It’s that time of year again. The online Superbowl party that Mullen started three years ago to celebrate the age of Twitter is well into development. If you remember, we began our annual project when there weren’t very many ad types on Twitter. In 2009, most of the industry was still like “huh?”

A few of us at Mullen, the kind folks at Radian 6, and some friends like Sally Hogshead and Lisa Hickey made the effort to get ad land excited. We launched what was then called Trash Talk from the Twitter Section, shared instructions for how to sign up for Twitter, and encouraged people to open accounts. Today it’s hard to imagine that Twitter needed an introduction as recently as three years ago.

Now here we are for our fourth anniversary and we’re excited to introduce some new features. For starters, we’ve made the site, brandbowl2012.com, more interactive. (Note that at this posting it re-directs to last year’s site.) For the first time, users will be able to compare brands head to head in a statistical showdown. Whose ads are getting more attention or more favorable reaction? Brandbowl knows.

We’ve isolated a box at the top of the page, held high by a digital fan, to feature the best tweets of the game. Post something particularly insightful or clever and you could find your tweet featured atop the stream for everyone to see.

Brandbowl 2012 also has some new data to share. This year’s analytics will track the geo location of tweets and also the gender of the participant. Might be interesting to see comparisons between the sexes when it comes to talking about Superbowl ads.

The mobile experience will be better, too. Let’s face it, there’s likely to be more people watching the game with a smartphone in hand than a laptop resting on their knees. You’ll be able to check live rankings and post instantly from your iPhone or Android. Given that it’s a site, not an app, it will work everywhere.

And finally, we’ve been approached by Billboard, which wants to get in on the action. So we’ve offered them the featured tweet board for the half-time show. Madonna better watch out. Billboard knows what it’s talking about when it comes to reviewing music and performances.

Once again, our partner Radian 6 is back with its sentiment data and analytics. And for the second year in a row Boston.com is hosting the site and helping to promote it.  Given that Twitter’s active user base continues to grow and that social media advertising couch critics is an expanding population, we expect to get some pretty good data.

Hope to see you there. On brandbowl2012.com. Using the easy to remember hashtag #brandbowl. I know who I’m rooting for. The creative.

If you need a reminder or are interested in what this is all about, here’s a video recap of last year’s effort.

He reminded us that we didn’t have to play by the rules. He proved that we could succeed, fail and return to even greater glory. If we were creative types he gave us permission to follow our instincts, believe in ourselves and dismiss the predictability of research and the safety of committees. He introduced the masses to the virtue of beautiful design.

Here’s what I think about when I think about Steve.  What about you?

The Whole Earth Catalog
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. Words to live by for all of us.

The Stanford Commencement Address
Lots of lessons and inspiration.

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones”
One of the greatest scripts of all time. Allegedly written by Jobs himself.

Steve’s quotes

Captured here nicely in the Wall Street Journal

My favorite quote:  “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”

An all-time favorite Apple ad
A harbinger of things to come.

Steve Jobs was the same age I am. I remember everything about Apple, from its launch as a company when I was working in the minicomputer business, to its reinvention of the personal computer, to its ad campaigns, to Steve’s return, to his departure, to yesterday. Lucky to be here during the same time as Steve Jobs.

But now there’s Instagram. Brands like Burberry and Olympus (a Mullen client) are getting more and more active. Should you? You’re getting pitched by Springpad, which just made it possible for users to filter their friends’ “likes.” Or perhaps you’ve heard of BlipSnips, which is anxious for you to create ideas that leverage their new video-tagging platform. There’s Klout, where you can tap into influencers. And, of course, let’s not forget all the check-in and and gaming sites.

And all of that is before you even consider Google+. Granted as a brand you’re not supposed to be on the new platform yet, but let’s face it, next month something big is coming for brands.

If you’re a marketer you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by social media these days. Perhaps even fatigue has set in.

Yet it’s important to keep in mind that while the proliferation of platforms can be exhausting – to users as well as marketers – social media is not going away. In fact consumers will spend more and more time in the new online spaces. And not just as viewers but as creators (witness the growth of Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram).

So what do you do? Do you focus? Or diversify? Do you jump on every new service that comes along? You probably don’t have time or resources for that. Do you wait until each becomes big enough to merit attention? On one hand that makes sense, but on another it risks being late to the party.

At Mullen, we’re recommending the following:

1. Focus on a few key platforms that align with customers and their preferred social engagement

It’s not about being on every platform. It’s about using them in ways that align with your marketing objectives and your customers. If you’re a retailer and you have teenage customers, be on YouTube and connect with the haulers. Try geo-based offers and rewards if you have physical locations. Stay with Facebook, obviously. And wait and see to what degree a younger community embraces Twitter. If, on the other hand, you’re in the world of sports or athletics, then obviously invest in Twitter. As more and more athletes use the service, they attract fans who are also your customers. For your big efforts, stay with the proven platforms.

2. Experiment with a smaller percent of your budget

Every company has an R & D budget to develop new technologies, products and manufacturing processes. Why not one for marketing? One of the big problems in the emergence of new social platforms is that we tend to evaluate them using the old metrics (reach, frequency, impressions, click-throughs). By those measures most will fail. But if we think in terms of experimentation and focus on learning how to leverage new services or get even better at understanding consumer behavior, it’s worth putting some time and money into the latest services. Take a look at what we’re doing for Living Language on Instagram: it’s a perfect example of trying a new app to showcase a brand. It may not have the scale of Facebook or Flickr, but it’s a great opportunity to see how much content we can inspire fans to spread around and talk about.

3. Concentrate on doing things worth sharing

On my Google+ page there’s a great comment from digital strategist Farrah Bostic that I’ll summarize here: Instead of putting resources against the creation of destinations – and that includes your Facebook page – that encourage you to spend time “marketing your marketing,” spend your energy doing things worth talking about. Make assets that are worth spreading across all the platforms. Or invent experiences that invite the creation of content that will migrate from one space to another. Remember that our real job in social media is to get others to do work for us – talking enthusiastically about our products and services. Here’s a perfect example, recently created for Tommee Tippee.

Whatever you do, remember this. You’re not supposed to work at social media as much as it’s supposed to work for you.

Our Wenham offices were beautiful, dignified even. But the long, narrow hallways and closed offices separated us. Boston’s 40 Broad Street is raw and urban by comparison. Contrary to Wenham, its openness, light and intentional density foster collisions, effortlessly bringing us closer together, connecting strategy, media, creative and even analytics.

In our old manor house, the work got done behind closed doors, in small offices that were invisible to those who passed in the hallway. At 40 Broad Street, the work gets conceived and shared and produced out in the open, publicly displayed on walls where all can see it, along with their invitation to participate.

Two years ago, we were surrounded by trees and manicured grounds, along with a fair number of turkeys and the occasional fox. They belonged outside the walls and fortunately stayed there. At 40 Broad, we’re surrounded by the city and its diverse work force, construction workers and street performers, young emerging tech companies, local museums, ethnic neighborhoods and, of course, tourists and shoppers. Somehow all of that buzz and inspiration finds its way inside the agency, where it gets put to good use.

So what have we learned being at 40 Broad Street? A lot.

Space inspires creativity: Do it right and everything from glass conference rooms to tight quarters to visible walls of work will inspire collaboration and sharing.

It’s good to stand up and move around: Bar-height work stations and creative reviews that take place in a large open area bring more people together for quicker sharing and synthesis of ideas.

The elimination of borders fosters innovation: It makes no sense to isolate a so-called creative department, as better ideas emerge when everyone’s creative and working together in a space that encourages it.

It’s never perfect: Our offices remain a work in progress as we experiment with moving people around, trying new configurations, striving for even more openness and collisions.

For years the Wenham manor house and its historic splendor informed the outside world of who we were. But 40 Broad Street, Boston does something far more important. It reminds those of us inside the agency of who we are.

When you consider that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are all barely five years old; that social media remains in its infancy; and that mobile, LBS and smartphones are an even greater novelty, there are only two things we can be sure of. Faster change is inevitable. And we have no idea what’s really going to happen. Still, we have to prepare.

We believe there are six trends that are, however, inevitable:

1. Marketers will become less dependent on messages.
2. Brands will focus on more ways to be interesting, relevant and useful.
3. The future of narratives will be networked storytelling.
4. Real time will become the new ordinary.
5. A new generation of talent will want to invent and build things rather than say things.
6. Our industry will see all kinds of new competitors.

So what does that mean? We need new skills. It’s time to embrace design thinking, identify and recruit more T-shaped talent, master what I call modern collaboration, and get better at building things.

Perhaps the best way to achieve that is to understand the obstacles to innovation and invent the future without anyone from the present. Build Box 3, so to speak (Box 1 is your current business model; Box 2 is learning to forget the past; Box 3 is inventing the future).

Can’t tell you yet exactly what we have in mind. But stay tuned. Or better yet, consider coming to work here and helping us do it.

BrandBowl2011 Pre-Game Site

Get your adjectives ready: Brilliant, Genius, Hysterical. Or if you prefer:  Lame, Boring, Derivative, WTF. BrandBowl is back. Time to think about Super Bowl TV ads. For even in the age of social media, conversation, user participation and engagement, we still like a good TV commercial. And what better time and place to watch them than during the annual advertising festival known as the Super Bowl? It’s the one day of the year when our friends and family join us, not just to consume :30 second messages, but to actually talk about them. That’s right, the ads. Whether they feature half clueless men, scantily clad women, talking babies, washed up celebrities or even squirrels (or were they cats?; please see video below).

So with that spirit your friends at Mullen bring you our third annual BrandBowl, an online social media party to which everyone’s invited. This year it’s bigger than ever. Radian6 is back. And Hulu is feeding us the actual commercials as they become available. We’ve brought on a new partner in Boston.com, the online version of The Boston Globe, to both host and help promote the event. This could make it a much bigger event than in past years.

Tweet to your heart’s content no matter where you are and add the hashtag #brandbowl. If you’re really into it, we invite you to upload your comments, predictions and condemnations in video form to the BrandBowl YouTube Channel.  Just tag them “brandbowl” and we’ll grab them to show on our BrandBowl channel. If they’re really good or funny or both, we might even import them to Boston.com, where we’ll have a video window to showcase the best of what we find online.

A quick refresher if you need it on how Brandbowl works:

• The stream appearing on Brandbowl2011.com displays tweets that are posted from the main site, or our new mobile version, along with any tweet that includes the hashtag #brandbowl. If you tweet from Brandbowl2011.com the site automatically includes the hashtag for you.

• The rankings represent an assessment of every Superbowl ad-related tweet, whether it included the hashtag or not. As long as a tweet mentions a brand that’s advertising on the game, or refers to its specific commercial, we can include it in our analysis, thanks to both a pre-game and in-game compilation of relevant keywords that we determine refer to the advertising.

Hope to see you there.  Go Steelers (for our colleagues at Mullen Pittsburgh) and Go Packers (for all our friends in Packer Nation!).  Most of all, go advertisers, please do some memorable spots this year.

It’s that time of year again. When we start thinking about Austin and ribs and digital friends and panel nerd badges. But first, we have to take care of business and do our job influencing, or at least commenting on, the submitted panels and talks.

Granted there is no shortage of great panels up at SxSW this voting season. In fact there are more than I’ve had the time to plow through. So, just in case you’re in the same over extended situation, I thought I’d share a few that Mullen colleagues and I have either submitted or been invited to join in hopes that they meet with your approval and ultimate vote. Of course, in the spirit of honest engagement, don’t vote for anything you wouldn’t actually want to attend. I’m not a big fan of the popularity contest approach to anything.

Ad Agencies Need A New Mindset To Survive

Submitted by Edward Boches:  read more and vote

If the advertising agency is to survive in an era when the reigns of media have been transferred from a few professionals to 2 billion individuals, it will have to revamp its entire way of thinking. The mindset will have to shift from thinking about target audiences to communities. Strategy will require more insight about a consumer’s relationship to media and technology rather than just how she feels about the brand. The team will change entirely to include production, mobile, and experience design in addition to art and copy. And the consumer will play an active, rather than passive role, in the creation and sharing of everything. What does an ad agency have to do to survive? What are the practices it must unlearn? What new skills will it require? This panel, comprised of agency leaders, each in a different stage of evolution, will explore the challenges and offer ideas.

Radian6 and Mullen Hijack the Superbowl

Submitted by Christian Madden: read more and vote

In 2010 (and again in 2011) Mullen and Radian 6 turned the Superbowl, an old media event, into a new media event. With a simple website, a hashtag, and real time sentiment analysis, Brandbowl2010.com analyzed Twitter conversation to rate the game’s commercials in real time.  Find out how sentiment analysis can fuel a creative idea and how an analog event can be converted into a digital experience. It’s a model that anyone can replicate.

Augmented Reality and the Launch of the Olympus Pen

Submitted by Michael Bourne: read more and vote

Augmented reality usually sucks. But this example is pretty good, (note it was done by Mullen). The agency, Total Immersion and Wired collaborated to create and run the first ever augmented reality camera demo.

What were the challenges in creating a fully functional “digital” digital camera that shot videos and still images using a computer webcam and what did WIRED learn in the process of activating the creative in its first iPad edition? Interested?  Give this panel a vote.

To see the rest of this post and some other panels we all agree are noteworthy, click here.

Potential promotable tweet from Panera

When are they going to make money? How can their valuation be so high? Remember MySpace and Second Life? Or even AOL? Platforms that were flying high and then hit a virtual ceiling.

Well it appears Twitter may finally have an answer. Or at least a first step. The fast growing micro-blogging service – from 500,000 to 22 million monthly uniques in the last 12 months – announced Promoted Tweets this week.

Advertisers will be able to buy keywords, which will return branded tweets when those keywords are searched. For example, search “Panera” and you could get the café’s most recent post at the top of the search rather than the community’s most recent updates, responses or conversation about the brand.

Paid posts that appear without having to search will follow soon.  These brand generated Tweets will appear in a user’s stream based on perceived relevance to that individual’s interests. Twitter will attempt to determine whether a brand message makes sense based on whom you engage with and follow. Keeping tabs on Lance Armstrong? Expect a Tweet from Trek bikes.

It might take Twitter and brands a while to determine the value and efficacy of promoted Tweets. Initially the platform plans to charge based on how many people “see” a post in their stream, whether they replied to it, RT’d it to their followers, or clicked on an embedded link.

No doubt this will take a while to figure out. If you follow 5,000 people, for example, even a paid Tweet won’t stand out. (Good for the  user if she doesn’t want it; bad for the brand trying to engage.) On the other hand if you follow 200, it might be rather prominent in your stream.

Promoted Tweets will be tagged as such, so it’s my guess that people won’t really mind them, as long as they don’t become too prevalent. My advice to Twitter is to put limits on how many promoted Tweets can show up in anyone’s stream in a given time frame. We all know how annoying it is to log into Facebook and find our page dominated by brand or media posts treating Facebook as if it’s just another RSS feed.

As someone who spends a lot of time using Twitter as a marketing tool, my one caution to all brands would be to avoid thinking this is the easy way out. Pure advertising messages on Twitter will be rejected by users. And anything less than a well-planned conversation strategy that takes into consideration a balance of paid Tweets, earned engagement, and genuine interaction with your community is destined to fail.

I think this is great for Twitter if it earns them some revenue. But we’ll be advising our clients to make sure it’s only one aspect of their Twitter strategy. What do you think?  About time?  Or one more opportunity for a brand to intrude on a user’s social space?

One key lesson: don't think audience, think in terms of community of participants

Last night at a special MITX event titled What is the future of advertising agencies? Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran asked a panel of Boston’s advertising leaders what they thought would engender success in the future.

Obviously we like Joe Grimaldi’s answer the best.  “Whoever hires the best talent wins.”

Our second favorite answer came from Larry Weber, serial entrepreneur, digital visionary and currently chairman of the W2 group.  “Brands need to build experiences, not produce campaigns.”

But the real show last night was panel moderator Sean Corcoran’s opening presentation in which he debuted the findings of his thorough research about the fate of ad agencies and the role they will play for brands and marketers in the future.

Sean gave us a brief history of agencies:  ad sales, owners of brand, losers of strategic influence, owners of big idea, splintered specialists — evidence of an ability to adapt constantly over the last 150 years.  But ever since the Internet showed up, agencies (some anyway) have struggled. They continue to think in terms of messages and campaigns rather than experiences. They’ve been slow to master digital technology. They’ve found it hard to move from an assembly line production process to one that’s iterative and adaptive.

So what’s next?  Here’s what Forrester says.  Based on extensive research, interviews with 60 industry leaders (myself included) here are the preliminary findings debuted last night.  In the next couple of weeks Forrester will issue a final report, available to both agencies and marketers.

We not only agree with much of what Sean says, we’re well ahead of the pack on many fronts.  We share, in italics, some of what we’re doing in light of these turbulent times.

It is a new world and clients know it.

• There’s a complexity of media relationships and an attention scarcity (content without walls).
• Despite Edelman’s recent findings, Forrester insists that consumers trust consumers more than brands
• The Groundswell has gone mainstream (consumer is creator/sharer/distributor and there is no going back so deal with it)
• WOM reigns again; your content and the experiences you create must stimulate it
• 3.5 billion brand conversations occur every day:  all in public

Note:  At Mullen, we’re addressing these changes in numerous ways: we developed the Modes of the Mind strategic approach that helps a brand understand its consumer’s relationship to content and community; we’ve built one of the advertising industry’s largest social influence groups; and finally we’ve created our own internal social media lab, which has experimented with projects such as Brandbowl and The Next Great Generation.

Consumers hate most advertising

• Only 5 % agree with advertising claims
• 50 % say brands don’t live up to advertising promises
• 67 % complain there is too much advertising

Adaptive marketing is the new model

• Powered by digital
• Real time response, like politics, is the future of marketing
• All about pull not push
• Addressability is here
• Intelligence and analytics will drive everything.

Note:  We’re in constant pursuit of speed whether it’s to respond or anticipate.  In the last year we’ve have added real time research, increased our social media monitoring capabilities, and developed a disciplined approach to conversation strategy so that we can respond quickly to changes in the marketplace or to community generated content.

There is a new media model

• Paid for scale and reach and speed
• Owned for content, relationships, listening and co-creation
• Earned (social, WOM, PR, bloggers, influencers)

Note:  We love hearing this, since we offer fully autonomous media services with mediaHub; content generation across digital, social, application development and mobile; and full-service PR and social influence.  Believe it or not, on a good day we can actually get them to all work together.

Successful agencies of the future will…

• Build campaigns PLUS platforms, not messages
• Don’t think in terms of audience but rather about a community of participants.
• Integrate in new ways: co-creation, curation, crowdsourcing
• Embrace and master new technologies quickly (iPad anyone?)

Note:  Take a look at what we’re doing for Timberland Pro.  TV, web, experiential, mobile apps but most importantly, all of tied up under a real positioning:  Stay on your feet.

Marketers will look for three things from an agency

• Ideas:  NOTE this does not mean messages or ads
• Interaction:  engagement, connection, community, media
• Intelligence: need to collect, report, analyze and predict

Note:  We have PhD’s from MIT doing our analytics.  We’re building predictive models you can actually take to the bank.

So yes, according the Forrester the future is coming and coming fast.  We say, bring it on.  The sooner the better.