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.

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.

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)

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. We staged Tassimo‘s reality. The convention we identified was that every hot beverage system had a similar positioning, which could be summed up as “the moment”. In other words, the machines delivered a single cup of coffee that the recipient then savored – alone. Our insight was that Tassimo was more about sharing. It delivers many different beverages, including tea and hot chocolate, so there’s something for everyone. Everybody gets what they want. It has a campfire appeal, with people gathering around it make their favorite drink. This led directly to the brand message: “Together is better.” Now Tassimo is building a culture of togetherness that will have an impact on many aspects of its behavior.

You can’t tell the world a company stands for one thing if its employees know that, internally, that isn’t the case. Employees have blogs now – or friends with blogs. The corporate world has become transparent. As I mentioned at the start: the culture has become the brand.

That’s why TBWA aspires to being more than an advertising agency. I like to think that through our work we contribute to our clients’ company cultures. That’s why our relationship with them usually remains strong for so many years: we have played a role in the creation of their culture and our very own. In that way, we help to provide them and ourselves with a sustainable future.

By Ulrich Proeschel, Brand Director TBWA Europe and mad-blog.com initiator.

If you have an questions or suggestions, simply send me an eMail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The economic crisis on the one hand, the digital revolution on the other…

Our profession has never been so shaken. These two circumstances create multiple effects. And we are all wondering what tomorrow will look like.

Concerning digital, communications groups are developing varied, often opposing strategies. Some, through a series of acquisitions, attempt to create a technological barrier between them and their competitors. Others, like our Agency, are putting digital at the very center of their conventional activities. Neither strategy is, by definition, the winner. There are different ways to succeed. What makes a strategy effective is the quality of its implementation, and the commitment to it.

To ensure that everything starts with digital, the 180 agency in Amsterdam totally reinvented itself. The result of their actions was even more radical than they had imagined, and the price they paid was heavy, with no fewer than 55 out of their total 120 staff changing. This is a dramatic illustration of the size of the task. The path ahead is narrow, and it is difficult.

Too often, we are more comfortable talking about digital ideas than making the inherent changes that are necessary to provoke the right solutions in the digital world. As Colleen DeCourcy, our Chief Digital Officer, said to me recently: “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

In an industry faced with such challenges, the relevance of award shows, and even The Gunn Report itself, comes under scrutiny. It is a recurring subject. I remember back in the ‘70s, industry colleagues who announced the imminent demise of the Cannes Festival. We know what it has since become. Its turnover increased tenfold, because today more than ever, the celebration of creativity is essential despite of the difficult environment in which we are operating, or rather, because of it. And it’s why, although they avoided awards shows for over 50 years, the world’s leading advertisers now participate actively in them, and celebrate when their own campaigns are recognized.

In a speech I gave in Cannes last year, I underlined that “Big can be beautiful too.” In 2007, both Procter & Gamble and Unilever were awarded a Grand Prix at this festival. Today, a lot of great work comes from large companies. They have internalized the fact that audiences are not captive anymore. If you don’t entertain and engage people, they will simply ignore you. “Safe advertising“ is becoming invisible. At last.

There’s no getting away from that fact that, today, creativity is no longer optional. It is vital to every product category and to every communications discipline.

In fact, there are two factors that are contributing to put creativity in the center. On the one hand, the imminent demise of repetitive advertising, and on the other, the understanding that each and every touchpoint between a brand and its audiences must be creative.

Advertising is part of how brands behave, but brands are judged on everything they do, not just how they appear in advertising.

We need to embrace all the ways to tell a brand’s story: its packaging, its retail presence, the content of its website, its PR programs, the products themselves. And to ensure that everything is creative. This is why, even when an agency is not directly in charge of one of these elements, it must nevertheless feel a sense of responsibility. There can be no room for compromise or mediocrity if you have the ambition to be a brand leader. Advertising agencies will rediscover their original reason for being; they will again become true generalists.

But contrary to the past, they will only achieve this if they learn how to change rhythm. The problem is no longer just to ensure the coherence between the different elements of a brand’s communication, which some continue to refer to as 360°. But rather, to feed a constant conversation with our audiences, 365 days a year. From 360 to 365…it is the very rhythm of communications that digital has shaken up. Agencies need to move from a quarterly to a daily cadence.

We have to organize ourselves to deliver constant communications. A fleet of small initiatives coming together to create an ongoing communication program, generating more frequent conversation points. We need to own these conversations, not just the creative work.

Otherwise said, in this digital era, traditional agencies will only succeed if they adopt the rhythm of the pure players. And as for these, they will need to learn, or rather to understand, how brands are built. These two symmetrical challenges are vital for the agencies concerned. The challenge for so-called conventional agencies is immense. The challenge for the pure players appears to me even more formidable.

Agencies need to repatriate part of the media thinking process. We can no longer think of media as numbers on a spreadsheet or a list of options for places to buy our audiences’ attention. We can no longer think of media as just a means for brands to talk at consumers, but rather as all the places, spaces and experiences where people live their lives. “Media” does not have to be paid for, and it does not have to be measurable to matter to our audiences. In essence, media is any space between an idea and the audience.

It is time for advertising agencies not to be media neutral anymore, but to be media passionate. It is time to grow ideas that turn brands into media themselves.

The industry adopted “Communications Planning” as a way of describing this. A new discipline, at the crossroads of audience planning and connection planning. We do not talk to “consumers” anymore, we talk to audiences who are marketing savvy, who know the brands, who respect them and who program their own media lives. Today, each of us plans his own daily itinerary through all these “media” solicitations. We need to understand the members of our audiences, how they connect with the world, how they digest media and all the technology that surrounds them…

If we treat people like “consumers,” we are interrupting what they are interested in to talk to them about our brand. If we treat people like an “audience,” we become what they are interested in, and become an integral part of them.

As for Connections Planning, it is much more than just a tool for allocation of resources. It is about understanding the interaction between all the different points of contact, rather than just the impact of these individual contact points.

This is why, as an illustration of this, we often discuss the magic triangle formed by advertising/event/digital.

Each of these three elements rebounds off the two others. Like a kind of ricochet. Back and forth between the real and virtual worlds. An event created in the street is picked up and circulated on the net and nourishes the brand idea developed in the advertising. Or the other way around, a community receives a text message on its mobile that provokes a reaction in real life. Or another case, where an event can become content for both offline and online advertising. The virtual decouples the effects of the real, and the real gives substance, life to the virtual. Brand conversations are organized around these exchanges. And the role of agencies is to organize and feed these conversations. To enrich the brand story, on a daily basis.

In other words, the way media is used has become a creative issue. And from now on, every advertising agency presentation should start with media.

At TBWA, we regroup all these thoughts and practices under one expression. We call it Media Arts. Because we believe each point of contact must tell the brand story gracefully, artfully.

Whatever they choose to call it, however they approach this new discipline, traditional agencies, the big networks, cannot ignore this new reality. There is only one way to define brand behavior, and that is to integrate everything, and do this in a creative way.

Our mission is to design brand behaviors to serve brand beliefs. Agile brand behaviors, to support brave brand beliefs.

And it is here, digital revolution or not, that nothing has changed. Our business has always been to build brands, to give them more sense and substance. It is up to our agencies to imagine and to formulate what these brand beliefs are.

At TBWA, this is the role of Disruption. Disruption is about brand belief, whereas Media Arts is about brand behavior.

Most often, this brand belief is encapsulated in a few precise words. A few examples I know well are: “Think Different, Shift, Impossible is Nothing, Dogs Rule, In an Absolut World, Go Visa…” Agencies’ true reason for being is to bring to life the meaning that resides in these words. This ability to express in a few words what a brand stands for, what impact it can have, what the brand believes in. In fact, in this ever-changing world of content and clutter, brands with a clear point of view are more valuable than ever.

These few words that “say the brand” will be the starting point for storytelling. They are at the same time the source of creative inspiration and the strategic backbone for all the communications plans. Today, more than ever, in a fragmented world where everyone is seeking signposts, we need big central ideas that serve as lighthouses. As Lee Clow said recently: “Big ideas win, good ads don’t.”

Agencies are experts at distilling a thought into just a few words. To understand the essence of a brand, to give it a larger share of the future, to share the idea with all the brand’s audiences, this is, and will always be, our role.

To achieve this, we have at our disposal today a multitude of means of expression. So many new delivery systems, formats, screens and experiences available to us to deliver the brand story. The consequence is that creative output is increasing exponentially in quantity. Where we used to produce 30-second formats, we now have to think in terms of websites, blogs, e-webs, digital radio, SMS conversations, social media on the web, street events, PR, and a whole array of new communications opportunities.

On the financial side, the implications of all this are critical for the future of our industry. More content produced in more different ways should result in more fees to conceive it all. However, with the crisis as an excuse, the trend is rather the opposite.

The stakes are clear: thanks to the interactions between all the disciplines, to the digital boom, we know that we can achieve levels of effectiveness with partially lower “media” investment. At the same time, we need to increase our creative resources. Depending on the agency, the cost of these represents only about 2% (between 1% and 3%), of the clients’ overall investment: a very few percentage points that can obviously have a huge leverage effect on the value of the total 100% investment. It is vital that our clients understand that a part, albeit minor, of the savings made in media investment should be reinvested in creative resources. This, for them, is where the true creation of value lies.

1 or 2% more…this is the necessary condition for a total transformation of our industry. Because the creative revolution we are embarked upon needs to be funded. There is no other option for our clients than to contribute to making this happen. They will be the first to benefit.

More than 50 percent of you return on a regular basis and the average time you spend browsing our content is almost 3 minutes per visit. Over 5.000 of you visited the blog more than 100 times. I think that is great. Thank you very much.

One more thing: Do you know who designed the RSS logo, a symbol that actually became an icon on the web and replaced the less appealing letters “RSS”? It is Steve Horlander, who once said about his logo: “Almost immediately it took on a life of its own. It had its own website, its own T-shirt, coffee mugs…” Obviously he managed to create something that entertained the audience.

If you want to help spreading the celebrations of Media Arts and Disruption, simply follow us on Twitter and RT if you like.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.