Mass communication can now be more accurately described as mass’ communication considering virtually anyone and everyone has the opportunity to spread their own message about themselves and their lives – including the products and services they endorse or disparage.

That means people outside your company (and your control) talking about your brand colored by their own experience, or worse, echoing as facts fragmented, second-, third-, fourth- or nth-hand opinions from a friend of a friend or an “expert” they follow.

Consider the effect of a rock thrown into a still pond. The first ripples are well defined and intact. But as they move farther away from the source, they quickly lose their cohesiveness and become distorted.

Now consider a pond with no shorelines to keep the ripples from spreading to a point where they lack all resemblance to their original form. It’s easy to see how even the largest brands could easily become deconstructed when communicated (or miscommunicated) on the exponential scale that the Internet provides.

Certainly marketers want to plant content seeds in the hope that they take root among an intended audience who will nurture the content and pass it along. The trick is to keep your brand from being unraveled as it travels hither and yon outside (and even inside) your company’s walls.

Devising a solid content strategy enables you to solidify one single brand message to help ensure all stakeholders spread it accurately.

A good content strategy will take into account the audience, an appropriate tone and voice to match the personality of the brand, along with objectives and challenges the content can help address and solve.

In essence, according to an article in the Spring 2011 edition of Content magazine, published by Custom Content Council, content strategy “is the foundation of consistency that can be used across channels and audiences – a touchstone all marketers and content creators can refer to in order to make sure their efforts are aligned with the brand.”

It’s essential that you clearly communicate and regularly reinforce the content strategy to all members of your company and your vendors. Creatives (inside and outside the company) in their zest to find fresh new ways to communicate your story may stray from the brand. Having a central content strategy will help prevent this from happening.

By necessity, marketing and creative strategies will vary from medium to medium to address the way the intended audience prefers to receive and digest their information. But the key message as defined by the content strategy must remain consistent at all times.

To protect your hard-earned brand, it’s absolutely crucial to track and listen to content as it reverberates through social media channels, sharing, peer-to-peer communication and via word of mouth. Constant monitoring of brand conversations enables you to detect when the message is in danger of becoming distorted. From there, you can react quickly and as aggressively as necessary to inject new and correct dialogue into the conversation to keep your message intact and your brand thriving.

“We tell our friends about your brand not because we like your brand, but because we like our friends.” – Mike Arauz

Words on paper, or even radio or TV for that matter are cheap. Calculated messages designed to sell without a trusted source are more than likely to fall on deaf ears.

It’s the words between friends via text, email, social media or even (yes, people do still talk on occasion) face-to-face conversations that can be invaluable as recommendations, or conversely, insurmountable obstacles in your attempts to gain acceptance of your brand. One favorable opinion from a friend can equal the effect of dozens of ads. In the same way, a negative opinion from that same friend (or a friend of that friend or a blogger your friend follows) can stick like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth.

It wasn’t always this way. In the past, messages about brands were sent and received. Distractions were few and for the most part, the audience was engaged and wanted to believe. If the pitch was clever and promised wonderful things we responded. The power of the media lent credibility to the advertiser. There was no feedback except for sales reports. Brands were what the company wanted them to be and that was that. Of course word-of-mouth spread both favorable and unfavorable opinions, but on a mere fraction of the scale that today’s technology enables.

Today the media has changed. There’s no mystique anymore. The means of mass communication are available to everyone at any time. Yesterday’s consumer has also changed. We’ve become more skeptical. We don’t want to be sold. And we certainly don’t want to just acquire another product. Rather, we want to have an experience that embraces or enhances our lifestyle. In this way, brands need to become living entities that invite customers to become their friends (even partners), partake in their brand experience and share their stories, rather than just buy their products.

As Edward Boches points out, advertising used to be the business of telling stories, now it’s the business of getting other people to tell stories for us.

In effect, people become the stories. Their experiences translated into their own words and spread among their friends is the advertising that’s going to be remembered one way or another. From that point, mainstream advertising either supports their story or is ignored.

So how do you get the ball rolling? How do you inspire people to engage with your brand and tell your stories for you? Again, according to Edward Boches, the message (along with expanding the medium) needs to evolve so that:

• Attention-getting becomes Shareable
• Original becomes Interactive
• Unexpected becomes Participatory
• Entertaining becomes Useful
• Emotional becomes Ongoing engagement

Understand that communities have replaced target audiences. Know where your intended customers hang out and understand their relationship to media and technology. Learn to leverage the network effect on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media.

Remember that being valuable is more important than just being different. Create utility instead of just messages. And above all else, get people involved. Think about ways you can turn passive listeners into inspired (and well-connected) storytellers. Have them turn your story into their own and they’ll do your marketing for you.

No one can refute the incredible impact the Internet has had on our daily lives as individuals in the ways we shop, gather information and socialize. But now the Internet is playing a much larger role. It’s being used to change entire countries. The current state of political unrest in Egypt is a perfect example.

No longer can countries and their leaders hide behind an iron, bamboo or any other curtain for that matter. Even if outsiders and foreign news crews can’t get in, witnesses inside with cell phones can instantly get first-hand photos and messages out to their countrymen and the world at large.

Information has always been the key to power. And with power comes the opportunity and ability to enact change – for better or worse. Young digital revolutionaries are now using the power of social networking to both share their ideologies and inspire would-be activists throughout the region.

In Egypt where a sizeable majority of the population is under 35, the Web is a natural pulpit from which to spread information and opinions about social topics including rising unemployment and other problems that need to be addressed.

To protect their existing governments and help curb unrest, some regimes, including Egypt’s have tried to limit so-called “liberation technology” including Internet and cell phone service as they realize that the voice of protest is amplified and transmitted instantly (and globally) through social media and on the Web.

But such heavy-handed tactics, reminiscent of tanks in the street, are both ineffective and counter productive. Refusing to provide access to, or use the channels of communication your audience favors to monitor and respond to their grievances limits interaction and dialogue, and may even be construed as arrogance, serving to drive the wedge even deeper.

It’s clear that just as companies have been required to embrace the Internet to create favorable and lasting relationships with their customers, so too must governments learn to reach out and listen to their citizens in the preferred media and language of the day.

“You can’t stop the signal.”  Mr. Universe, Serenity

Two nights ago, myself and colleagues Kevin O’Callaghan and Jared Roy attended the first CATFOA- Conversations About the Future of Advertising- of 2011.

Ana Andjelic, Sr. Planner at HUGE inc. dazzled the audinece with the presentation “Do We Need a New Definition of Creativity?” Answer? YES.

Jared, Kevin, myself and the rest of the crowd listened while this Serbian Superstar taught us how the digital landscape is fierce, dynamic and more complex than ever, and how marketers, brands and consumers need to embrace this electric environment, not avoid it.

Here are my initial takeaways.

Now, and moving forward:

• Think complex, not simple.
• Single solutions, or single core ideas, or single jingles don’t cut it anymore.
• Digital environment = unknown unknowns –> complex (not complicated) adaptive system.
• Rapid changing world where outcomes are unpredictable, risks are incalculable etc.
• Expertise alone is not enough, all bets are off.
• Once behaviors get involved, that’s when things become complex.
• When addressing a person more so than a product, or something complex altogether, you have to take into account the entire context (sources of knowledge, community the person is in, technology the person uses etc.)
• Think of creativity as a medium, not the end product.
• Does it contribute to behavior?
• example: neighborgoods.net. A creative solution? Yes. But, more importantly, this is a platform that combines geo-location, crowd-sourcing      and community but focuses on needs and behaviors, not a product! This is a consumption market place that seperates goods/services exchange from brands. This is a trend that will continue to grow.
• Life starts for a product when it leaves the store (Swapping, rather than purchasing begins, this is collaborative participatory behavior).
• Pepsi Refresh – Pepsi is the mediator between the idea and execution.
• The best creative is alive. Like an organism, it needs to evolve, do something, adapt, or change its behavior while considering its context and environment. If it does not live, it will be forgotten.
• Unique behavioral-based communities: Skyara –> Bartering/swapping services (snowball effect) How About We –> Dating
• Content may be king, but context is key.
• People aren’t buying based on brand perceptions anymore (but context).
• Marketing will always be in “beta”
• Creative brief is not to drill down an idea, but to be a starting point for the growth of an idea(s).
• Collaborative consumption, a core driver behind community and interaction, is a rapidly growing trend.
• Planners are thinking about execution now more than ever (not just insights, but how to spread these insights contextually across this complex space).
• Allow people and their behavior to be the medium, and watch your brand grow.
• You can present the end product in a simple manner for the user, but that does not mean to simplify the business problem or avoid the context of the complex environment that inevitably exists.
• Campaigns shouldn’t have expiration dates.
• No shortcuts(5 month Old Spice Guy break).  Give legs to emotions, don’t drop off after execution.
• Be less wrong than yesterday.

If Ana is truly onto something, which I believe she is, I think that many industry people and agencies will be frightened. Why?

• The old job paradigms are fading – writer/art director teams that run the show, account people who just do strategy and budget allocations, the importance of award shows, salaries based on awards or tv spots, etc.
• It’s coming, but making money from it is still in limbo. (Ana suggests it will be based on performance, after the fact, not a fixed budget).
• Will the leading creative agencies of today still lead? Or, will they play “catch up” as they did with the early internet / web revolution?
• Will digital agencies become bigger than traditional ones? Will they even be called agencies?
• What will the learning curve be like for clients, agencies, and the people involved on both sides? Where will training come from? When will schools catch up?
• ( Kevin ) I have long believed that advertising ruins many aspects of our culture and our economy. Hopefully this will be the revolution to make a better model.

This presentation truly opened my eyes and left me inspired. I plan to approach my everyday job and outlook with the above takeways in mind, as I am confident that this is truly what’s in store for the future of advertising.

Big thanks to Tim Brunelle, MIMA and MCAD for putting it on!