Having just gotten back from the Paradise that is Southwest Florida, I was intrigued to read a post from Mark Driscoll, an influential young pastor in Seattle, WA.

He and his family (wife and 5 kids) are leaving headed for vacation, and Mark has decided to immerse in a total media blackout.  For some, that would be no big deal.  But this fellow Facebooks (wow, is that a word now?) and Tweets and Podcasts and Vidcasts and DVD’s relentlessly.  To spend four weeks with no iPhone, no laptop, no television, no MEDIA?  I wonder what THAT’S like.

Could be a real blessing, I suppose, but it’s difficult departure in today’s age of 24/7 immediacy.  Granted, I was sneaking away with my bride for a four day “recharge” getaway, but I used my iPhone GPS on the golf course, UrbanSpoon for help with restaurants, and checked in on FourSquare three times.  Although I spend less than one week per month in my Florida getaway, it’s wired for wireless and digital cable.  I checked my email, favorite news sites and exchanged Facebook messages with my son traveling in Europe.

Maybe someday I’ll go “media free” for an extended period and get back in touch the deeper things in life.  Right now, I gotta post this blog.

Things are underway at the D8 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California and it will be a very telling 3 days.  Almost everyone who is anyone in shaping the digital landscape is on hand, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg.  We’ll hear a lot about “what’s next” and those of us in the marketing community should be listening closely.

Because, to re-quote a laughable line from the early ‘90s, “This Internet-thing might just catch on.”

We met with a new business prospect today and the question was “How much of our budget should we devote to digital and social media.”

Not “if.”  Not “when.”  But “how much?”  Believe me, that was not a question ANY of our clients were asking three to five years ago.  And 10 years ago, less that 1% of our work involved digital delivery.

Today, our digital and social efforts--concept through deployment--make up nearly 50% of our total revenue.  With such a shift in such little time, it’s prudent to ponder “what’s next?”

So even while we’re perfecting our presence in the current Web 2.0 & Social Media environment, we must begin preparing for the next wave.

Here are three keys:

Mobile/Apps:  If you’re not already working on this functionality and considering how it can be relevant to your market, it may already be too late to become a player.  Within three years, clients will expect this capability to help connect them with their market.

Geo-Location:  Smartphones will outnumber laptops this year.  The ascension of the Droid platform, across multiple carriers, is not a threat to the iPhone...it’s a complement.   App development for those and other handhelds is already mushrooming.  And as devices and apps become increasingly robust, the ability to master pushing marketing messages to those ready to receive such messages (timing and location) will become a requirement.  That’s where geo-location technology, married with marketing-rich data, comes in.

Data mining: We’ve already begun to collect and compile huge databases on behalf of our clients.  In the very near future (like yet this year), we must learn to do more with that data...to marry it with message deployment technology across all channels.

It will be fascinating to watch how those three keys are discussed  at D8.

At least that’s what iThink!

Okay, I’m an Apple evangelist.  Not because it’s fashionable or cool (though it is), but because their approach to simplicity and ease of use just makes sense.  I often tell those just coming to the World-of-Mac that the most difficult concept to grasp is “It Really is THAT easy.”

“Where’s my ‘C’ drive?” is funny to me.

With that clearly stated, I’ll praise the Apple community one more time for the help I got last Saturday with a nagging Derby time problem...betting.

I’ve tried a lot of betting “methods,” but somehow always got caught up in minutia of the process and apparently never followed any one of them correctly.  I came to consider it a moral victory if I lost only the money I anticipated “spending” for the good time I’d have.

C’mon, you’ve settled for that, too.

Saturday morning, on the way to Derby with a client, I decided to search the iPhone for help.  I found it in the form of an App called “One Click Pony.”

With just a few clicks, you can get picks from nationally syndicated handicapper Liam Durbin (Chicago Tribune and LA Times) for any race at virtually any racetrack in the nation.

It was the fifth race by the time we made our way to the third floor (a spectacular premium box in the Colonel Matt Winn room), and I was anxious to try it out.

I’m a $2 Place bettor ordinarily (sometimes $5 or even $20) who bets too many horses and inevitably ends up betting against myself.  I checked my One Click Pony and it rated four horses as viable (in a number of different ways) and gave me the option to price an Trifecta bet (boxing the four horses recommended).

So I bet it.  And I won.

See, I’ve never placed an Trifecta or Exacta bet before, so the win (and the winnings) were very exciting, to say the least.

Needless to say, I tried it again and again throughout the day, and always got at least two of the top three finishers.  By day’s end, I had hit (out of 6 races) two Trifectas and one Exacta.

For the Derby itself, Liam missed the call completely.  But, all-in-all, I took away a few hundred dollars...courtesy of a $9.99 App.

“It Really is THAT easy!”

It’s 7:14 am on Wednesday morning, and I promised I’d have a blog written before our daily “Jolt®” meeting (8:43 am, thank you very much!).

It was decided yesterday in our internal PR meeting.  Seems our agency tome, “Undercurrent” has been starved of content lately.  We’re screaming busy here, growing like crazy, and running hard to guide our clients through the media landslide spawned by all things digital.

So it’s easy to see why the lowly “blog” gets put off.

Yet, a major reason we’ve been so blessed with this rainstorm of new business is precisely because we ventured into blogs and other forms of “social dialogue” in the past few years.  It’s how we’ve learned...by “operating on ourselves” as I like to say.

It has set us apart from our “legacy media” peers and given us a unique advantage in attracting new business.  To neglect this “golden goose” now--because it has been so successful we no longer have time to maintain it--would be the equivalent of surrendering while winning.

So today we embark on a new initiative.  Over the next weeks and months, you will hear  the voice of every member of CurrentMarketing, offering observations of our times and our industry from each unique perspective.

One thing my dad taught me about leadership was to “never give an order you wouldn’t follow”...so here I am.

It’s 7:35.  And I’ve done my part.

Blog On!

As new media channels continue to emerge at such a fast pace, consumers are getting product information from more and more sources. Some remain traditional news sources like newspaper or TV, yet specialty and peer sources are becoming more important. How important? In the new world of editorial marketing, unbiased, third-party endorsement can be three to seven times more valuable than paid advertising. And with today’s analytics, we can even be more specific in our goals.

In the Web 2.0 landscape, editorial marketing dovetails perfectly into the world of social media. Earned media can come from a variety of sources: professional news sources, specialty blogs, user-generated social media sites. The new goal is to use this influencer media to promote a product or service. The key is to push customers to social media to engage in a dialogue about the product/service benefits. The combination of product promotion by a credible source, followed by peer engagement, produces increased likelihood for acceptance.

We know an editorial marketing strategy is more than the “regularly scheduled press release” method. It requires ongoing partnerships with a variety of media to introduce the product/service and educate them. We must fashion a compelling story about the product/service and engage consumers to build loyalty.

The successful strategy must include:

* Identification of the business opportunity or challenge the campaign addresses. The more specific, the better.
* A campaign goal. The more measurable, the more successful it will be (product awareness, event attendance, friend building, relationship management, sales conversion).
* Alignment of goals with the marketing strategy, creative campaign and messaging to reach the audience.
* Implementation of proper editorial engagement and consumer response tactics
* Analysis and appropriate adjustment

Success from editorial marketing can be determined in myriad fashions. The goal may be a huge profile in a major association publication. It might be a simple as 20 event mentions in various area blogs. Or a coordinated deployment of message across traditional and social media channels, as in the case of a major client of ours.

Last year, we launched a new creative platform for the $100 million company using a unique tagline.

We recruited the company’s fans to be a part of the message development through a series of open “casting calls.”  Through carefully timed release and follow-up with local broadcast and newspaper writers, the story found its way to the front page of the Features section of the Courier-Journal and on 5:30p, 6p and 11p network-affiliate newscasts.  On-premise marketing materials at area locations directed potential participants to a micro-site for details, times and location.  The result was more than 200 people waited in line to tell their story on the two designated shoot days.

The segments gathered were immediately uploaded to a YouTube channel developed specifically for the campaign, allowing participants to share their segments with friends and family.  The YouTube site received move than 3,000 views in the week following.

What's with the constant over-bundling of goods and services to artificially inflate the price?  Do they think we're all THAT stupid?

Satellite and cable television are a good example of why this bugs me.

See, I'm a simple guy.  I want a few news and sports channels, some neat HD adventure and travel channels, local affiliates, and not a lot more.  Instead, to get what I want, providers force a lot of what I DON'T want in the “package” and try to represent it as a good deal.

It's not.  Not for me.  Not for them.  I don't need feeds across 4 HBO time zones.

And I'll walk away first.

Yet it seems more and more that such “deals” are multiplying in the marketplace.  Retailers, restaurants, cellphone providers, car dealers, media reps...it's ubiquitous!

What if Agencies did this?  Need a logo?  Okay, I've got a logo/brochure/website package right here!  No?  How 'bout this logo/billboard/radio/texting package?  You get the point.

And it's silly, right?

So here's a solution:  next time a salesperson or a company starts to bundle what you want with what you don't, just wait patiently until they finish their pitch.

Smile.

Then offer them 'half'.

It may not work but it will certainly change the conversation.  And it's a lot more fun than just standing there fuming over the situation.

I have developed a standard position about adopting and applying emerging developments in the marketing arena.  It’s a position borne through observation of incredibly smart “failures” and illogically lucky “successes” and it’s rooted in the maxim that “Timing is Everything.” 

I want to be third.

I could cite example after example of how my “Rule of the Third” has proven itself historically, from wars to commercial real estate development to technology to product introduction.

Here’s why it works: 

The Starter, an eager innovator, has no road map to follow.  The poor soul, with the great or not-so-great idea, is by definition ahead of demand...so unless he or she can sustain the thrust of the enterprise--independent of profit or gain--for a rather long period of time, it withers, dies and appears to fail.

Meanwhile, Second Sting, a keen observer, has recognized the potential of the innovative enterprise and rightly recognizes that its ultimate success hinges on drumming up sufficient demand and acceptance.  So, while slightly smoothing the rough edges from the initial efforts, Second String usually exhausts itself in the heavy lifting of “preparing the market.”

That’s when everything is ripe for Rule of the Third.  The innovation is refined.  Mistakes are recognized.  A little tweak here and there to make it better than ever.  And the market has just begun to clamor.  And you’re rested, ready and waiting. 

How sweet is that?

Maybe that’s why your Grandma always said...“third time’s charmed!”

Okay, I'm writing this blog from within a new program called Buzz Word, part of an online word processing suite in Beta test from Adobe. It allows me to write, similar to a conventional software-based program ... except the fonts are limited.

And that's where the similarity stops.

The documents are stored on Adobe's servers, and I can access them from anywhere. What's more, I can email them to a Co-Author or a Reviewer or a Reader at my discretion. That affords them differing permission levels of modification. The dictionary/spell check is teachable for either Within this document or Always. Colors. Bolds. Variable font sizes. Paragraph formatting. Charts. Lists. Cut. Paste. And yes I can embed and save images (4 megs or less) within the document with more freedom of placement & movement than Word ever allowed.

Then I can export it to my desktop as a Word document, PDF, Rich Text file or pure HTML.

It's damned sweet, that's what it is.

I'm not sure about the whole "do I have a connection" question as it relates to online enterprise activities such as this. My hunch is in the next few years, online connectivity will be ubiquitous, so that question/hesitancy is probably moot.

Confession time: I've been using Apple's Pages program for a month or so and prefer it to Word for all the elegant Apple features you'd expect. Buzz Word won't replace that immediately, though I expect to use it for longer documents which require ongoing revisions.

There truly has never been a better time to be in this business.

After what seems like years of anxious waiting, our Agency is in the midst of a remarkable transformation in what will soon seem to have occurred “in the blink of an eye.” At last, the components of change--so long on the distant horizon--are within the grasp of day-to-day marketers.

You know all the buzz words: Web 2.0, Social Networks, Blogs, Podcasts, Mobile Advertising, RSS. Funny, “interactive,” “digital,” and “internet” are becoming “old school” terms in the same manner as “electronic,” “transistor,” and “solid-state” did a couple of decades ago.

The casual observer could be excused for wondering what this means for the continued viability of this business of advertising and marketing. “Surely ‘the ad biz’ will shortly fade into the sunset, as with blacksmiths and buggy-whip manufacturers of the 1900’s.”

I remember being amused by a “brand consultant” who said to me with feigned sincerity, “You must be really scared about the future for your business.” It was the early ’90’s and desktop publishing (remember THAT term?) was coming into its own and, “why, with all the fonts and clip art and stuff,” surely we’d be on the ash-heap in no time.

“Now anyone can do it,” she said.

I was wittier in those days, and without a pause I reminded her that “The pencil has existed for thousands of years, right.” She agreed. I grinned.

“Has that made everyone an artist? Or a writer?”

Of course it didn’t. Likewise, new and exciting communication channels will never lessen the need for ideas regarding effective consumer contact and persuasion.

In fact, my bet is the opportunities will be multiplied. Because “when the stone is carved, the ink is dry, the transmission is complete, or the file is downloaded”--in short no matter the delivery method--the IDEA is what will matter most.

Two great descriptions of this business will endure all methods of content delivery. The first, from Fairfax Cone (look him up on Wiki, for goodness sakes!): “Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. It’s as simple as that.”

The second is from John E. Kennedy (not a typo) and adopted by Albert Lasker: “Advertising is Salemanship in Print.”

Okay, the “print” part IS a bit dated...but you get the point.