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.

This has nothing to do with advertising but it does include a Trumpet…

We have a facebook group. Check it out here and connect with other connection planners.

Because we are living in a postmodern world where fragments of ideas bombard us constantly, we’ve become good at looking past the messages that are sent to us and instead focus on our real experiences and interactions with brands. So if interactions are the most powerful force impacting brands then we ought to think about what we do as designing interactions. But, it turns out that designing interactions is quite different than designing communications.

Polygamous Wedding speaker, Rob Walker’s latest column - Consumed - has appeared in the New York Times.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published earlier this year, Bob Dylan commented that “the relationship between a performer and the audience is anything but a buddy-buddy thing.” The role of the Dylan fan, he suggested, is to appreciate Dylan music. This seems out of step with the pop zeitgeist. While the impact of digital technology on record labels gets more attention, it also affects the fan-star dynamic: online social networking tools promise us more interaction, or a more direct connection (to use the buzz terms of the moment), with artists. This version of the “buddy-buddy thing” has obvious appeal — so much so that the birth of a company like Buddylube seems almost inevitable.

In an era of increased media fragmentation that media, planning and creative have to seamlessly work together in order to navigate all these possibilities and create an environment that best connects brands and people. Simply creating a new structure is not the biggest issue we face; the bigger issue is thinking about what the product of this union should be. Gareth shared six thoughts about how to create energy around a brand.