Wieneke’s first rule of sales: “in order to sell the shoe, show the shoe”. Nowhere is this more true than in car sales.

But in this ad, Mercedes substitutes some “product lust” for, well…lust. And my question is – if this ad were in heavy rotation would have on demand.

Same, neutral or negative?

How much of the digital brands that you create are visual?

Since digital experiences are mostly screen-based, the answer is that almost all our work is visual.

Before anyone cares about our words, clients experience our brand, usually visually. Sure, our Kantian monkey minds boil everything down to words, but they come from experiences. In fact, studies of cognition teach us words are how we remember experiences.

So, while this lovely viral video sets out to make the case for the power of words in marketing, I think power of its story comes from just about everything but words.

So take quick look. Do you agree with their copy “that marketing is the power of words” or if you agree with their example, “that marketing is an accumulation of experience“?

The last 24 hours has been awesome ball soup cool. 

It all started with the launch of Columbia sportswear’s very cool Portable Activity Log app. This free app builds on Columbia’s customers’ passion for adventure, by giving them and everyone else who joins in a free tool to collect and share news of your adventures.

I think their corporate home page’s announcement may be the best thing I’ve seen on a computer screen. Columbia’s devoted the bulk of their home page to promoting its launch – and again, the word awesome comes to mind. Take a look.

Today Engadget described it as lapping Google’s related offering…that’s a good day!

Google’s own adventure tracking app just got majorly one-upped by a company that also happens to make heated jackets…It’s free to download, and aside from monitoring your hikes and treks via GPS, it also syncs photos, videos, and trail information to a web journal automatically, complete with pinpoint geotagging information on each piece of media…

It’ll keep track of elevation changes, current speed and distance traveled, and it makes sharing said trips to social networks — quite the lesson in simplicity.

Get it for yourself free –  The app is a cross between Map My Run, Four Square, and your trusty GPS. Give it a spin.

• Download Columbia’s GPS Pal from the App Store.
• Download Columbia’s GPS Pal from Google Play.

If you read this blog, you know how highly I think of ISITE’s customer experience and mobile teams – and Gene Ehrbar who I’ve co-taught mobile marketing bootcamp with. Its great working on strategy with a team that challenges you to go big, and to see this kind of delivery on brands from consumer, to B2B, to .EDUs.

As a one-time trek guide and digital native, it doesn’t get better than this. Please send any feedback you like this way — and if you dig it write a review and tell friends.

Remember – you can’t luck out if you’re not there….and if you do luck out, get a few photos or videos of the good times, plant some GPS markers, and tell the story in style.

I’ve been seeing a lot written about “the social media bubble” in places like the NY Times, NPR, and Atlantic Monthly. A theme you’ll find across their coverage is that the sale of Instagram is a mark of the social media end times.

I’m the first person to point out the folly of assigning universal values to followers and friends. Really, doesn’t it matter just who those friends are, and what your plans are for them? Besides, there are bigger forces, such as the end of the PC era that will do more to shift customer experience and business models than social media. So, what other signs of social media’s value might we find?

This week the Huffington Post became the first blog to ever win a Pulitzer Prize.

The prize for HuffPo’s David Wood’s is stunning 10-part series “Beyond the Battlefield,” which describes the lives of severely injured Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans. The blog invested in a long term effort, allowing Wood to interview veterans over an eight month period. The reporting is paired with striking photo journalism. Take a look. (above)

Matt Wuerker, Politico’s editorial cartoonist and illustrator also won a Pultizer for “his consistently fresh, funny cartoons, especially memorable for lampooning the partisan conflict that engulfed Washington”. You can see a carousel of his work here. Though Politico is printed for distribution in DC, most people know it as a blog.

Okay, both publications and the Pulitzer committee may all be in the bubble. But that’s not the point. There’s real revenue being racked-up, and value being established. Sure there’s uncertainty, but that’s not a bubble, its just good old risk. (if you want a real bubble, find a place where government financing is falsely buoying prices: college tuition and corn seem more bubbelicious to me than Pinterest with its 22 employees.

Bubble or Sale?
Not long ago Ad Age summed up this whole social media and digital media shift: “Marketers: Digital offers us more for less“. We’re in a tight economy, many big firms are cutting advertising to protect margins. They’re moving part of it to digital, and depending on its greater efficiency to make up for over all ad cuts. Cuts in one area of marketing are fueling the development of new owned and earned media channels. When Facebook ads are selling at $1 CPM, the bubble feels far from full; it feels like a sale. Knowing that Facebook is steaming toward a possible $100B IPO, raises the negotiating floor for any strategic purchase it makes. America is leading in digital marketing, and the investment world is fueling a ton of innovation in this “bubble”. (There are tons of examples: ExactTarget’s IPO, Schoolology – a Blackboard competitor in the .edu space, and Path come to mind.)

Sure, there is an irrational exuberance among those who thoughtlessly pursue the endless string of bright shiny objects in digital marketing. Darwin punishes stupid change as surely as those who fail to innovate. But in this environment, you’re either in motion or out of the game. More than ever, change isn’t optional, bubble or not.

My friend Jonathan Wells at The Christian Science Monitor is fond of noting that “every day is a new adventure.” He uses the phrase in humor and gratitude.

One of my adventures for 2012 has been starting a graduate course in digital marketing at Northeastern’s program in digital media. The journey started back in March at the Usability Professionals annual big meeting in Boston. In the months that followed, I started to get to know Northeastern as a thesis adviser. This let me meet people at the end of the digital media program, and think about the kinds of marketing frameworks that would complement their hands-on skills in site development and video.

Its Always the People
First, you should know the students in the program are A-mazing. All are pursuing graduate degrees as part of a career changes or upgrades. Northeastern has a tradition of bringing diverse groups together,  which shows in my notably global group, with half the class hailing from international locations: Poland, Venezuela, Thailand, China, Moldova.

The second thing to know is that they’re smart. They have great takes on how digital is changing the industries they’ve worked in and how it touches their lives. Some walked in able to rattle-off Porters five forces and Kotler’s Ps. So now the real test begins.

Flip the Class
The team at Northeastern has challenged me to flip the class by taking much of the information transfer-part of the class to on-demand video, so our in-person time can focus on answering questions, discussion, and welcoming experts.

This is helping me turn a corner. For years I’ve written blog posts on the growing importance of video to marketers, all along recognizing the hypocrisy of writing about video. This exercise has encouraged me to move from knowing that video is important to making more of it myself.

Here’s the line up of the first week’s online teaching.

Yep, we’re not going light on the information transfer. We’re just taking a lot of it out of class so we can use in-person time better.

We’ll dig in to demand generation, SEO, video, social, mobile, brand management, digital advertising, and optimization…but we’re starting out with a focus on how marketing changes business. I’m hoping to expand the view of marketing from “the make it pretty” department that exists in some firms to a broader view about marketing as the positioner of the total firm to its markets. (All four of Kotler’s Ps, not just promotion.)

At the moment I’m working with a great set of clients who are doing some groundbreaking work in mobile and making data-driven experiences part of their brand strategy. This gives me extra ideas to bring to the exchange that is interactive learning, and a great sounding board to test out concepts during outside time with clients. It also means things will be extra busy, and extra interesting for a few months. What could be better?

Every day is a new adventure; I hope you enjoy yours in good company.

It may take time, but no matter how good or bad things are, progress is possible.

Optimists believe this is the best of all worlds; pessimists fear it is.

So find your dissatisfaction and work with it. Put a lemon to its best use.

End of fortune cookie. Dave

I’m pleased to announce this free webinar on one of the absolute hottest topics in digital marketing, future proofing our work as we move to a post PC environment.

Consumers today already expect fully responsive experiences across a huge number of devices and platforms. However, designing individually for the array smart phone operating systems, tablets, game consoles, and now even car dashboards, is a path to stranded effort and investment. The good news is that there is a solution to this.

Smart companies are finding they can use an approach called Responsive Design to sense visitor’s device parameters and render a digital experience optimized for them.

When: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 1pm – 2pm Eastern
Where: on your computer
How: Register for Future Friendly Mobile Development here.
Who: My colleague and friend, Gene Ehrbar, is the Director of Mobile Solutions at ISITE Design. 

If you’re thinking about how to develop great mobile solutions that can adapt to the future, then this hour should be inked in to your schedule. Having taught Mobile Marketing Boot Camp with Gene, I know insightful, expert, and generous he is. This will be good.

Tell him Dave sent you. ;>

Today I’m at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School speaking at the Bridging the Digital Gap confrere, where I’ll be sharing thoughts on building digital careers.

You can get the flavor of what we’re talking about. I’ll be suggesting that many of the same things that make for good digital marketing also foster successful digital careers.

I hope you’ll take a look at the slide deck — and also if you’re around, please mark your calendar for next Wednesday to join my friend and ISITE Design colleague Gene Ehrbar a free webinar on Responsive Deisgn. This is how to make future friendly websites that adapt to well to the demands of mobile technology, and its a hot topic among designers, strategists, and those of us who love mobile.

Thanks to everyone who made today happen, and to everyone who turned out before a big holiday weekend.

Bridging the Digital Gap by Dave Wieneke

A Conference on Digital Careers and Business Opportunity at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School. April 6, 2012.

Storified by Dave Wieneke · Sat, Apr 07 2012 12:25:35

@HeyNitro Yeah! @usefularts is a great speaker. He’s also been on a panel with Dave. ^TVsnap

Welcome to Bentley University
Its 6pm and I’m eating sushi outside the LaCava student center at Bentley University before giving a guest lecture. About a quarter of the people I meet are international. It’s 80 degrees and spring break is over. Everyone seems tanned rested and relieved.

But behind the happy afternoon, higher education in America is facing challenges big enough to nearly end its existence on the way to dramatically remaking it.

We’re already aware of the looming obligation of debt that students too often graduate into. And too often, they find their academic work doesn’t line up to corresponding professional rewards.

Could Higher Education Become a Sucker Bet?
There is a point at which the cost of higher education becomes a sucker bet. That usually happens when everyone agrees something is a sure win. Often there are even loan programs to extend such markets, and cost bubbles emerge. And those last in get hurt the worst. Sounds familiar, right?

But cost isn’t higher education’s only challenge.

A recent poll showed that professors know less that one-fifth of their students by name. The speed of economic and business changes makes the half-life of specific knowledge conveyed in undergraduate education breathtakingly short.

Students need the kind of creative and adaptive skills that can only come from instructors who know them up close, who can encourage and evaluate them, and will remember their names for a few months. Anonymity is a clearly an anti-pattern to this kind of involved learning.

Student Consulting Teams Work at Bentley
So  I was delighted to walk across the Bentley University campus with my host, Mari Anne, as she stopped and visited with no fewer than three separate teams of students working together before her class. They were preparing marketing programs for real small-business clients that are part of their course with her.

 By this time in the year, she knows them both by name and more: here’s the bad boy who often has great ideas; she’s driven and we did a session to get her ready for a Digitas interview; he’s up for a job at Hubspot and is headed out sailing after graduation.

She opens up the network, allowing students unfettered access during class.  (yes, America, students play Tetris during lectures – certainly during mine.) She puts the week’s quiz questions up on the screen early, letting early arrivers get a few minutes extra to answer her weekly marketing current-events quiz.

• What big Apple event occurred while we were on break? (The iPad launch)
• How are big-box retailers cashing in on Apple’s big event? (Early openings, which Apple loves.)
• How is Amazon getting in on Apple’s big event? (With a new reader for the hi-res new iPad.)
• What major digital event occurred in Austin, TX while we were on break? (SxSW)

It’s the kind of information you’d expect young marketers to have “top of mind.” It creates a culture of people who are on top of the space, even during spring break. “The more knowledge you have that is relevant and current, the happier I am,” says Mari Anne.

Ideas, Action and Adaptation
I give my short talk on how marketers can use the rubric of Lay Epistemology to plan campaigns that shift audience beliefs, and a quick flyover of how to analyze “conversion architecture” on landing pages. It’s just academic enough to inspire note-taking. And when the questions start, it gets fun.

These are people on deadline; they want to know if these ideas will help them deliver better advice. “What’s the right mix between inbound techniques and advertising?” “How far into social media can you expect a client to go who is non-technical?” “How can you advise a company that badly needs market research?”

Professor as Account Director
When two students mention their plan to visit a restaurant they’re advising, Mari Anne asks, “What for? If it’s to get the vibe, go at rush hour. If it’s to talk to the client, go late – one owner is always in the kitchen, and they’re more accessible during closedown.”

Mari Anne functions like an Account Director. She wants to see previews of their client-solution pitches, and emphasizes that they have to connect ideas to next steps that the clients will be able to put into action.

Most of the class is headed to graduation. They’re interviewing at agencies, marketing service companies, and media firms. Thanks to Mari Anne, each has worked for clients usually in two different industries. They know current events, speak the lingo, and expect to adapt ferociously to a fast-changing industry.

A half -of them have sent me LinkedIn invitations before I’m out of the room. They’ve tweeted the night’s high points, and dropped ideas into draft PowerPoint stacks for their clients. They get the need to connect to a broader network, and to have skills and points of view that set them apart. Some may become friends, competitors, clients or colleagues.

In just two months, most will be alumni. They’ll be filling the gap between the promise of digital media and the best we’ve done, so far. We’ve got a long way still to go. So, I’ll be at two more universities this week. To know the future of digital marketing, it helps to see the next generation’s talent.

As a marketer, journalist and learner, I’ve always had a nagging feeling about the idea of “content”.

Its a terribly generic word, which too often gets used by engineers and designers to describe undifferentiated marketing messages.  You know, after building a great page template, someone says “the content goes here.”

I’ve recently enjoyed serving on a committee with Margot Bloomstein who makes getting people to think about and plan “good content” her specialty. Thursday nigh, ISITE Design  hosted a little after work book launch bash for her.  I posted an announcement of this here, and got to see a few old friends too.

The registration and attendee list is here. 

Thanks for coming out – I hear that Wayne Kurtzman will be posting photos of the night here.