model–and this banner looks a lot better!

Apple’s iAd Platform

Apple, too, got into the mobile marketing game by buying another company. It acquired Quattro Wireless earlier this year to get into the game. However, its approach has been entirely different from Google–befitting a company that trademarked the expression “Think Different.”  The company announced that it was shutting down Quattro’s existing business and putting all of its developers into building out a completely new iAd marketing platform. While Google/AdMob tacked on something quickly to its existing business, Apple is taking time to do for mobile marketing what it has done for laptops, MP3 players, and mobile devices.

What Works

• The actual ad units are rolling out slowly, but are rich media that is designed to take advantage of the unique properties of the iPhone and iPad platforms. You can see from the video below in which Steve Jobs shows a couple of mockups of ads for Toy Story 3 and Nike.
• Apple is ensuring that only large, committed advertisers are getting into its new platform. It is inviting a handful of big, mass marketing spenders such as Unilever, Disney, Nissan, and Citigroup. It is also forcing the companies and their agencies to work through Apple’s development process. This means that when you see in iAd for the first time, it will probably be something relevant and special.

What Doesn’t

• If you have an iPhone or iPad, have you seen an iAd yet? Didn’t think so. Because of Apple’s high standards and long production and approval process, there are only a handful of these in the wild to date.
• There are many other issues with the tightly controlled iAd platform. For example, it doesn’t tie in to existing measurement tools, the ads are non-standard, and the spending commitment and cost-per-click is high for an unproven media.

My take:

As you can see, the two companies’ approaches are virtual mirror images of each other. The strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other, and vice versa. But to borrow from an expression I heard in my first job sacking groceries at Kroger, I think Apple is working hard while Google is hardly working. As a company, Google has made its fortune by creating a simple advertising unit that works extremely well when paired with search–an activity in which the advertising itself can be useful at a key moment when people are looking for the right place to go. But Google had not been able to apply this model to its other tools such as Gmail and Google Docs, in which people are using the software for other purposes. In these spaces, the AdWords are mainly an irrelevant distraction. I see the same in its mobile platform so far.

I like the fact that Apple is working harder to make a more powerful, meaningful advertising platform. I have argued in the past that it will face many struggles, but I like the idea that the company is taking the longer-term view and trying to define a better way ad model. It is not choosing the easy path of slapping on an acquisition or an existing model just to be “first” in the marketplace. I still believe that most marketers should develop actual, added-value apps themselves versus buying interruptions on the iAd platform, but I am encouraged that Apple is thinking differently and putting its thoughts into real action.

Special Author’s Note: If you have read down this far, you are likely a regular reader and enjoy this content. If so, you probably noticed that I’ve cut back the number of posts I write each week–dropping down from three posts per week to about one. This is intentional and will be the pattern going forward. I love blogging, but have got some other big, Marketing-with-Meaning-related projects that are forcing me to cut back on new content. Plus, I’ve really found that Twitter is a much better place for me to share thoughts, links, and insights in a way that is easier for me to share and for you, dear reader, to consume. Thanks for your readership and understanding!

This year I started a new tradition with our Strategic Planning Group at Bridge Worldwide. We’ve been taking the afternoon of the first Friday of each month to get out of the office and experience something together. While it’s great to do some team bonding, the main reason for these events is to give ourselves some firsthand experience in something new that might spark insights and ideas for the work we do every day. After all, marketing to me is really about figuring out how the world works and what people want. So by getting some new life experiences and seeing people in different situations we can be better at our jobs. Last week I decided to take the team blackberry picking, and the purpose of this post is to share a few things that we took away from the experience.

We spent last Friday afternoon across the river in northern Kentucky at Barker’s Blackberry Hill Winery. It is literally a mom and pop farm located past a maze of gravel farm roads that barely register on Google Maps. We all eventually managed to find the place and discovered a lovely few acres of blackberry vines at the top of a small hill. The older couple who runs the farm pointed us to a pile of buckets and boxes and set us loose picking up and down the rows of fruit. Within minutes our hands were purple from picking the delicious fruit and—being strategists—we all started working out the best way to find and pick the most/best blackberries possible. We shouted tips and discoveries over the vines and smiled as some of our team members’ children shouted with glee. After picking for about an hour we headed back to the small farm shack to weigh our berries and pay for hauls. I think the price was something ridiculously cheap, like $2 for a bucket, and $2 per pound of berries. As we left, the owners gave us printouts of blackberry storage tips and handed out Popsicles for the children.

It was a great afternoon, and we finished it off by debriefing over beers on the backyard deck of one of our team members. There were a few key takeaways that we all agreed on:

• There is something powerful in the “return to basics.” The more digital we become as a society, the more people will start to feel a desire to “unplug” and have some RL (Real Life) meet-ups and hobbies. And the more things we can consume cheaply, the more people will start to feel a desire to invest time and money in things that are rare and antique, and that take time, skill, and patience to attain. We see this in the rise of knitting shops, organic farming, backyard chicken coops, and letter writing on hand-printed stationery. An interest in growing and picking your own produce is a great example of this return to basics. We enjoyed seeing our hands turn purple and us getting lost on gravel roads just to get a few pounds of fruit.
• Experiences are everything. One of the quotes that I threw out a lot for our team is that, “For the rest of your lives we will remember going blackberry picking together as a team activity.” I have often written in this blog about the impact of experiences, and data that shows how people value and recall experiences at very high levels. Building on the previous point, at a time when anyone can get anything they want online or in stores, we are compelled to look for the new and the rare in experiences that are truly unique and more memorable than any mere purchase.
• It is something children and parents can enjoy together. As a parent I can tell you that it seems increasingly difficult to find activities that everyone fully enjoys together. I feel like I have to drag my kids to my favorite restaurants, and they have to drag me to watch the latest kiddie movie at the theater. But blackberry picking is great fun for anyone, and something even more enjoyable when you do it together. One parent’s son said that blackberry picking was like “hunting for treasure” and I think he really nailed something deep for me, too. There is something deep and timeless about exploring the outdoors and discovering the treasures of nature—whether it is a plump blackberry, a turtle in the creek, or that perfect climbing tree.

Of course we also gave some thought to how brands might embrace small farms and handpicked produce to advance their marketing objectives. A few brands are already getting close to this area. For example, Kraft’s Triscuit brand is starting do things to embrace and encourage the home farming movement. At this website, the brand shows a map of home and community farms throughout the country. It is also teaming with an organization called Urban Farming to start 50 community farms, and included seeds in specially marked boxes. Meanwhile, the Cascadian Farms brand at General Mills, which is one of the largest organic food companies, has taken to the Facebook world of FarmVille, where people can grow virtual, branded organic crops.

I think there is a big opportunity for a leading food brand to do more to help create experiences like ours. What if a brand such as Cascadian Farms, Green Giant, or Birds Eye actually discovered small farms near major markets like the one we visited and partnered with them to encourage more people to have a picking experience? There could be various ways that the brand could partner with local farmers—perhaps investing a few dollars to improve their operations or upgrade their websites. (This one for our blackberry farm is broken, for example.)

But the bigger lesson here is that we all need to get away from our desks together once in a while and return to the RL. You just might discover a new way to build your business, and yourself.

One of the most common complaints among fellow business-travel road warriors is the high cost of Wi-Fi outside the friendly confines of our offices. It’s a topic that comes up continually in hotel lobbies and airport terminals as we struggle to stay connected with the flow of business. We all go through gut-wrenching internal debates about whether or not we should expense the $14.99 for a day of Internet access just so we can sync email and maybe Skype the kids before bed. Why is it—we often wonder—that Wi-Fi is free at Starbucks and McDonald’s, yet we must put up outrageous charges where we need it most—where we are already spending hundreds of dollars for hotel rooms or plane tickets? A recent article in Slate has gained some attention in suggesting that the time has come to free up Wi-Fi at every business. While that would be nice, the law of supply and demand won’t change things, until someone recognizes the opportunity for Marketing with Meaning.

In Slate, author Farhad Manjoo tells the story of how Starbucks was recently pressured to offer free Wi-Fi service because a plethora of its competitors have provided the free access—ranging from McDonald’s to nearly every corner deli and independent coffee spot. He writes that many mid- and low-budget hotel chains have begun to offer free Wi-Fi, including Best Western, Comfort Inn, and Holiday Inn. According to Manjoo:

“The sooner that hotels, airports, convention centers, and other similar places realize this, the happier they’ll make their customers.”

Sounds great, but don’t hold your breath. Just because people want, nay, need something for free does not mean that they will get it. The real purpose of my post today is to remind us that the simple economics of supply and demand come before any Wi-Fi routers go up.

In general economic terms, free services are most likely to occur when three rules apply: (1) the cost to provide the services is low; (2) consumers specifically desire the free services; and (3) and competition is also offering them for free. For example, restaurants provide free salt, pepper, and sugar at your table. The cost of these condiments is very low, people want or need access to them while eating, and because so many restaurants provide them for free it would be ridiculous to start charging. In the hotel market, we similarly see free shampoo, soap, in-room coffeemakers, turndown service, and wake-up calls.

Wi-Fi passes these tests in some cases. In the U.S. at least, Wi-Fi is very cheap to install and provide and it is definitely a service that consumers desire. However, competition is where things get dicey. Restaurants and coffee shops feel the competitive pressure because people have a pretty broad choice of where to sit down and spend their money. One could literally drive by a dozen spots in less than five minutes looking for those that have a “Free Wi-Fi” sign in the window. The same goes for those mid- and low-budget hotel chains, as they are frequently huddled together along the same interstate exit.

But this competitive shopping process is very different for high-end hotels and airports. The competitive options for business travelers are much more restricted in these markets, and Econ 101 tells us that less competition means monopoly-like “rents” can go to the seller. Yep, it’s unfair and economically inefficient when Delta charges $9.99 for Wi-Fi on a one-hour flight, or when your $400-a-night W Hotel makes you pay $19.99 for 24 hours of its horribly slow Net access. But these services become huge moneymakers when you are stuck with few options.

The other free market “failure” here is that most end users of high-end hotels and airfare are not the ones actually paying for the Wi-Fi access—it’s actually the employer who gets stuck with the bill when the expense report is turned in. This is similar to the reason our health insurance costs keep going up—the end patient is agreeing to (or even asking for) medical services that he or she never pays for. Now, just because all three of these guidelines are in effect does not mean that companies will choose to offer free benefits; but it does mean that this becomes a true marketing choice and investment—and I believe this can be one of the most meaningful marketing choices a brand can make.

There is one great airline example about how bucking the charging trend can be a marketing win. Charging for checked baggage is an interesting case where a reduction in competition led companies to cut back on a service that everyone enjoyed for free for years. The few big players—Delta, Continental,  American, and others—are now reaping big bucks thanks to this shift in the market. In 2009 they collected $13.5 billion in “ancillary services fees”—which mainly consists of new baggage fees.

But building on its Brand Purpose of “Democratizing Air Travel,” Southwest Airlines saw a huge opportunity in this shift. It was the one major airline that refused to charge its customers for up to two pieces of checked luggage. Not only did it keep its free baggage benefit, but it created a marketing campaign around “Bags Fly Free.” The results are pretty amazing: Southwest gave up an estimated $300 million in profit by forgoing the fees, but its differentiated service allowed the company to gain an additional 1% share of the market, which translated into $900 million in additional revenue—not to mention earning it ongoing customer trust and brand loyalty at a moment of truth. This was a marketing investment that clearly paid off.

What I find interesting is that it may be that only those services that “violate” my three rules above are noticeable by consumers and should actually be considered marketing investments. When you and all of your competitors offer something it is no longer differentiated, meaningful marketing, but rather just a cost of doing business. At what point does Wi-Fi at a restaurant just become the equivalent of ketchup?

Wi-Fi on airlines or high-end hotels is far from destined to be free, but it does offer an opportunity for brands to stand out by offering it. I am starting to see movements in this direction. For example, last week Sheraton offered me free (but slow) Wi-Fi because I am a Gold Starwood Points member. And Delta provides free Wi-Fi in its Sky Club lounges.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for an airline or hotel chain to differentiate by offering free Wi-Fi credits or codes directly to the company procurement and travel managers who are paying for accommodations at the end of the day. Imagine a loyalty campaign or points program targeting these key decision makers. Working through a travel provider such as American Express, Delta, or the W Hotel could offer free Wi-Fi to heavy corporate buyers. This could help break through the clutter, reward the most valuable end customers, and win a nudge of business when prices are about the same. Another “scale” option is to partner with a company such as Orbitz or Travelocity to show people that free Wi-Fi is, say, a $14.99 value when the price search results appear. A customer might decide to pay an extra $10 for a hotel room when he knows the $14.99 Wi-Fi comes free. And remember, the incremental cost of a hotel offering this benefit is near $0.

You might find it useful to use this post to trigger a thinking exercise on your brand. What is a service that your customers will appreciate, that has reasonably low costs to execute, and that your competition isn’t offering yet? You might just uncover a powerful Meaningful Marketing idea.

A little more than a year ago I wrote one of my most-visited posts about the power of engaging product demonstrations. If you haven’t read it, take a look. The purpose of this post is to revisit demonstrations with two killer examples that I saw just yesterday morning.

First, there’s the video above of the new Dyson Air Multiplier fan, above. The next chapter in Dyson’s re-think of age-old contraptions, this time we see a playful series of balloons sent through Dyson fans. The result is clever and interesting, and perfectly highlights the reason for shelling out a few hundred dollars for a new fan: It’s simply gorgeous. This two-minute film has been viewed by more than 725,000 people since late May.

The lesson here is that new products can be incredibly interesting. We like seeing what’s new, and continue to spend money on innovative items that can make our lives better. It’s the same reason that people spend billions of dollars a year on products sold in TV infomercials; in fact, I recall TiVo reporting that some of the least-skipped ads are two-minute infomercials.

The second example was forwarded to me from a friend. Instead of a new innovation, this is a series of videos for a brand in one of the oldest commodity product categories on the market: the DieHard battery. You might remember the old DieHard commercials from the ’70s and ’80s that put car batteries in torture tests; for example, this ad in which a car on a frozen lake starts after sitting on the ice all winter.

Now DieHard is back in the demo business in a much more updated way, showing that even an existing brand and category has the ability to amaze. The dramatic movie-announcer-like voiceover is back, but just about everything else is different. Check it out:

There are some other examples of the ads that I love. For example, this one of innovative musician Reggie Watts. It’s pretty easy to measure success of these demos based on the number of views. Reggie Watts is getting up toward 900,000 views, and the Gary Numan example above is at 75,000 in less than a week.

While these companies are polar opposites in many ways, their viral product demos have a few things in common:

1. Presented in video form, which allows for a full sight, sound, and motion experience as well as easy sharing
2. Brought to life in very creative ways, not just a side-by-side demo with blue liquid and before-and-after shots
3. Go beyond the 30-second interruption, allowing space for a story to develop and for content to be enjoyed, on the consumer’s terms

On my way back from the Cannes Advertising Festival a few weeks ago a couple of work buddies and I decided to take a break and take advantage of our European travel to stop in London for a day at Wimbledon. I’m not a giant tennis fan, but I love any opportunity to experience a remarkable event. So it was a no-brainer to cross the channel and splurge on a day at Court 1 in this historic facility. But my “Marketing with Meaning” hat never comes off, dear readers. While enjoying the matches and sipping my new favorite summer drink, Pimm’s, I noticed something that sparked this blog post…

In the program for the event I noticed a full-page ad for HSBC—captured by my iPhone in the photo above. As you can see, HSBC offered free strawberries and cream for its cardholders at the matches. It struck me as a terrific example of Marketing with Meaning, and perhaps a new trend that other brands are picking up on.

Another great example of a brand that is providing added value for its loyal customers is Lexus. I recently had a chance to prepare a presentation for a group of Lexus dealers, and through the process of researching their work discovered how many of these independent businesses are similarly doing special things for their owners. For example, in several major cities around the U.S. local Lexus dealers have arranged for free, private parking for its car owners. You can find this benefit at the BankAtlantic Center in Tampa, at the Texas Rangers ballpark and AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, and at the U.S. Open tennis championship.

All too often in banking, automotive, or other businesses, current customers get little care and feeding once the bank account is open or the car drives off the lot. In these and many other industries (e.g., phone service, credit cards, cable TV) a vast majority of marketing dollars are put against acquiring new customers. Marketing managers become completely focused on cost-per-acquisition and churn rate, but rarely think about how the easiest sell is the one they’ve already made.

There is tremendous opportunity for brands to win by moving more of their marketing budgets to the benefit of current, loyal customers. Broadly speaking, there are two main benefits of this approach. First, there is almost always an opportunity to sell more products and services to those who are already buying from you. Car makers can convince you to put another one of their vehicles in the garage or upgrade to a new model faster. Banks have an opportunity to cross-sell countless other financial services.

But the second, often-ignored benefit of marketing to your current customers is that it can be a way to impress and win over new prospects. This ad for HSBC naturally advises current cardholders of a special treat, but in doing so it also shows all non-HSBC customers how well this bank treats its own. Similarly, Lexus understands that free, premium parking means that friends will want to ride in the Lexus owner’s car and thus get a free sample of the riding and service experience. And in both examples, the brand has chosen special, high-end events where the prized, highest-income customers attend.

How might you use marketing dollars to benefit your best customers while attracting prized prospects to your side? Or if you are already providing valuable services to current customers, how might you better show prospects what they are missing?

That was my first line to kick off our seminar at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival on Friday, June 25. “Wow!” is also the easiest way for me to describe the amount of work we put into the event, and the combined reactions of those who had a chance to join our seminar. After months of planning and preparation we pulled off our first-ever seminar in Cannes at the annual gathering of the world’s leaders in advertising and marketing. Although I am still in a bit of a daze since coming off the stage nearly two weeks ago, my mind is already racing to develop ideas for the next big way that we can spread the next evolution of marketing. But before rushing on to what’s next, I want to capture and celebrate what we pulled off here.

Before I go on, though, I suggest that you invest the 45 minutes to view our complete seminar footage, which is up and available here. Or if you’re really time-strapped, first check out some highlights in the YouTube video above.

Recap

Way back around October 2009, our President, Jay Woffington, and I had lunch with Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble and now global speaker/consultant and professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Business. My book had just launched and Jim was continuing to spread his belief in brand ideals. We talked about our common desire to change the way marketing is performed, and we agreed that there was no better place than the annual Cannes Advertising Festival—a place where advertising and marketing leaders from around the world gather once a year to judge the best work, compare notes on where the industry is going, and bring back lessons that might be applied to the incredible changes surging through business and society today. We decided to team up and the folks at the Cannes Lions organization were excited to have us onboard for a seminar in late June.

In retrospect, deciding to do a seminar in Cannes and getting agreement from its leaders was the easy part. The real challenge lay in deciding what to do on our big stage. Thankfully we had some help. Two of our top creative leaders at Bridge Worldwide, Jason Bender and George Alexander, came up with the idea of asking a Burning Question. They argued that people in our industry are spending too much time searching for answers to questions such as: “What percentage of my budget should I spend on digital?,” “Do I need a new ad agency?,” and “What should my Facebook strategy be?” They reasoned that marketers are spending too much time looking for answers in new media tactics, and are therefore missing the big, fundamental shift that is happening in business and society. Their idea was for Jim and me to ask our Cannes audience a Burning Question, that, when asked, could help organizations hit the reset button and fundamentally adjust their methods to not only improve business results, but also improve life for customers, employees, stakeholders, and society overall.

To prepare for the event, Jim and I set up interviews with key leaders at some of the world’s largest marketers in the world. We were blown away to get 100% of our requests accepted from IBM, AT&T, Kraft, P&G, Levi’s, Luxottica, Pepsi, and Samsung. We flew camera crews around the country to ask these leaders our Burning Question and learn about how they recognized a need for change, the initial efforts they are making to shift, and the business and stakeholder benefits that are resulting from these early efforts. We were surprised to hear similar stories, and eager to share them with our audience in Cannes and beyond.

And to engage with more than the relative handful of folks who can go to Cannes, we sought to bring marketers around the world into the discussion. On BurningQuestion.com we asked people to post what they believed are the questions we should be asking ourselves. And we even ran a contest to bring two people over with us based on their personal efforts to improve the marketing world. Our winners were Stan Phelps, who is pioneering a new way to “give a little something extra” through his Marketing Lagniappe project, and Tyson Adams, a budding “philanthroprenuer” who just started a business called liveGLOCAL, that sells high-quality coffee and provides books for children in Laos for each bag sold. Both guys are incredible leaders who will continue to drive the next evolution of marketing in their own unique ways.

The Results

After a week of final-final preparation and taking in the other seminars and award-winning work in Cannes (see my blog posts here, here, and here), I was very eager to finally take the stage on Friday. Overall I was very pleased with the seminar. As you can see in the full-length video, we did a lot of things to drum up excitement and ensure that no one was disappointed to be sitting in our session on a Friday afternoon. I think we were able to weave together many threads that were running through Cannes all week and give the group something to thinking about, our Burning Question:

“How can we, in marketing and business, hold ourselves to a higher standard to create a positive impact on those we serve, our employees, and even the world?“

After the seminar we invited everyone in the audience up to the roof of the Palais to continue the conversation. I loved the chance to meet people from places as diverse as Ecuador, Turkey, India, and Australia—all struggling to figure out where the marketing world is going, and all coming away with some new thinking that they can apply to their brands and businesses. I gave away a few hundred copies of my book and collected a pocketful of business cards from potential clients, partners, and even competitors who wanted to keep talking about how we might work together toward this common goal. (Check out some of the after-seminar photos below…)

I find that it’s always hard to look at the time and money investment of an event like this and figure out if it was worth it. This was the biggest thing our agency has ever put on, and ultimately we are betting that by driving the industry conversation forward we will attract new clients and further build our business. Just like all of you, we are betting that we will succeed by creating Marketing with Meaning.

The work is not over, however, as we’ve come back down to earth and back to our desks and day jobs. We are working on plans to further share our seminar and the hours of amazing interviews footage with industry leaders. Jim and I even have a few requests to repeat the performance at industry events and corporate training facilities.

And, of course, I’ve already started thinking about what we could do in Cannes next year. I think the topic will only be hotter in 2011, and we want to continue to build on the momentum we have started. I would love your ideas and feedback in the comments below!

As we get closer to our Burning Question seminar on Friday I’ve had less time than usual to relay my thoughts and discussions here in this space. I’m forced to combine topics from Wednesday and Thursday (today) here in Cannes, and in fact I only wanted to touch on one takeaway today—but it’s a good one.

Content Creators Are Waiting for Brands

Lots of people have written or spoken about how brands are becoming media properties and how they can spawn the stars of tomorrow, but this idea never truly crystallized for me until viewing relevant, related seminars over the past two days.

On Wednesday, master director Spike Jonze spoke about his work on everything from short films to television commercials to major motion pictures such as the recent Where the Wild Things Are. He spoke about how he loves to work with brands when they come to him with an idea that excites him. It can be a music video for Bjork or a commercial for the Gap in which he got to destroy a store. Jonze talked about how he often works with agencies to re-imagine the ideas that they bring him—usually tearing up all of the “junk” that got added to the brief or after dozens of client meetings.

His biggest advice for the hundreds of creatives in the room: “The most powerful weapon you have is ‘No.’” Jonze said he took his fair share of bad projects, but he eventually learned that only work that excited him would result in a positive result. It’s a lesson that I believe more brands (personal and corporate) must learn.

Thursday’s highlight for me was the annual Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase. For 90 minutes we saw a series of short films from some of the most talented rising film directors in the world. Examples ranged from the comedic (Drunk History) to delightful (Tone of Every Day) to animated (I Lived on the Moon).

The usual purpose of this 20-year-old event is to expose agencies to talent who might be great at filming their commercials someday. But after seeing dozens of examples of great branded content—rather than a raft of 30-second ads—I came to see the new model falling into place before my eyes. Whether it’s big name directors such as Spike Jonze or up-and-comers such as those in the Saatchi showcase, clients and agencies of all types were looking not for commercial directors, but rather for partners who could help bring ideas to life.

These directors have the stories, the passion, and the ability to capture people’s imagination—but they often lack the resources or opportunities to put their ideas in front of a large audience. Brands have the money and desire to connect with consumers, but most are not in the business of creating entertainment. So putting them together could make magic.

But it’s no longer about hiring a young director to film your commercial. It’s about crafting content and giving up control to the artist. It’s Gatorade filming a replay of a high school football game. It’s Red Bull sponsoring a rising fashion designer. If you get this right, the result just might be Marketing with Meaning.

On Deck for Tomorrow…

I don’t want to give away all of the special things we have planned for our Burning Question seminar Friday at 5:15 p.m. Cannes time (or 11:15 a.m. for those back in the ET). But I will share one secret for readers of this blog. We’re going to be opening up our seminar tomorrow with a live lead-in by a group of “parkours” who we flew over from California. Parkouring or “free running” is a new type of sport in which athletes turn everyday signposts, buildings, and other street-side objects into a jungle gym. We’ve been filming them jumping and leaping all week in Cannes, and they will come from the streets into our seminar tomorrow. Our goal is to shake people up with some entertainment to close out a huge day of seminars and it should be a fun way to start. If you’re reading this in Cannes, you don’t want to miss it. And if you don’t happen to be in the South of France tomorrow we will be sure to capture everything on video at burningquestion.com.

Is it digital? Traditional? Or are we way past the point of the online versus offline debate? That’s the question that was resonating in my head and among colleagues on Tuesday, Day 2 of the Cannes Advertising Festival.

Unfortunately most of the seminars I attended left me with little to write about. They seemed to cover the same material or be a bit too direct of a sales pitch than what should happen at Cannes. So I spent a good chunk of time walking the floor of work in the Outdoor and Direct category. And I came back with the following observations.

Outdoor has no scale—but no one doubts it.

The outdoor work that made the short list and won Lions was outstanding. It was entertaining, linked to brand benefits, and smart. Although I have debated in the past in this space whether outdoor ads are meaningful, the work here demonstrates that even a traditionally interruptive medium can add value to people’s lives when it makes them laugh, cry, or think. It reminded me that any medium can be meaningful.

But one of the things that hit me was that these award-winning outdoor ads are often one-off executions that might appear in a single city for a limited time. Because they are innovative and often surprise people with a laugh, there’s little use in keeping it up once everyone has gotten the joke. Several of the executions were also expensive and difficult to place. You simply cannot expose them to enough eyeballs to generate “scale” like a print ad or TV commercial. Take this terrific example from Hot Wheels, below:

Another favorite of mine was this campaign for James Ready beer. It offered billboard/photo coupons for local stores so that you could save money in other ways and put the savings toward beer.

Clients are looking for scale, so why would they sign off on this kind of one-off work? It’s a challenge we hear all of the time in digital, but I’ve not heard it applied to outdoor before. Perhaps this comes from the agency test/award budget, or maybe, just maybe, clients are starting to buy into great ideas that make a big impact with a smaller audience. It’s a question I’d like to explore further and would love your comments here.

Direct is digital.

In looking at the range of Direct nominees and winners I was amazed by the amount of work that I would call digital. “Direct” has traditionally meant something that went in the mailbox—but if Cannes is the standard, that definition is done. My friend David Sable at Wunderman has said for years that “direct is digital” and he just might be right.

Take the example above for Nokia’s navigation tool: The World’s Largest Sign. Here, people could search for directions online in London and the sign would rotate in real-life to point to whatever you searched for. To me, this is a digital idea that just happens to connect to the real world. But it was offered in the Direct category.

Another example is this direct/outdoor piece for The Economist in India that asked people to text for clues to decipher the political debate behind the ad.

Where are the digital agencies?

This merger of Direct/Digital brings me to my final takeaway of the day. This morning I opened the daily Cannes Lions magazine to look for the short-listed work in the Cyber (digital) category. It’s the category we won a Gold for last year for our Pringles banner. I was blown away to see that of the 150 or so short-listed entries, only about 6 or 7 of them were created by digital agencies from the Advertising Age list. Very big names such as Razorfish and Digitas were missing in action. This could be the big news of Day 3 when the final Cyber winners are handed out.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but there are a few hypotheses. Maybe digital agencies don’t know how to do the kind of work that wins Cannes awards—or they don’t know how to “campaign” to get their work into the winner’s circle (a little-known secret to winning sometimes). Another possibility is that a lot of the work digital agencies do—such as e-commerce sites, mobile apps, search optimization, and social media relationship marketing programs—simply don’t fit into a creative awards competition. What tends to win here are one-off “ideas” in the form of smart, funny, interesting engagements.

Or, maybe traditional agencies are now very close to mastering digital agencies’ space. After years of wondering and waiting, maybe they finally now get it. If so, and if Cannes is the place this is judged, it’s not great news for digital agencies like mine. But this also might be a wake-up call for those of us on the digital-agency side to take our game up a notch or two.

Well, here we are in the South of France once again for the annual Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. I was last here two years ago for the yearly meeting of the world’s marketing leaders. (You can see some of my previous posts starting here.) Now, it’s one year after the economic crisis that impacted the advertising industry particularly hard. Attendance here at Cannes went down from a high of around 10,000 people to a mere 6,000. But things are looking up! Supposedly attendance is up to 8,000 or more and there is a positive spirit in the air here. Things are also looking up, of course, because we’re here preparing to answer The Burning Question on Friday this week. Preparation for our big event is going very well and I really wish we were on the stage presenting already. But while waiting for our big moment I’ve had the chance to listen and learn from others’ sessions and conversations over drinks. I will blog daily here to share a few things from each day. Read on for my takeaways from yesterday (Monday), the first major day at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

JWT Presents “Ideas People Want to Spend Time With”

Bob Jeffery, CEO, and Fernando Vega Olmos, Creative Chairman, of our sister agency JWT presented some examples of their best work around the world, which represents an entirely new direction for one of the largest and oldest advertising agencies. Jeffery started by making the point that, “Time is the new currency… so we must create ideas that people want to spend time with.” It’s a concept that is perfectly consistent with Marketing with Meaning.

The pair proceeded to share examples of some killer work that is completely consistent with our concept of Marketing with Meaning. Examples included things that you’ve probably seen me tweet about over the past few weeks, including the Heineken classical music concert prank and hilarious videos for Kotex that poke fun of decades of tampon ads. But I was most impressed by two cause-related ideas that the company launched over the past year. First, a campaign for UNICEF in which vending machines were placed with the opportunity for people to donate their change to provide fresh water in Haiti. The campaign created a new way to donate and most users had never donated before. A second campaign for the Red Cross in Mexico created children’s rides (like the ones that used to be outside of supermarkets) in which all donations went to the Red Cross and kids got the chance to “play” hero. The campaign resulted in a +20% increase in donations during the horrible economy last year.

Schematic and Bridge Worldwide Show the Possibilities of a New Meaning Medium

One of our WPP sister digital agencies, Schematic, was back at Cannes with its revolutionary “touchwall” technology. Think of it as a giant iPad on steroids that reads an RFID tag in your conference badge and helps you get more out the event. You can find people, arrange for places to meet, get descriptions of the day’s sessions, and check out nearby restaurants.

This year our agency, Bridge Worldwide, was invited to join the Schematic demo to show how this new “medium” could be used for a variety of brands. We developed two ideas based on brands that we work on. We showed how Charmin could create an entertaining interactive game with mysterious people behind bathroom-stall doors, and we showed a concept for the Bounty brand in which people around the world could collaborate to make a work of art using the device. We’re a long way from having touchwalls installed worldwide, but the unit was a great chance to explore how new technology can become meaningful from the beginning.

Another Question…

One of my favorite things about coming to an event such as this is that you start hearing some common threads of thought as people have time to experience, reflect, and discuss. While we’ve been asking The Burning Question, a new question came to me when I did an interview with the Cannes Eye team here: “Should the word ‘advertising’ be dropped from the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival?” I had not really thought of that before, but the question came up a few hours later over drinks with my friend Rick Boyko, Director of the VCU Brandcenter (which I wrote about previously here). Rick talked about how we should evolve our craft away from “advertising” and all of its negative connotations and move toward something that is more relevant for our present evolution of marketing—around creating experiences and telling stories.

I’m not sure what the answer is yet, but a move away from “advertising” in Cannes and in our industry might be the “reset button” that we all need to elevate our game.