The world is digital and most of us leave traces in the digital space, through Facebook, twittter, foursquare or any other sharing or networking platform out there. Just the other day I came across a tool presented by the British daily The Guardian. Via their online edition they publish an automatically generated motion graphic describing the Twitter activity around every game of the 2010 football world cup in South Africa.

Check out the link and click on one of the colored bubbles, they represent a game. Than lean back and and experience again the emotional rollercoaster ride of the team, the nations and the many supporters of game – all generated from the Twitter activity.

Looks greats and shows us the speed of the world we live in. Just imagine the speed brands could communicate with their audience using all this data generated in a smart way.

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.

Last week in during a public lecture in Moscow Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA Worldwide, covered three critical areas for the future success of brands: (1) big brand ideas, (2) brand content and (3) brand initiatives. Now P&G’s former CMO Jim Stengel rewrites the marketing textbook, as Advertising Age puts it. Stengel is leading a revolution already well under way toward purpose-driven marketing.

Mr. Stengel is looking to reinvent marketing education along the way, scrapping most historical case studies for live ones presented by top creatives from BBDO and TBWA/Chiat/Day and executives from Dell, Procter & Gamble Co. and PepsiCo. He and Sanjay Sood, UCLA marketing professor and collaborator on the class, plan to pitch it as a model to the Harvard Business Review.

Part two in Mr. Stengel’s plan is his long-awaited book, set to be published by Crown Books next year, for which he’s enlisted a platoon of UCLA students, WPP’s Millward Brown and TBWA/Chiat/Day executives to help quantify and dissect the 50 brands that have added the most brand and financial value in the past decade and the purpose that drives them (hint: the top two are Google and Apple). The book’s working title is “Grow: How the World’s Best Businesses Use the Power of Ideals to Outshine the Competition.”

“When his book comes out, it’s going to be one of those touchstone books, and not just because we’re working on it,” said Rob Schwartz, executive creative director of TBWA. TBWA CMO Laurie Coots is the primary agency executive working on the book.

(Source: AdAge.com)

Do you know why some companies are performing better in the crisis than others? And do you know why those same companies will emerge from the crisis in an even healthier position than before? It’s because they have strong cultures.

It is about having a vision, a belief system, an attitude and a worldview that is shared by the entire company. More than a simple guideline, it is a set of values. When a company has a strong culture, everyone in that organization not only supports decisions made by the CEO – but could have made the same decision in his or her place. In our digitalised, open-sourced society the culture is the brand. You cannot fake it.

Some of our clients have the strongest cultures of all. I have to mention Apple, because it’s such a great example. Thanks to the vision of Steve Jobs, Apple has a culture of creativity and innovation. ‘Think different’ was far more than an advertising slogan. It went to the heart of a way of thinking that has transformed the company. By thinking different, Apple shrugged off the notion that it was a mere computer maker and embraced the idea that it was a provider of tools for creative people. The result, of course, was iTunes, the iPod – and later the iPhone. These were radical new departures for Apple, but they were perfectly in tune with its culture.

Apple is well known for the loyalty it engenders among consumers. Needless to say, its employees are equally evangelical. When you go to an Apple store, you can tell the staff love working there. Why? Because a strong culture attracts the best employees. And when the economy crumbles, you want those people by your side.

So how do you build a strong company culture? For one thing, it takes time. You can’t just bolt it on. When you start a company, the culture is already taking root. In fact, very often, company cultures are created by strong leaders. The system may stay in place long after that person has left, but usually it can be traced back to a single inspiring figure.

At TBWA our culture is based on Disruption, which is all about questioning conventions in order to find a new path towards a larger share of the future. But when we organise Disruption exercises (we call them ‘Disruption Days’) for our clients, we do not ask them to change their cultures. In fact, we ask them to look deep within their cultures and identify their key points of difference, a vision and belief-system that sets them apart, makes them likeable or creates a campfire. In this way, we can unlock untapped potential. Companies often tell us that they have ‘found themselves’ after going through the Disruption process. It’s a liberating experience for them.

Take Kraft, who we recently invited to attend a Disruption Day when the company was reviewing the strategy for its Tassimo hot beverage maker. We transformed our Berlin office into an apartment, with a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a kid’s room. Read more…

Author and Mad-blog contributor Mark Tungate writes about a brand with a Russian heritage – Fabergé.

When I heard a few months ago that a mining group called Pallinghurst had acquired Fabergé, I wondered what had happened to the brand since the 19th century, when it was associated with fabulous jewelled Easter eggs. The story was even more intriguing than I’d hoped.

Peter Carl Fabergé was born in Saint Petersburg on 30 May 1846. He joined his father’s jewellery business in 1864 and took over the running of the firm eight years later.

The Easter of 1885 was a turning point for Fabergé. Tsar Alexander III wanted a 20th wedding anniversary gift for his wife, the Tsarina Maria Fedorovna, so he commissioned Fabergé to create an exquisite egg. The jeweller delivered it to the palace on Easter morning. At first it appeared to be a simple enamelled egg. Inside, however, there was a golden yoke. In Russian doll style, the yoke yielded a golden hen. And nestling within that was a miniature of the imperial crown, encrusted with diamonds, and an egg-shaped ruby.

Each year, Fabergé was commissioned to create another egg. When Nicholas II ascended to the throne after Alexander’s death, he continued the tradition. The Imperial eggs were exhibited at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, transforming the House of Fabergé into an international brand. The orders poured in for fine jewellery, silverware and tableware.

During the revolution, Fabergé fled with his family on the last train to Riga – and then to Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Lausanne. He died in 1920 and was buried in Cannes, France. Fabergé’s sons Eugene and Alexander set up shop in Paris, where they ran a small workshop called Fabergé & Company. However, they were forced to take legal action against a businessman named Sam Rubin, who had begun marketing cosmetics and perfumes under the Fabergé name.

Rubin had got the idea for the brand from one of his acquaintances: the oil tycoon Armand Hammer, a collector of Fabergé eggs. Lacking the finances to pursue their legal action, the Fabergé heirs eventually ceded the name to Rubin for US$25,000. He later sold the business to another company, Rayette, for US$26 million.

Renamed Fabergé Inc, the company sold products like the aftershaves Brut (‘Splash it all over’) and Denim (‘For the man who doesn’t have to try too hard’). Another company, McGregor, briefly owned the Fabergé brand before Unilever acquired it for US$1.5 billion in 1989.

Having fallen from intoxicating luxury to mass market, Fabergé was ready to be revived. A lifeline appeared in 2007, when Pallinghurst announced that it had purchased the Fabergé brand name. A new collection of Fabergé jewellery (not including eggs) was unveiled online at the end of 2009. See www.faberge.com

But what happened to the original jewel-encrusted eggs? There were fifty in all. Nine were acquired in 2004 by a Russian energy tycoon from the family of the late publisher Malcolm Forbes. Ten are housed in the Kremlin. Five are at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Queen Elizabeth owns three. Most of the others are divided among collectors around the world. And eight have vanished entirely.

This post is adapted from Mark Tungate’s current book, Luxury World: the Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands.

In this series of posts, Tatyana Strashnenko (Strategic Planning Director TBWA\Moscow) celebrates Russian innovation with disruption stories from the country’s past and present.

The final part of our look at innovative Russian ideas.

The exploits of Peter the Great (ruler of Russia from 1682 to 1725) can be seen as a good illustration of how having a strong Vision can totally re-shape a system.

Peter changed the country by having a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve: to turn Russia into a progressive European state and to shed its image as a medieval “northern neighbour”.

He invited foreign specialists to the country and sent young Russians to study abroad. He constructed a port city on unpromising marshland, but with an opening onto the Baltic Sea that connected his country to Europe. He built Russia’s first fleet and strengthened its army. He encouraged the introduction of modern fashions (encouraging noblemen to shave off their beards, for example). In short, he led a technological and cultural leap that put Russia in line with the strongest empires of the world. He did this by overturning conventions and adopting a new behaviour.

Far more recently, Roman Abramovich demonstrated disruptive thinking by buying Chelsea football club in 2003. At that time, his rivals were plunging millions into natural resources within Russia. Abramovich’s move not only paid off financially, it also propelled him into the gossip columns and made him a leading figure in European life. He could have remained the wealthy governor of an obscure province. His foresight recalls that of Peter the Great and proves, once again, that when it comes to innovation, we Russians know how to play the game.

To read part one, click here. For part two, click here.

In this series of posts, Tatyana Strashnenko (Strategic Planning Director TBWA\Moscow) celebrates Russian innovation with disruption stories from the country’s past and present.

Continuing our dip into Russia’s culture of inventiveness.

Examples of Russian innovation emerge throughout our history. For instance, in the 19th century the inventor Dimitri Mendeleev literally cleaned up chemistry.

Before Mendeleev came along, chemistry was an inexact science. It was known that mixing certain chemicals produced certain reactions – but nobody was entirely sure why.

Mendeleev’s disruptive idea was to suggest that there were no more than eight groups of elements. All the elements in each group shared characteristics. This simple idea turned an art into a science. It was called the Periodic Table, and it was officially unveiled before the Russian Chemical Society in March 1869.

You can see what I mean when I suggest that innovation is in our blood. It explains why, in 1950s, the Soviet Union introduced a special holiday: the Professional Day of Inventors and Innovators. There was even a prize (created as a Soviet response to the Nobel Prize) awarded to the most innovative ideas. The solemn ceremony took place every year on the 26th of June.

More recently, we’ve continued to take pride in our disruptive approach to science. Some time ago an interesting fact was published online: “Americans spent one million dollars creating a pen that will write in zero-gravity conditions. Soviet cosmonauts just use pencils.”

Part one, click here. Part three, click here.

In this series of posts, Tatyana Strashnenko (Strategic Planning Director TBWA\Moscow) celebrates Russian innovation with disruption stories from the country’s past and present.

Resourcefulness is one of the key traits of the Russian mentality.  Since life has never been easy and the state has always tended to smother initiative rather than stimulating it, we’ve had no choice but to innovate. The saying “necessity is the mother of invention” could have been coined for us.

One of our most famous novels, of course, is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Perhaps this is not surprising, because in battle, Russians have often been innovative. They’ve disrupted conventional military theory and defeated superior forces with unexpected tactics.

Perhaps the best example was the decision by General Kutuzov in 1812 to leave Moscow open to Napoleon. After the brutal battle of Borodino, the Russian army was in no state to defend the city. And so it was quite literally abandoned. Napoleon entered a dead metropolis. The few remaining provisions soon ran out. Napoleon was forced to move further south, where he was met and defeated by a fortified and morally superior Russian force. Kutuzov had been criticised for abandoning Moscow – but his unconventional strategy won the day.

On a lighter note, in peacetime Russians are famous for being able to make practically any object out of the materials at hand. Cotton, cable and a box of matches will get you an electric water heater. A record can be copied onto an X-ray photograph. And there is practically no car part that can’t be replaced by something concocted from a few items bought in a hardware store.

Humorists say that this is why Russians are not afraid of any crisis or calamity. Click here for examples.

Check again later for the two posts to follow.