Clearly we are right in the middle of a major shift in our time. Having spent the past ten years working our way out of the shadows of the 20th century – we are just getting started on what the future holds when it comes to how we consume information, communicate, purchase products and more.

Right now we are in the middle of the latest evolutionary phase of digital media. The hyper active digital media users and experts are harnessing what social media really is. We are seeing new businesses, products and marketing campaigns take form in front of our eyes.

How do companies position themselves for success in this rapidly changing media environment?

A great place to start is to follow these two awesome digital execs at Edelman PR, Steve Rubel and Dave Armano.  Both recently acknowledged changes going on right now in some recent articles they posted up online.

In Steve Rubel’s It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as we know it he acknowledges the web will come to an end as mobile takes over:

According to Morgan Stanley, within five years global internet consumption on mobile devices will surpass the same activity on PCs. This sounds like good news. It won’t be enough just to build branded mobile applications that repurpose content across all of the different platforms. That’s like newspapers taking the print experience and replicating it on the web as they tried back in the 1990s. Rather, we will need to rethink, remix and repackage information for an entirely different modality than platforms of yore.

Steve accurately points out that companies shouldn’t make the same mistakes when it comes to the mobile revolution that old media companies did in the 90s by replicating their print format and business model and applying it to the web platform. As we have seen recently – repeating old business models within a new format equates to a major fail.

In Dave Armano’s Why marketing won’t look like marketing in the post-conumer era states:

Providing better products, better experiences and providing indisputable value through things like services will get the right people saying the right things about you. This means there’s going to be a Dawrinism effect at play here. Inferior brands, services and marketing strategies are going to fall on deaf ears and wither away while superior brands with more relevant and meaningful ways of connecting with their customers will prevail.

The point?

The rules of the game have and will continue to rapidly change.

Don’t be a business lagger – be a business leader. Pay attention to your target audience. Take in the entire landscape. Create products that offer value. Listen to your tribe. Incentivize them to participate in the conversation. Maybe then – consumers will buy product and thank your company for making their lives a little easier in these trying times.

An era of change requires one to be constantly changing within themselves, within their organization – this includes small and large businesses, no one is immune.

Lastly, if you want to learn more from these two maestros then see this great deck on Six Digital Trends to watch out for. It. Is. Sick.

What is there not to like about the genius Old Spice personalized video replies to social media users? Sure enough this has been all the rage on the Twitter feed among fans of the brand and marketers this week.

NewTeeVee recently reported that there were 5.9 million views of the videos day one.

This kind of program personalizes the brand. Shows a brand making a genuine effort. This adds to the campaigns “ tongue-and-cheek” edge. I mean, Alyssa Milano tweeted that she made her husband jealous and he went out and purchased Old Spice after never being a user of the deodorant.

Do you get better organic co-signing? A Hollywood actress tweets about how Old Spice is involved in her life AND she even did a video response to the Old Spice man.

Edward Boches of Mullen states “I haven’t contacted or spoken with anyone at Weiden and Kennedy, the agency behind the Old Spice idea, but clearly they have just gone out and done what is likely to be labeled one of the best examples of “the new integration.”

Ed Cotton poses some interesting questions on what this means for the future of communication strategy and creative.

But, Doug Karr  asks – is all this hype actually pushing the needle on Old Spice sales? After all the dust settles – this is the REAL question to ask and consider amongst all the hoopla and hype.

Regardless, kudos to W+K (yet again) for pushing the envelope and showing us a new way to use Television and online communications to spark a genuine conversation around a brand.

UPDATE: Old Spice Sales Double with YouTube Campaign

When I was an Agent in Hollywood we would often try to figure out the model we could build for clients in the vein of Asthon Kutcher, Ryan Seacrest and Lebron James in the sense of – how can we turn star’s brand and persona into an entire media operation and business?

Junta42’s Joe Pulazzi explains how Lebron and his team have managed to architect a media ecosystem and has positioned his brand for future media success.

Mazel tov Lebron.

That said, I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say how disappointing his free-agency hoopla was last week.   Not only was there so much overdone hype but WME agency and ESPN figured out a way to get Lebron his one-hour of air time to announce his free-agency decision. Sure enough, there is a back-lash from the public because the TV program just plain sucked and was a whole lot of nothing.  For more on why this was a failure I encourage folks to read Ed Cotton’s post on Lebron and the problem of brand self-importance.

Media empire versus brand management.  Looks like Lebron’s pursuit for maximizing the value of his brand by leveraging an hour of television to make a career change announcement has now back fired and damaged his brand image.  We’ll all forget come fall/winter 2010 but in the meantime, everyone will have an eyebrow raised at Lebron.

Watching TV last night. Saw this awesome commercial playing a jazzy rendition the U.S. Army’s Reveille morning call while showing Americans getting ready and grinding away at their American hustle.

I thought – this is genius, whose commercial is this? Whose work? Sure enough American Express Open Forum via ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Simply brilliant.

Don’t let the recession show you what’s up – YOU show the recession what is up.

Start booming.

Love it.

From WARC article:

As part of the process, Philips, which also carried away the Film Grand Prix last year with ‘Carousel’, produced five online shorts via an alliance with directors from Ridley Scott Associates.

The ads, which were developed in conjunction with DDB London, were reported by Film Craft head judge Jon Kamen to have “blown the jury away”.

Philips marketing chief Gary Raucher believed the corporation had now buried its previous reputation for lacking a creative spark. “Philips has gone through a transformation. Three years ago we wouldn’t have even been at Cannes,” he said.

Rory Sutherland says many expensive fixes are just obscuring simpler answers. In a terrific Ted discussion -Rory reveals some humorous examples of how changing behavior has nothing to do with the size of the budget or the force behind a program yet big institutions don’t like to admit to this reality.

Rory believes we can use a Chief Detail Officer in corporations and Governments can use an Agency of Detail that invests their time in finding out ways to spend the least amount of money/resources to solve problems versus just throwing money at problems and hoping novel solution(s) will return in result.

The man makes quite a point here – worth the watch.

Big ups to Caleb Kramer for letting me know about this video.

If you don’t think social media has and will continue to change how we share information and communicate then please take a few minutes to watch this video. These are some crazy statistics. Wow.

Intel’s holographic window display (ala Minority Report) looks absolutely amazing. Per the article on The Social Path, Intel admits they are three to five years away from this.  Can you imagine how techonolgy like this will influence our shopping experience and how we buy things?  The future is here.

PSFK presents Future of Retail report

View more presentations from PSFK.

PSFK is an amazing company that I’ve been following for the past three years. Their latest presentation - the future of retail is amazing.  If you want to catch a glimpse of what’s to come in the retail business then take a few minutes and review this deck.  It is awesome.