• The Sony Walkman
• Teddy Ruxpin
• Z Cavaricci
• Karate Kid
• Shoulder pads
• INXS
• Intellivision
• Waterbeds

Well, when you check out our new “Explore the 80′s” site for National Geographic Channel, everyone wins. Conceived as a companion to their six-part television documentary series on the 1980s, The Decade That Made Us, we created a high-tech, content-rich experience that goes far beyond the limits of what TV can offer. Our team put a lot of love into it, and we’re pretty proud of what we’ve created.

First and foremost, this is a storytelling experience. We created hundreds of explorable pieces of content, gathering facts, dates, quotes, amazing videos, and archival imagery. You don’t just read; you watch and vote and share. We also built a “story” layer over the content, allowing us to build larger narratives by combining many pieces of content. Get into a story about teen movies or video games to see what I mean.

We’re also doing some amazing things on the technology side. The tech team killed it, utilizing bleeding-edge HTML5 canvas and WebGL, CSS3 animations, a custom-built Ruby on Rails/MongoDB backend, and some 6,000 lines of Javascript to fly you through our little piece of cyberspace.

Hope you like it. If you do, let’s have a celebratory Bartles & Jaymes together.

I myself went in “sponge” capacity and, given it was my first time on the hallowed grounds of the Austin Convention Center, tried as best I could to be as open-minded and as alert as possible – a challenge that increased as the days, exposure to big data chat, and prolonged drinking sessions accumulated.

Nevertheless, by the time the geek crowd had traded places with the music kids, my attitude had also completely evolved from “healthily jaded” (surely this is just a bunch of marketers blowing smoke in each other’s faces…) to being a truly inspired convert (Elon Musk, Al Gore and Peter Thiel, in all their visionary wonderment, are hard to argue with).

The bottom line: SXSW for all its Foursquare-, Vine- and Twitter-trending frenetic-ness, is, in its purest form, a repository for some of the best minds in the country to come together, doing their best to propel technological and cultural innovation forward.

If that doesn’t excite you, then you are probably better off immigrating to Costa Rica and waiting for the next big wave to roll in.

If it does, though, then below is a summary of the great and the good, as we interpreted it, from South By 2013.

Yesterday Facebook unveiled a reimagined News Feed experience that has enormous implications for every brand with a Facebook page. Here are five of the big shifts you should have on your radar.

EdgeRank  is dead

Facebook has given up on trying to filter your content for you in favor of serving separate feeds to users. Think of it now as friends, photos, events, pages, and a firehose of everything you’re connected with.

Expect to see dramatic fluctuations in reach and engagement as you figure out when your core audience is engaging in a longer (desktop or tablet) session. It’s very likely you’ll start posting more often to different time zones as you try to catch users relaxing in the evening or sneaking in Facebook time at work.

Note: Facebook has not explicitly stated that EdgeRank has been killed. There’s just no functional reason for it to exist in a multiple–News Feed experience.

Third-party video finally gets some love

Facebook is now featuring videos from third parties (think Vimeo and YouTube) on an equal footing with Facebook videos. That means full-width content and in–News Feed playing.

Your video thumbnail is now a full-size opportunity to convince your fans to watch and share your videos. For brands already pushing the envelope of News Feed content, this will be an easy and rewarding shift.

Images are even better

The rise of the visual Web isn’t news, but it’s great to see Facebook making strides to make the News Feed experience even better for photos. Your images might not be better, but Facebook is committed to doing a better job of displaying them.

For brands with limited visual content, this should be the final wakeup call. If you can’t produce compelling brand imagery, Facebook no longer represents an organic opportunity.

Links matter again

You’ve probably seen the updated tiles in your News Feed from friends connected to Instagram or Pinterest. Now Facebook is rolling out the larger thumbnails and excerpts as a default link and application action treatment.

If your brand has a lot of great content on a blog or community site, now links to that content will show up in a big way without sneaking links into image captions.  Judging by the content on a lot of brand pages I’ve seen lately, most weren’t optimizing links for News Feeds anyhow. Congratulations! Waiting for things to get better just paid off.

Cross-device design has arrived

Facebook just gave the Web design community something wonderful. Now when you’re talking to a crowd about the importance of a device-agnostic Web experience, you can just say, “Like Facebook” and even the staunchest troglodyte will nod in understanding.

Thanks, Zuck.

Next step for brands:  

Sit down with your community managers and content team. Ask them to start answering two questions before posting something to Facebook:

1. Why will our fans care about this content?
2. Why will they share this content?

Best practices of strategic paid support, tight copy, bright images, and time-of-day optimization still apply. Enjoy!

On Sunday, March 10, head over to Antone’s at 9:00 pm.  Need help finding it? Just keep an eye out for Doc’s DeLorean, the General Lee and the A-Team van.  VJ Ian Edgar will kick things off with an insane ‘80s tribute, and then Girl Talk will bring it back to today with one of his signature pop collages.  Don’t worry if you break a sweat busting out moves like Kevin Bacon – there will be plenty of Drakaar Noir and Love’s Baby Soft perfume to freshen up.

Be sure to RSVP and visit the site for more: natgeotv.com/sxsw.

To help promote the program, Mullen created a companion site called Killing Lincoln Conspiracy.

The Killing Lincoln companion site immerses viewers in the world of 1865. As the Civil War draws to a close and tensions mount between the Union and the Confederacy, we follow John Wilkes Booth as he conspires to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Through historical photography, newspaper archives and personal quotes and writings, viewers can explore the motivations behind the murder and the clues leading to Booth’s arrest. The site also highlights the ramifications of Booth’s actions, noting how they changed history and showing modern-day locations live on Google Street View. It approaches a moment in history as something alive and relevant, with parallels to our current time.

And some other useful details:

• This is an HTML5 parallax site design
• There are nearly 1,000 unique content elements: photos, video, audio and text
• Google Street View allows viewers to see locations as they are today
• We worked with the Library of Congress and the National Archives to source content, sometimes even calling local historical societies
• Users can follow along on the site with the live broadcast using a JUMP button
• All content is shareable
• Users can see which location they are currently closest to via geotargeting.

In a related promotional effort, mediahub/Mullen teamed with Millennial Media to drive tune-in through a targeted wi-fi and tablet promotion. The creative features an option to view a full screen video highlight from the show, and as the documentary is airing, the video and accompanying text will dynamically update to reflect what is going on in the program. The changing content of the mobile experience will correspond to the National Geographic Channel desktop site, which will also be updating in real-time.

As my mediahub/Mullen colleague Laurel Boyd explains, “Tablets have carved out a role in the modern home, and for many consumers, they have become an important part of the TV-watching experience. The mobile campaign for ‘Killing Lincoln’ will drive awareness of the show at the perfect time—when consumers are at home, on their tablets and looking for content.”

Enjoy the site and the show, which debuts this Sunday night at 8:00 on National Geographic Channel.

American Greetings began a national search for an advertising agency partner in November 2012; the search was handled by Roth Associates. The company narrowed the selection to four finalists, from which the agency of record was chosen. Mullen was chosen based on its capabilities to grow with American Greetings’ marketing and business needs.

“We selected Mullen for its breadth of experience and approach to helping us meet consumer needs” said Alex Ho, executive director of marketing at American Greetings. “Identifying a strong agency partner is significantly important to our leadership team and our business. We’re very excited to begin working with Mullen, and look forward to the partnership.”

“Innovative, creative, digitally-driven, smart, nice people who want to do fresh new work – American Greetings is an ideal partner for Mullen,” said Alex Leikikh, president of Mullen’s Boston office. “We feel like we’ve landed on a big creative idea that, coupled with the power of our strategic and multi-channel media capabilities, can make a huge impact on American Greetings and all of its amazing brands.”

About American Greetings Corporation
For more than 100 years, American Greetings Corporation (NYSE: AM) has been a creator and manufacturer of innovative social expression products that assist consumers in enhancing their relationships to create happiness, laughter and love.  The Company’s major greeting card lines are American Greetings, Carlton Cards, Gibson, Recycled Paper Greetings and Papyrus, and other paper product offerings include DesignWare party goods and American Greetings and Plus Mark gift-wrap and boxed cards.  American Greetings also has one of the largest collections of greetings on the Web, including greeting cards available at Cardstore.com and electronic greeting cards available at AmericanGreetings.com.  In addition to its product lines, American Greetings also creates and licenses popular character brands through the American Greetings Properties group.  Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings generates annual revenue of approximately $1.7 billion, and its products can be found in retail outlets worldwide.  For more information on the Company, visit http://corporate.americangreetings.com.

Stephen Goldblatt (photo: Carol Vaziri)

Mullen Chief Creative Officer Mark Wenneker announced today that Stephen Goldblatt has joined the agency as Chief Digital Officer. Goldblatt will work with Wenneker to lead a diverse team of creative technologists, user experience specialists and developers across the agency’s Boston and San Francisco offices. Goldblatt comes to Mullen from Evolution Bureau in San Francisco, where he was Partner and Executive Creative Director and led some of the agency’s most innovative digital creative, including Facebook Studio, “Mob the Rainbow” for Skittles, “Serenading Unicorn” for Juicy Fruit and “Gagaville” for Zynga.

 Prior to joining EVB, Goldblatt was at Goodby Silverstein & Partners for eight years as a Group Creative Director, leading some of the agency’s famous and distinguished work for HP (“The Computer Is Personal Again”).

 “What Stephen has done at EVB in the last four years has been awesome to watch,” said Wenneker. “This was an idea born out of trust, friendship and admiration. We have a massive group of digital talent waiting to be led. Now we have that leader.”

“Mullen has the right amount of altitude to be able to take risks other agencies can’t,” said Goldblatt. “We’ll have the opportunity to put into practice the learning from the past four years by developing work for clients across all platforms that originates from a social insight. I’m excited to work with a team that has a shared vision of doing innovative work. And I’m excited to work closely with Mark.”

Goldblatt brings a global perspective to his work, having started his career in Prague at MARK BBDO and subsequently working at DM9DDB in Sao Paulo. He has been recognized at every major international award show, including D&AD, Cannes Lions (where he recently judged the Cyber Lions), Art Directors Club, The One Show, Clio Awards and LIAA. Under his guidance, EVB has twice been recognized as a Stand-Out Agency by Advertising Age and he was personally recognized recently as one of the Top Creative Minds in Digital by to Adweek.