Every year 8 million people contract deadly illnesses such as cholera, typhoid, malaria and trachoma from contaminated water. It’s still the leading cause of death in the world. In order to generate awareness around World Water Day, BDDP Unlimited and Solidarites International in Paris created a unique installation. On a busy city street they used only H2O to communicate their message. As carefully timed drops of water cascaded down, impossible to ignore messages were formed such as “I kill more than AIDS.” Over 300,000 people stopped and watched this “talking” waterfall in just one week. There’s no better way to fight the problems of unclean water than with water itself.

Today Indy Saha, Head of Strategy TBWA\London group and Agency.com (twitter: @indysaha) shares with us some interesting thoughts on the recent Facebook announcements:

From a social and cultural point of view,  THEY ARE THE BIG DEAL.  They will change the way you interact with social networks and how you surf the internet forever, how brands can target consumers and will challenge the dominance of Google as being the most powerful company online.  In fact in year from now any website which has not incorporated these changes, will look very archaic.

WHY IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU INTERACT WITH THE WEB AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

Social networking will no longer happen just in social networks  it will happen on every site of the internet.  Imagine being on any website and being able to “like” that site by simply clicking a button, whether that is an article, a band, a song.  You will be able to leave comments on that site, see what your friends have done on that site, what they think of the content on that site and you will even be able to see which of your friends are currently on that site, and connect with them on that site.

But then imagine going onto another site, and because your likes and activities have been remembered, the site becomes personalised to your tastes or to your friends tastes, or it even suggests stuff that people who liked similar things to you also like (this is the beginning of the “semantic web”), so if you have “liked” various artists/ bands across various sites – by the time you get to a music streaming site like Pandora, it will generate a playlist automatically of songs you might like.

When you do go onto Facebook itself, it will suggest communities you should join of people who also like the same things as you and let you connect with them and share ideas and interests.

Facebook have also introduced their own currency called “Facebook Credits” which allows one payment system across all app.  So you will not need to have separate accounts for payment across Farmville or 1-800 Flowers, but a seamless centralised payment system like ITunes, a seamlessness which will make commerce take off on Facebook in a big way. [I can see print publications developing Facebook editions which will be powered by these micro-payments.]

WHY IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY BRANDS TARGET CONSUMERS

Facebook have made it piss easy for brands to integrate these social features into a website: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins

We will probably see a shift in branded experiences taking place on proprietary microsites and no longer having to be in social networks.

A brand will now know how popular parts of their site experience are, which bit of content are the most relevant.  Not only this they will know the demographics and maybe even the locations of audiences engaging with their site, as well as how they are engaging.   This will open up developing more attitude based advertising.  Wherever consumers go on the web, they will carry their preferences, behaviours and friends with them.

And this is WHY FACEBOOK WILL CHALLENGE THE DOMINANCE OF GOOGLE

Google has a massive advertising and search platform based on keywords.  Facebook is creating an advertising and search platform which is based on behaviors, attitudes, preferences and social connections [what your friends like and do etc], this allows the creation of more powerfully targetted relevant advertising and experiences.

These for me were the big out takes as people who work in marketing.  For more information you can watch the keynote in full here.

Writer at large Mark Tungate finds himself trapped in Argentina – and in the past.

You want Disruption? You’ve got it: a giant cloud of ash sent the world spinning back in time, to an era when foreign travel was long, difficult and mostly over land.

Personally, I was stuck in Buenos Aires. The situation could have been worse, especially as I was stranded at the Alvear Palace, one of the most glamorous hotels in town. On Sunday night, the lobby bar was full of wealthy stragglers from around the world. It really did feel like an episode from an Agatha Christie novel.

After a bit of research, I discovered that pre-aviation travellers from Buenos Aires to France – where I am based – usually took a steamship to Bordeaux. The journey took three weeks. What a luxury it would be to have so much time today! One could read, think – or simply stare out at the ocean. And being so close to the waves, rather than soaring high above them, would remind us that nature is wild and dangerous.

The volcano disruption has served the same purpose. It has brought home the reality that the Global Village is virtual rather than actual. The networks that make the physical world a smaller place depend on technology that – apparently – is almost as sensitive to the caprices of nature as steamships were.

The difference, of course, is that we have the virtual world to rely on. Throughout my extended stay in Buenos Aires, I was constantly in touch with Air France, friends and relatives and news from around the world via the Internet.  Ironically, this made me feel even more frustrated. At least the travellers of the past knew that they were cut off from civilisation, as did their loved ones. Today we can communicate with the entire world in an instant, and yet still feel very far from home.

Jean-Marie Dru is the Chairman of TBWA Worldwide He writes a memo to all his colleagues at TBWA every week. Sometimes, he shares them with us:

We have been talking about branded content for years. And also of brand content. In the first case, the brand participates in pre-existing editorial content, created by others. In the second case, the brand creates its own content.

We have recommended to numerous clients that they play an editorial role, to create content that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. For instance, consider the short Visa Winter Olympics films; or “Replay,” where Gatorade created a re-match between the Easton and Phillipsburg College football teams, 15 years later, with exactly the same players and the same referees. I am also thinking of all those great brand content initiatives from Nissan, Pedigree or Absolut.

The challenge is huge: our competitors are no longer just other brands, but all producers of content, be it TV or press, from journalists to scriptwriters. Our latest productions show that we can meet the challenge.

But often, the question of the legitimacy of brands creating content is raised. There is a preconceived notion that traditional media have more legitimacy than brands as providers of content.

Pascal Somarriba is the former advertising director of Benetton and Color’s magazine, sold for 5.50 euros, with a distribution of 350,000 copies. Here is what he thinks about this “legitimacy issue.”

“People believe that the media are by definition independent. As a consequence, this freedom would guarantee the quality of the content they create. This reasoning is not justified.

In fact, the media are profit-making businesses with commercial constraints that brands don’t have, because brands’ resources come from other activities. The desire to offer different brand experiences leads them to create qualitative content, and pushes them to invest in media projects which are financially inaccessible to traditional media. This is even truer for international companies, able to pay back their content on a worldwide scale.

And on top of it, media must be careful not to upset their reader base, their subscribers in particular, as well as their advertisers (there are numerous cases of advertisers boycotting media following an article or a TV report they didn’t like…).

Brands needn’t be restricted by editorial complexes. It is the level of their editorial ambition that will make the difference. The quality, creativity and innovation of what they do will give brand content the same credibility that the media have gained over time.”

In other words, there is no content that would “naturally” be of quality and for which we could say “in advance” that it is worth being consulted. It always comes back to the audience to judge the quality of the content. As such, brands and media are more and more on the same equal footing.