Your help please

I've been asked to speak in a conference about Leveraging content to access younger audiences and early adopters on digital platforms. Any thoughts on what you think the do's and don't are welcome...and any reflections or examples on/for my 5 starters below are extremely welcome: 1. Create a culture around the brand not just a campaign or a message. 2. Give them an experience and don't chase exposure for expoure's sake, do not say. 3. Give them something that they can participate in - not treating them like a passive audience. 4. Be authentic not didactic. 5. Allow them to carry your idea forward - their way.

Life in Second Life: The Holiday Video

Trash Talk Tells it as it is HERE: Click on watch film on the left.

10. Random thoughts on Second Life

1. A place for 'forward thinking, innovative ad agencies' to show us how forward thinking & innovative ad agencies they are. (Dad in school disco) 2. Chatted to David Reuters from Reuters in SL a great deal of interest about their venture at least they have an interesting idea - the intersection between virtual and real news. 3. A place for Americans to come and make money and for others they come to find out about the rest of the world. 4. You can watch a stripper and run a spreadsheet on the same desktop neither sheet is worth getting underneath. 5. Brands are trying to exploit it while its users are trying to enjoy it. 6. There is nothing really new in Second Life pretty much everything in it is already in Real Life ... its just the way you do it is different. 7. People in Second Life have really weird alter egos (flaming wings anyone?) wonder what they look like in real life (bloke with a beard from bexley heath?). 8. SL is clunky techy geeky but when it becomes more like real life that's when it will really be an interesting proposition for example VOIP will enable you to have multiple voice conversations live. Ultimately Second Life - I humbly predict - is on a trajectory to become as close to real life as possible...but 9. Second Life is a metaphor for fantasy and that has always been with us not just now. So will it loose its fantasy? 10. It's all about people people. Technology may give us new ways to connect and make clans but it is still about people and always was always will be.

Clients of the future will look like this...

The top ten marketing innovators in Ag Age's report showed some interesting characters. Trever Edwards the VP Global Brand Management for Nike who was born in London and pretty much worked in every major city had this to say about Nike innovation:

We think a lot about the need to bring something new to the marketplace, but we don't think about it as just being new; we think about: How is this better than the last thing we brought to the marketplace?

According to Edwards it's not innovation for innovation's sake. A father of two three year old twins Edwards is inspired by how his children always see the world with a fresh pair of eyes. Another interesting US marketer is Paolo Timoni CEO Piagio US. He had a great lovely brand and cool product but the Americans didn't want it I mean its small to start with and didn't know where to park it right? Wrong. He started a campaign about

"Vespanomics" concept, which the company defines as "the ecological, economic and personal satisfaction one achieves after buying a Vespa scooter."

This is interesting but what's more interesting is what Mr. Timoni did when Bush announced a drive against American's 'addiction to oil' Timoni wrote an open letter in The New York Times, addressed to all U.S. mayors, encouraging them to find a place for scooters in their cities. The letter received an overwhelmingly positive response, not only from pro-scooter bloggers but from the mayors, who invited the company to present at a conference of mayors in May. Now could this idea have come from an ad agency who is only interested in selling 30second ads ... I doubt it but damn it gets mayors in every city consider giving your product government approved distribution not to mention putting your product on the public agenda. And of-course the latest campaign moved from "Vespanomics" to "Vespatition" to call for facilities for two-wheel vehicles. The client of the future is an opportunist, propagandist as well as innovator.

The Consumer is not an idiot it's your ...