Just read this news on agencyspy about CPC speaker John King and attendee Adam Chorney. Congrats!

Changes are taking place at Fallon Minneapolis. The shop is promoting three of its youngest staffers: John King (33), to the newly created position of director of brand innovation; Amy Sheil (35), to director of media; and Adam Chorney (30), to director of connection planning. The agency said that “These individuals, and the disciplines they represent, are interdependent, and they will be working closely together to help reshape the future of the agency and have a strong voice in new business and other important business initiatives.”

One of the greats, Pat Fallon, chairman of Fallon, said, “We see each of these areas (connection planning, media, and brand innovation) as critically important to our future and after searching far and wide for people outside the organization to lead us into the future, we determined that we had some “young guns” right under our noses who were ready to step up.”

The agency is apparently trying to get itself back into shape and into the game. Fallon also recently hired Al Kelly from StrawberryFrog as Executive Creative Director, too. The shop is really looking to drive a youth movement to generate ideas and insights that go beyond the agency structure. That would be nice, right? Considering that Fallon has a few rough years (losing big clients like Citi and BMW accounts, as well as suffering from creative turn over), the agency’s new bid to import talent and promote the hungry from within might make all the difference.

“one of the most valuable things i learned from the connections planning conference was that the more we, as an industry, try and give connection planning a definitive role and title, the less likely it is to succeed. to me it’s more than a title, its more than a process and more than a philosophy. It’s a way of thinking…it’s almost like everything that we were taught to be true about communication, we have to disregard and think the opposite way.”

“I think connection planners are spawned. As in November spawned a monster. Get it? Connection Planners have always been around, they reside in various nooks of the business whether it be asst media planners or junior producers or curious hr people or even writers, designers, CIM, or the guy answering the phone. Connections Planning is simply cutting through the haze and mystery we all cast in our profession, making a genuine (i hate that word) connection between message and people. It’s getting to the gut reaction of evaluating an idea that is/be cool, regardless of efficiencies and testing and models and hyperbole we use to sell it’s value. The title or background doesn’t matter near as much as the mentality. Shouldn’t we all, everyone in advertising, be a “connection” planner. Isn’t everything we do critical to connecting? If that is the case, perhaps the best connections planner is someone who is able to cross-pollinate ideas across the spectrum of idea-creators. I wonder if the best connections planners aren’t closet philosophers (or real life debutantes) rather than media or account planning people.”

Join the conversation here and post your thoughts!

Polygamous Weddings Paul Woolmington from trumpet on Vimeo.

a fairly blank slate rested upon a city with deep history and culture. After the post-Katrina exodus, young creative thinkers have been passing through the city exploring the idea of working there - Likemind New Orleans is a particular starting place for new folk to meet other likeminded people.Almost half-way between New York and Los Angeles, there’s an opportunity to hold these young people here with a mix of jobs and culture and with their help encourage the region to boom as a creative center. The city has everything that creative minds seem to need: a deep authentic and slightly dark culture, cosmopolitan people, an unhealthy appreciation of alcohol, a local music and arts scene and a growing number of people that want to make things happen.

Totally agree with all those statements but being someone that lives in New Orleans, here are some of my thoughts to strengthen what Piers mentions..

Couple that with the rising trend of the Fourth Sector. Organizations driven by both social purpose and financial promise. Combination of the public, private and volunteer sectors. Before, students mainly had two choices - working for a non-profit to do good or selling out to Corporate America. Now young professionals can do both within the Fourth Sector. “Young M.B.A. students are not satisfied with going to work for a normal corporation because they are passionate to do good in the world and do it in business. People of faith want exactly the same thing, and there is a whole generation of people who’ve become extraordinarily wealthy as a result of the technological revolution and are now asking themselves if they can create change in the world.”

Here are some statistics to prove the point. The number of college students who volunteer are up from 600K to 3.3M (2002 to 2005). Nearly half of young professionals would turn away from an employer that lacked good corporate social responsibility policies. 1/3 of them said that working for a caring and responsible employer was more important than they salary they earned (BT Survey, August 2007). And just a decade ago, there were virtually no business school courses with a social curriculum. In 2003, Fast Company announced that a total of more than 250 colleges and universities offered either coursework or degree programs for students interested in jobs “with a social focus.”

Companies like Patagonia, Method and Nau embrace the double and triple bottom line where profit is just as important as social factors and sustainability. Even companies such as Toyota and Gap have adopted social policy within their brand mission statements. Change is evident. People are fed up. Documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth tipped the Green movement and SiCKO will change the healthcare system within our country. People are becoming fed up with the way things are run.

This movement is evident in New Orleans. The Times Picayune article showcases the influx of young Vanguards into New Orleans. Over half of the schools in New Orleans are charter schools. We’re leading the sustainable green movement with companies such as Global Green and Jeriko House. Startups like New Orleans Exchange are launching here to help rebuild the city through entrepreneurship. We just elected the youngest and first minority governer in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. There’s even more evidence in the newly released top 40 under 40 by Gambit Weekly. And it’s not just us, major outlets such as Business Week have labeled New Orleans as the “Startup Laboratory“.

New Orleans should be known as the leaders within the 4th Sector movement. Our city is ripe with opportunities for massive change. The talented Vanguards are moving into the city now. Much like Austin is known for music, Silicon Valley for software development, New Orleans should be known as the leading innovators within the 4th Sector movement.

One of the conference speakers, Adrian Ho, wrote a great post on interactions versus marketing.

One of the realisations I made about life in Minnesota was that it delivered a completely different kind of quality of life than I’d ever previously considered. Before Minnesota, I’d spent all my life in big cities: London, L.A, SF etc. These places taught me to value moments. Great nights at the theatre, interesting bars, clubs, good shopping, and interesting places to go on the weekend.

I think we’ve typically thought about marketing as the creation of moments - communications, events, spectacles, launches, etc. Similarly, I think these moments make up only a very small part of the view customers have of a brand. Instead the vast majority of what informs a person’s view of a brand is the day in, day out usage of the product/service.

This ties directly into what Zeus Jones is about: actions speak louder than words. This is so obvious and simple which makes it pretty genius. We focus so much on communicating and messaging that we forget about the core things that make up a product or service. Gareth mentioned that over 90% of budgets are spent on marketing. Brands like Method are striving to have marketing budgets of zero.

Does that mean we’re all out of jobs?

We’ll always need our Coke’s and Pepsi’s and BBDO’s and JWT’s to keep the engine running. But there’s a huge opportunity for startups and challenger brands to reinvent the wheel. The way I see it - if you have two products like Coke and Pepsi / Miller Light and Bud Light that are essentially the same thing, you have to utilize branding and advertising to differentiate yourself. The old model of advertising was flipping rational thought. No rational person would pay extra for a product or service that delivered the same utility. That’s why we have Fruity Pebbles and the store version - Fruity Stebbles. Advertising and branding was created to get people to act irrationally.

But, with technology, communication, web 3.0, etc today - it has created a ton of transparency. And with that, communications and advertising has changed with it. You are no longer communicating a message or convincing people to try your product because technology has allowed it for someone to duplicate or make your idea better. The “doing” aspect builds brand advocates which is what I think Adrian was referring to.

Another layer I would add is innovation. I know it’s a term that’s been overused but I look at the Apple iPhone and Nike Plus as innovative - service - branded utility things that would have never been considered before. Apple disrupted a whole category by creating the iPhone. Every company is trying to catch up and either match or exceed the iPhone. Google is already on board. Nike Plus created a global running community that mixes online and offline. Rather than saying they are the best, they are showing by innovating. I don’t really know where I’m going with this bit but I think “doing” and doing it right is directly linked to innovation. What’s the point of communicating something if it’s not innovative and transformative?

Any thoughts out there?

A little more than two years ago, Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., attempted to clarify the origins of Web 2.0, what the term meant and how it differed from the antiquated Web 1.0 in this article.

For those of you who like the short version, here it is:
Web 1.0 → Web 2.0
DoubleClick → Google AdSense
Ofoto → Flickr
Akamai → BitTorrent
mp3.com → Napster
Britannica Online → Wikipedia
personal websites → blogging
evite → upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation → search engine optimization
page views → cost per click
screen scraping → web services
publishing → participation
content management systems → wikis
directories (taxonomy) → tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness → syndication

“Web 2.0 came to describe almost any site, service or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration,” PC Magazine’s Cade Metz wrote in an article published earlier this year.

Though some have been able to explain Web 2.0, others are still skeptical of the term. The deviation between Web 1.0 and 2.0 technology is hard to define considering some of the components of 2.0 have been used since the early days of the World Wide Web.

But before we’ve clearly defined Web 2.0, we’ve already jumped the gun and have begun speculating about Web 3.0.

Metz has found that many believe “Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web.”

“In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read Web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we’re looking for.”

Essentially turning the Web into one big database.

Other evolutionary traits associated with Web 3.0 include artificial intelligence leverage, 3D capabilities or a masked marketing ploy hyping minute changes to Web 2.0.

Are Netheads jumping the gun or am I just being complacent? If you have a better understanding of Web 3.0 and feel it needs to be discussed on a broader scale, please feel free to share.