In the past I have been fairly unkind to sports tie-ins in this blog. For example, a while back I criticized the practice using the example of State Farm’s naming sponsorship of the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby during All Star weekend. At best, most sponsorships are just the 3,001st meaningless ad impression that a consumer might see on a given day. At worst, and as Seth Godin suggests, they are a way for marketers to get a free trip to a game.

However I genuinely love the work that P&G has done on a corporate basis around this year’s Olympic Winter Games. If you’ve been watching the games, you have certainly seen a number of TV commercials for P&G products such as Bounty, Tide, and Olay. While it’s true that I’m not a fan of this kind of advertising, I have to admit that pooling together multiple brands for a single media buy is a smart approach to making the medium work harder.

But what is really special is how the company decided to make its partnership and mass media buy meaningful by embracing Moms. As part of its Olympics effort, the company is specifically directing funds toward the mothers of Team USA athletes in a program titled “Thank You Mom.” This “cause” within an Olympics partnership recognizes that the economy has made it tougher for families to afford to travel to see their kids’ special moments. It is also a perfect tie to the company and its brands—most of which target mothers and are used by mothers for years in raising their children.

To bring deliver on the promise and address mothers’ needs. P&G is providing funds earmarked toward helping athletes’ families travel to the games in the form of debit cards that have gone to more than 200 individuals. The company also set up a special home in Vancouver near the games that provides a place for families to gather before and after events. (It’s a little-known issue that families can’t come into the Olympic Village where athletes stay.) And to honor these special mothers—and build a connection to mothers everywhere—P&G is using some of its media time for a series of truly tear-jerking videos. More than 130,000 people have chosen to view the video above so far on YouTube.  Kudos to Wieden+Kennedy for the nice work.

Online, our team helped activate the partnership with additional meaningful elements. There is the opportunity to download a $100 coupon book, which will help directly link the program to sales results. And we added content that cannot be found elsewhere—including video interviews with Olympic Winter Games athletes’ moms, and blog recaps and live Twitter reports from the games. If you are touched by the content and tribute, you can even send a thank-you note to your own mother with this tool.

There are plenty of big companies such as Visa and McDonalds that are back at the Olympics again, and they have also purchased a lot of commercial time with game-themed ads. But I haven’t seen anyone who has worked to do something special, memorable, or meaningful with their large commitment. The bonus for P&G, should it choose to continue sponsoring in years to come, is that it can “own” this idea around embracing the unsung mothers and make future events bigger and better. And we hope to help continue this new tradition!

My friend Matt Carcieri is one of the key leaders at P&G charged with helping the company move to “Purpose-Based Branding.” If you haven’t read about this before, the central idea is that brands must turn their equities and marketing toward the pursuit of higher-level goals. In his book on the topic, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Roy Spence writes that brands must challenge themselves to wholeheartedly focus on this purpose for existence. At P&G, people such as Matt Carcieri and Jim Stengel helped Pampers, for example, shift toward a Purpose of improving babies’ development. Over the holidays, Matt shared a story of how Southwest Airlines—one of the central case studies in Spence’s book—is continuing to profit from its purpose.

In his book, Spence tells the story of how Southwest Airlines rose to leadership in the late 1970s and 1980s on the heels of the government’s deregulation of the airline industry. As the skies opened up to new competitors, Southwest took an underdog mentality up against the big, entrenched, oligopolistic players such as American, Pan Am, and TWA. The company’s entire employee base embraced the underdog label, and rallied around their Purpose:  to democratize air travel. This mentality drove the company to embrace shorter, point-to-point flights, enabled it to expand without unionization, and even showed in the high-quality, high-fun flight attendants and pilots. Southwest was not just another airline; it was a company on a mission to make flying more affordable and accessible. Today, Southwest is just behind Delta in total market capitalization, and did it without major mergers or dips into bankruptcy. The company was profitable again in 2008, while Delta felt a 40% net loss.

Based on Southwest’s purpose, it is no surprise that the company decided not to go along with the rest of the industry crowd and add baggage fees to the price of a ticket. According to its CEO, Gary Kelly, Southwest was giving up $300 million in revenue by not simply joining its competitors in charging a fee that fliers hate, but can do little about. But the underdog, democratic blood still pumps through Southwest’s veins, and it bucked the trend and risked angering shareholders by just saying “no.”

What’s more, Southwest saw the opportunity to promote the hell out of its commitment to “Bags Fly Free.” Baggage fees can add up to $100 per flight per person, so Southwest’s television commercials and print ads tout their fundamental competitive difference. The ads feature smiling Southwest employees talking about how much they love bags—itself an example of a strong, purpose-driven culture.

The results? Well, Southwest claims that it has captured an additional 1% of the market because of its lack of baggage fees so far. That translates to $800 million to $900 million in additional revenue. Yep, as much as three times more revenue than baggage fees would generate. And please don’t forget how this meaningful marketing choice adds to the brand equity and loyalty of travelers. We all feel a great deal of anger for airlines that use their market power to gouge us on fare prices and continually pull back on service quality. But with Southwest, we have a hero in an otherwise villainous business. This very visible issue around baggage fees further cements the good and evil brands in the business, and translates into more sales for Southwest over time.

Thanks to its strong, guiding brand purpose, and its ability to make meaningful marketing decisions, Southwest continues to be the bright spot of success in an industry that continues to look at its customers as cattle. My only problem with Southwest is that it still hasn’t come to free Cincinnati from the oppressive shackles of Delta!

As our customers turn away from the traditional model of interruptive, impression-based advertising, most companies have chosen to continue to spend most of their marketing dollars in this way, while they hope that some scalable, new-media alternative takes hold quickly. But a handful of organizations are not waiting for others to build the next model. Instead, they are investing their money and time into creating new media platforms in which their marketing itself adds value to consumers’ lives. In my book, I share specific examples of how brands as diverse as Nike and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America have shifted their approach this way over years of testing and learning. Today, I wanted to share another killer example: Kraft.

In both my book and this blog I have written about how Kraft is producing some of the most meaningful marketing in the CPG business. The company has created an impressive website with everything from money-saving recipes to instructional cooking videos. The company has at least 15 million people in its email database. And who could forget its recent foray into iPhone apps, where its $.99 iFood tool blew away expectations and continues to serve as one of the best examples of useful, branded mobile marketing. In fact, the company recently announced that it will launch a 2.0 version and says that 60 percent of people use the app regularly, which is impressive given that only 30 percent of apps are used after the first day they are purchased.

Increasingly, Kraft marketing efforts are looking like the central strategy of this CPG leader, rather than just a series of experiments. Last week Advertising Age shared a video segment of the Kraft VP for Global Media Services, Mark Stewart, in which he shared a few words about how the company is becoming a media platform. The entire video is worth watching, but some of my favorite quotes include:

• “We’re in the food solutions business.”
• “We’re a scaled marketer and a scaled publisher.”
• “In this new world… brands have to stand for more than the functionality of their product. You have to provide real solutions and real services.”
• “The future is really about how do you add utility to your brands, which is way beyond what the product delivers.”

For perspective, these words are coming from a person who spends $800 million in measured media each year (i.e., putting Kraft brand ads on others’ media platforms). This means that all of these in-house efforts still only represent a fraction of consumer marketing, but it also shows how far Kraft could go if it started carving a large chunk of this spending for its owned-media business. And the company certainly appears to be headed in that direction. It’s once-free magazine for database members, Kraft Food & Family, is now becoming a subscription-based magazine. And the company is launching other branded apps, including something called “Triscuit Small Plates”—a partnership with Wine Enthusiast that gives tips on pairing wines with snacks and cheese.

This move to a meaningful media+marketing strategy fits well with the overall company strategy. With its focus on premium food brands and the wide range of categories in its stable, a scalable marketing platform makes a lot of sense. Ironically, while Kraft was expanding its media platform last week, another major multi-brand CPG marketer, Procter & Gamble, learned that its owned media platform was being canceled. Its long-running show, As the World Turns, was shuttered by CBS. Recall that the soap opera was invented by P&G as a platform for radio advertising for its brands in 1933.

Why would one owned-media effort rise while another falls? I’m sure part of the story is that tastes are changing in favor of digital tools and are moving away from daytime dramas, but I think the bigger story is that Kraft’s new efforts put the brand in the center of the meaningful content, while soap operas are merely a package for interruptive advertising. Interestingly, while its soap opera business has been failing, P&G is making new investments in sites such as Petside.com, which offers pet health information and provides a meaningful marketing platform for its Iams brand (which has health benefits and claims). This changing of the guard it but one example of how the world is moving toward Marketing with Meaning, and I expect both Kraft and P&G to continue to lead the way in the years ahead.

One of the benefits of having worked at Procter & Gamble (I was in marketing for six years from 1997 to 2004) is access to an alumni club of thousands of the smartest business minds in the world. Every two years the P&G Alumni Network hosts a global summit that brings together top leaders from around the world, including a few of the top current leaders still at P&G. Two years ago the event in Cincinnati was outstanding, so long ago I made plans to attend this year’s event in Rome, which was held two weeks ago. I took the opportunity to take the family on a vacation through Italy, which means this post is a little delayed, but I wanted to share some highlights of the sessions from the event.

The theme of the sessions was “improving consumers’ lives long term—a sustainability challenge,” and I found much in common with the Marketing with Meaning idea that I write about weekly in this space. Below are a few of my notes, on a speaker-by-speaker basis:

Fernando Aguirre, CEO of Chiquita Brands International

Chiquita seems to be making very positive moves on the sustainability front, a big plus for a company that uses natural resources heavily and works mainly in developing nations with rain forests, where problems seem to be significant and global biodiversity is in the balance. Aguirre talked about how his company is making several moves to embrace sustainability. For example, it is testing a new cleaning and packing station process that reduces water use from 80,000 to 3,000 cubic meters of water, which, if moved throughout the company’s operations, could save 3.4 billion gallons of water per year.

He specifically shared the case study of Chiquita’s challenge in Europe a few years ago, when cheap imports from questionable companies threatened the company’s sales results. Chiquita chose to highlight its sustainable harvesting practices and secured an endorsement from The Rainbow Alliance. Marketing highlighted Chiquita’s efforts and the Rainbow Alliance’s support, and as a result sales actually increased despite the huge price pressure. In other words, Chiquita’s sustainability positioning helped it differentiate a commodity and retain premium pricing. Because of these practices, Chiquita is now attracting “green” investors. Not a bad value equation case study.

Toni Belloni, Group Managing Director, LVMH

LVMH is one of the world’s most impressive houses of brands. The company is a luxury machine, with more than 60 brands ranging in sales from more than $5 billion to less than $5 million. Belloni oversees the company, but it is a very independent group of brands. He talked candidly about how this makes it difficult to drive a corporate sustainability movement. Another challenge is the fact that his luxury brands often work with very small “mom and pop” craftsmen, so it is hard to force them to live up to sustainability standards.

Nevertheless, the company is making a lot of progress. One example is a much-improved volume forecasting process and model that is helping shift shipping from airplanes to sea transport. The big downside of sea transport is that it can take many weeks longer to move goods. But better volume forecasting and planning can make a big difference. Shipping not only reduces transport costs by 90%, but it also cuts emissions by 80%.

I was very interested to hear that LVMH as a company is focused on the cause of supporting arts and culture around the world. In what is a perfect fit for the luxury brands and their consumer targets, it sponsors more than 30 art exhibitions every year, and created a “Haute Couture Academy” to encourage interest in the field and develop future hires.

Stef Kranendijk, CEO, Desso Group

The Desso Group is one of the world’s largest makers of carpets. A few years ago Kranendijk read the book Cradle to Cradle, a manifesto meant to convince companies that they can improve the world and improve their business results by pursuing more sustainable manufacturing processes. Stef decided to remake his company according to the manifesto, and he spoke about how his company is recycling carpet, using fewer chemicals, and innovating in areas such as office noise reduction. I gave him an advance copy of my book and I hope that he now reinvents his marketing according to my manifesto!

Len Sauers, VP, Global Sustainability, P&G

Sauers was one of the notable attendees who is not yet an alum of Procter. He was a perfect fit to speak in the conference theme of sustainability. He first spoke about P&G research into what consumers are willing to pay for more sustainable products. About 9% say they will pay more, 72% will pay the same or less, and about 17% ignore the sustainability issue altogether.

He went on to describe how the P&G corporate drive for sustainability can result in innovation down to individual products. For example, the company discovered that the Laundry Detergent category had the biggest negative energy impact among all of P&G’s businesses. That’s because a lot of energy is used in hot water washing cycles. This in turn helped drive innovation on brands such as Tide and Ariel that allow for better cleaning in cold water. And by advertising the benefits of cold water washing, P&G is helping to educate consumers on this simple yet meaningful step to reduce energy consumption. In the Netherlands alone, the company’s efforts have helped convince 52% of consumers to wash in cold water versus just 7% a few years ago.

Panel with Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO, WPP), Kevin Roberts (CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi), and Jim Stengel (Former Global Marketing Officer, P&G)

In one of the most disappointing parts of the event because earlier sessions ran very long, this panel of marketing giants was cut short. But there were a few good highlights from these strong voices for our industry.

Sir Martin spent time talking about how clients talk about holistic marketing, but their biggest barrier is actually their own behavior. They cannot seem to overcome the internal politics and silos of their organizations: “The amount of time we see our clients wasting on bureaucracy and infighting is appalling.” I wholeheartedly agree.

Kevin Roberts had some witty and accurate lines about what’s wrong with marketing today and what we need to do to fix it. Some of my favorites:

• “The consumer is still not the boss at P&G; the brand is the boss… Consumers want to participate in building the brand.”
• “It’s not B2B and B2C; it’s P2P—People to People.”
• “Stop talking about touchpoints. Like the expression “counting eyeballs,” that’s not good enough. It’s about creating engagements, and we should measure return on involvement.”

John Pepper, Former P&G CEO and Disney Nonexecutive Chairman

Just days before the event, Procter announced that the CEO baton would be passing from A.G. Lafley to Bob McDonald, and we were lucky enough to have both A.G. and Bob join our event in Rome. What made the moment even more special was when John Pepper, another former P&G CEO, spoke for a few minutes about the success of A.G. and his confidence in Bob. I personally agree with John that Bob McDonald is a great choice for the role. I got to work for Bob when I was on the Tide brand in the late ’90s and found him to be an inspirational leader. (As an aside, on the Laundry floor I was jokingly known as “Little Bob” and McDonald was “Big Bob.”)

After praising Bob, Pepper talked a bit about how Disney thinks about sustainability in its operations and marketing. He made a great point about how “it’s key to record the company’s efforts around sustainability and promote them internally so that employees understand and value the work.” Pepper also talked about how Disney has a powerful ability to encourage sustainability and positive causes through its media channels and parks. Currently there are park exhibits that educate visitors about the need for environmental improvement, and Hannah Montana recently kicked off a Disney Channel effort that encourages kids to play a role in improving the world (see Disney.com/friendsforchange).

Finally, Pepper provided me with my personal highlight of the event. After his session I went up to hand him an advance copy of my book. The first thing he said was, “Well, any time someone gives me a book I have them sign it.” I was very touched to hear this request, which was actually the first time I have ever signed a copy of my book.

This interaction with John Pepper and the P&G alumni event itself reminded me of how special my time with this company has been. P&G took a risk in hiring me out of business school, and gave me incredible opportunities to challenge myself on big brands with big budgets. It trained me well and exposed me to some of the best marketers in the world. Now that I’m on the agency side with P&G as a client, the company has been an important partner for our success and growth as an agency—challenging us to continually take our game up a notch, and treating us with respect and fairness. Procter & Gamble has certainly improved my life and I look forward to continuing to build its business as an alum and agency partner.

For the third time in the last four weeks, I had the chance to attend a marketing conference this week. I’m usually not this frequent of a conference attendee, but I have been fortunate enough to tie multiple objectives together with each trip. Naturally, one of those multiple objectives is to unearth insights that I can share with you, dear readers, in this space. So I’ve risen at 5 a.m. on a Friday to tirelessly record my takeaways from the very insightful Ad Age Digital Conference in NYC. As with my previous blog summaries of the Economist and iMedia conferences, I share the most memorable points from the speakers who stood out most in my mind. Enjoy!

Fred Wilson, Partner, Union Square Ventures

We started the day not with a marketing mind, but rather with a venture capitalist who sees significant opportunities in the “chaos scenario” that is the field of advertising today. Wilson focused his presentation on the concept of “earned media.” Earned media is the antithesis of paid media, and happens when brands do something valuable or useful that itself attracts attention, rather than relying on CPMs and GRPs. Wilson presented a few examples of brands that are winning here. One example he shared is “Men With Cramps,” a humorous “mockumentary” created for the ThermaCare brand’s menstrual SKU. Our agency actually helped put that together for the brand two years ago, and it won an Effie last year.

My favorite story was the example of a business in L.A. called Kogi; it is a few trucks that drive around the city, park every so often, announce their locations via Twitter, and collect dozens of customers at each stop for their killer cuisine. The marketing plan involves the owners and operators blogging and tweeting their life experiences as they run the operation throughout the city. It’s winning because of a combination of great product (spicy Korean barbecue is novel), a unique and valuable service (traveling restaurant you can track around town), and an open, social brand that people can personally connect with. To me, this is the only model of brand building that will increasingly survive and advance.

Fred tossed out a few other valuable tidbits. He mentioned that CareerBuilder’s Monk-E-Mail viral earned 300 million users who spent 8 minutes each on the site and cost only $250,000 to build. That’s less than the production cost of an average 30-second ad, and got huge results without the multimillion-dollar media buy to go along with it. He suggested that this was a key change of the “earned media” model: less money to media, but likely more time and money toward getting a killer idea. Wilson talked about how he had read data that suggests “clicks from social media convert at 2x to 4x that of paid search,” which makes sense. He ended with examples of the kinds of companies he is investing in within the advertising space; his first question in reviewing a business model is: “Is there some kind of valuable service being provided?” I couldn’t think of a better fit with Marketing with Meaning. You can check out Fred’s presentation on his blog.

Josh Weiss, Managing Director, Delta.com/Self-Service/CRM

On a panel about how technology changes your company, Weiss provides some interesting perspective. First, he shared the good news that Wi-Fi will be available on the entire Delta fleet by the end of 2009. In terms of marketing, he shared the story of how Delta was close to putting open consumer comments on the front page of its website redesign as a way to visibly show that it is a new kind of company, post-bankruptcy. But after much debate at the highest levels of the company they admitted that they were not quite ready for it, and instead launched a separate site, blog.delta.com. It’s a good admission and probably the right call for now. Weiss also admitted the challenge of deciding which mobile platform to design for; he shared that he personally has an iPhone and BlackBerry. Each phone has different benefits, and the fact that he has both is proof that no single option is prevailing.

Bob Kraut, VP of Marketing Communications, Pizza Hut

Who knew that Pizza Hut was taking digital so seriously? Well, with nearly a billion dollars in online orders, it now has to. Kraut shared the experience of his company seeing these sales spike, and increasingly shifting pizzahut.com from a branded vehicle into its largest single “store.” I enjoyed hearing that the company has moved from trying to have a “sticky” home page that keeps people around as long as possible toward a “slippery” page that gets online orderers in and out quickly. Kraut has found that people ordering online are higher income, less price sensitive, and very picky about the right to choose. Kraut also told the story of Pizza Hut’s recent April Fools’ prank, in which it leaked plans to change its name to “Pasta Hut.” The effort earned a lot of buzz and Pizza Hut was a Top 10 in Google Trends (a very interesting new media gauge of success in itself).

Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital

Rubel hosted a panel on “What’s Next, Before It’s Too Late.” To be honest, I didn’t hear any breakthroughs from the panel, but Rubel provides some good quotes. He called Second Life “digital marketing’s Vietnam War.” Rubel also captured a key insight, that most brands that edge into social media are only doing it in support of a limited-time creative campaign. He said that “social media is like soylent green; it’s made out of people,” and called on brand marketers to personally get in the social media space on an ongoing basis. The recent Skittles story, for example, was less effective as a one-time stunt, and missed the opportunity to forge a relationship.

Mark Sapir, VP of Marketing for Sports & Entertainment, Topps

Sapir revived many memories of collecting, sorting, and trading baseball cards as a kid. He shared the story of how Topps is evolving its entire approach to a new generation. Baseball cards used to be the main way that kids connected with athletes; at a time when there was no TV or stats in the sports sections of the newspaper, the baseball card was the only way for a kid to really “see” the players. Fast-forward a few decades and kids can watch SportsCenter 24-7 and look up live stats online. So Topps needed a new way to stay relevant and add value; in other words, it needed Marketing with Meaning. So the company has launched ToppsTown.com, which essentially mirrors the Webkinz model. A special code in each card allows kids to unlock virtual cards on the site. Once there they can view their collection, trade with people, read real-time stats, and play games. In the early days of the site and new baseball season, ToppsTown already has 200,000 members.

Simon Clift, CMO, Unilever

Clift had one of the most-discussed presentations of the two-day event with Wednesday morning’s keynote address. I was most pleasantly surprised by his story of Greenpeace protests against the company’s use of palm oil from rain forests. The group created a viral video mocking the company’s “Onslaught” viral video with its own version called “Onslaught(er),” which showed the effects of deforestation. Clift admitted that his company needed to listen and respond to the protests, and ended up working with Greenpeace on a plan to develop more sustainable sources. I believe it took remarkable emotional intelligence for Unilever to partner with the group after a fairly unfair campaign.

I also enjoyed hearing Clift talk about how smaller efforts seem to be more successful in this world of connected consumers and social media. He threw out three of my favorite quotes of the event, all of which point to a new way of approaching marketing: with less media-budget bang and more meaning:

• “It is possible to become famous on a dollar and a dream. Imagine what’s possible to do with our brands and our resources.”
• “We may be ahead of some of our competitors. But we’re most definitely behind consumers.”
• “I’m convinced fat media budgets help make people lazy, and we’ve thought about [whether we] should cut media budgets on some specific projects in order to force people to come up with better ideas.”

Joe Rospars, Founding Partner, Blue State Digital, and Former New Media Director, Obama for America

The story of Team Obama’s success with social media has been told many times in many places, but I still pulled a few new takeaways from Joe’s interview on stage. I found it interesting to hear that a key early decision in the campaign was to create a specific New Media team that was separated from the IT group. Traditionally campaigns had lumped digital marketing into IT, but this separate group helped elevate the discipline, and the team had its own seat at the strategy table. I also learned something new about the power of small donations; it seems that many of the 3 million people who donated gave around $5 each. The campaign looked at small donors less for their actual gift, but more as a way key to binding them personally to the brand. This reminds me of why we participate in the General Mills Box Tops for Education program at my children’s school, where I am president of the board; these box tops add up to only a small amount each year, but every time parents cut one out and bring it in they are building a stronger bond with us. But these small donors did add up for Obama: The 3 million online donors ended up making 6.5 million donations that totaled a half-billion dollars.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Facebook over the past few years. I love the service as a user but hate the overpromises on its advertising platform, which is literally invisible to users. But Sheryl Sandberg earned more love with her fascinating story of how the service is improving people’s social networks in a session titled, “How Many Friends Can You Have?” She broke down various types of networks that people have as follows:

• Our brains can handle about 150 personal relationships at any one time, which is called Dunbar’s number.
• Most people know 500 to 5,000 people.
• Facebook members have 120 friends on average.
• The majority of our communication is with 10 people on average.
• We have a close support network of only two to three people.

Sandberg claims that digital technology, especially Facebook, is creating a new concept called the active social network. She defined this as people who: (1) you know something about what they are up to lately; and (2) you communicate with them somewhat regularly. She claimed that Facebook is proven to double the size of people’s active social networks.

She went on to describe the four types of relationships that people have on Facebook: friends, family, coworkers, and “public profiles” (brands and celebrities); and she shared the three distinct types of communication on Facebook: inbox, chat, and wall-to-wall.

Overall, it was interesting to see that Facebook is really getting scientific about its study of human social interaction. It suggests to me that the company aims to become much more meaningful, rather than just waiting to cash out on a new ad model and IPO. In fact, I was blown away that Sandberg admitted that Facebook has realized that traditional banner ads will not work for the firm or advertisers. Rather, they must create marketing that fits with the core idea of the social network itself. Sandberg ended with the example of Honda’s “give a heart” program, which got 1.5 million interactions and 100 million impressions in four days.

Lucas Watson, Global Team Leader, Digital Business Strategy, P&G

I’ve gotten to know Lucas well over the years that we have worked with him at P&G, so it was great to see him represent the world’s largest advertiser on the digital stage. On a panel about “Redefining the Media Mix,” Lucas suggested that the key for brands is not to choose a cutting-edge media innovation first (i.e., “let’s do something on Twitter”), but rather to start with a killer idea, and then see where all kinds of media, both old and new, can make it come to life. He also had a good suggestion for brands thinking about social media: The key is to create a “social media framework” early in the form of a good database that you communicate with regularly. Then, when your idea is ready to go, the network is available for your launch.

So, overall, another good conference where I’ve learned a few new tricks to apply to our clients’ businesses and our Marketing with Meaning concept. My next blogging/tweeting conference will be at the Mobile Commerce Summit in Las Vegas June 3. I’ll be presenting a workshop on mobile+financial services. See you there!

(Here are some of the best Ad Age articles on the event.)

Tonight I am at an event at Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a group of marketers, agency folks, and other assorted digerati. We’ve been brought together to help the company… sell T-shirts.

You read it correctly. A few weeks ago Advertising Age created a stir by announcing that P&G was bringing together a large group of digital folks for a “Hack Night.” Since then people have speculated about what would come from this event—say, setting new ad-unit standards, figuring out how to monetize video, or maybe even Google, Facebook, and MySpace would face off in a cage match? To add to the mystery, all participants were sworn not to spread a single word of the event. This left many in the digerati world quietly asking each other if they were on the list, and several others were working the phones to get on it.

I’ll share more on the event tomorrow, but right now I need to get back to work selling T-shirts. We have been spread out and broken into four teams with an assignment to sell as many Tide T-shirts as possible before 9 p.m. It’s a great cause and a perfect-fit example of Marketing with Meaning. 100 percent of profits go to victims of natural disaster. Tide has been running the program for years, after starting with a group that traveled to New Orleans to help people wash and dry their clothes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

So if you love our cause and purpose, please help out and buy a shirt at www.tide3.com. And remember that if you buy two it’s free shipping and handling!

(Here’s a video our team just created.)

On Monday, November 3, a recent legend in the marketing world, P&G Global Marketing Officer Jim Stengel, retired from the client side. He is joining the client-service side for the first time in his life, and he’s joining a handful of us who are trying to take marketing to a higher level.

Stengel’s website and a Wall Street Journal article describe his new vocation—to help companies other than P&G succeed through “purpose-based marketing.” Through our work with P&G as a client, we’ve had a chance to see inside Stengel’s model of Brand Purpose. It’s an incredibly powerful new way of looking at brand building, based on P&G’s best brands, as well as best practices from some of the most valuable brands outside the company’s walls.

I cannot share this inside perspective here, but I can point you to a recent speech by Stengel at the University of Cincinnati. In one of his last appearances as a P&G leader, he spoke of his learnings from a lifetime of building purposeful brands, and alluded to the lessons he plans to share. Some of my favorite quotes and examples included:

• “Our studies show that brands with the most market trust have the highest marketing share.”
• Tide’s Clean Start program, which provides laundry services for victims of natural disasters, had a “far greater lift” in business impact than traditional advertising, and significantly raised key equity measures.
• Spend time with consumers, not just asking them how they use your products, but how they spend their lives, and figure out how you can positively impact their lives.
• “Every employee must live the ideals of the (purpose-driven) brand.”

As I alluded to above, Stengel is not only joining a legion of ex-P&Gers, but he is joining a small group of people and organizations that are trying to define what we choose to call Marketing with Meaning. I’ve actually had the chance to personally share Marketing with Meaning with Jim, and we found a good synergy between the two concepts. Brand Purpose is primarily based on how a brand redefines what it stands for—its driving purpose in society. Marketing with Meaning picks this up by helping Purpose Brands communicate with their customers in a new way—one beyond interruption that helps achieve its purpose. Drew Neisser, of Marketing as Service fame, makes a good point that we all have a common belief in purposeful brands, but that agencies are needed to bring the purpose to life.

Interestingly, in March 2007, just as I was putting together the full Marketing with Meaning concept to share with clients, Stengel spoke at the AAAA conference and said words that struck me:

What we really need is a mind-set shift… that will make us relevant for today’s consumers.  From ‘telling and selling’ to building relationships.”

Jim’s words convinced me that we were onto something with Marketing with Meaning after all: If the largest marketer in the world (and the one who perhaps succeeded more with “telling and selling” than anyone) saw the need for change, the rest would not be far away.

We’ll keep watching and partnering with Stengel as he joins the mission to make marketing more meaningful. It should be a even more successful ride with him onboard.