With the press now focusing mostly on hardware battles (“Can the Xoom beat the iPad2?”) we have almost overlooked some signifcant advances in mobile interfaces. Take Android’s new map application: You push a button. You say “From here to the next McDonalds”, and the phone guides you there. Amazing. Android now has voice enabled mobile search, email writing and even translation!

If Apple really integrates and improves on Siri, the virtual personal assisitant service it acquired last year, your voice will soon book you a restaurant table, movie tickets, and the cab home – without ever typing a single word. What a great and seamless way to buy things. (And fantastic way to scare advertisers, of course.)

However, this is about more than just establishing a really useful connection between products and people.

In my book, the future wants to look a lot like StarTrek. So how do people aboard the Enterprise use their computers? Textinput via keyboard is reserved for really complex operations. Entering coordinates for a new course, maybe. But if you want some information, you just ask.

We are approaching a time when keyboards will be our second choice of input. Combined with the first samples of semantic intelligence, that’s going to make computers beautiful and simple and great and everything I want. But I feel this will also have an effect on the tone of voice on the web in general.

If you look at forums and written feedback on the net, you can’t help but thinking there’s a gigantic gashing hole along the starboard side of civilization. The flaming wars on Usenet were fluffy cotton candy against the invectives people hurl at each other on any given forum today: whether they talk about the Miami Heat, nuclear power or a new mobile phone tariff.

An internet of voices should put a lid on some of the SCREAMING! that seems to be everywhere today. Because the “typed internet” offers us two layers of depersonalization and camouflaging. The first layer is the fictional avatar identity, like “nomadguy23″. The second one is keyboard-typing. It is less personal than handwriting, and definitely much less personal than talking. No wonder it’s tempting to snipe.

I have a feeling that an internet of voices will be a more polite internet: First, because our digital assistant phone will be right there “listening” to us. Even though he/she/it might not be real, it is a completely different experience from posting into an anonymous form field. Most of all though, talking aloud makes us socially accountable.  Remember when our parents explained the concept of “outside/inside voice” to us?

Imagine using Google mobile on a train. As long as typing was your first method of input, googling “articles about the “Whore of Akron” (forumspeak for LeBron James) wasn’t all that hard. But now you have to talk into your phone in this crowded subway car. Wouldn’t you rather say “Articles about LeBron James with really unfriendly and harsh ciriticism”? ;-)

I sure think so. And I definitely hope so, or the subway of the future will have to make do without me.

PS: Longer interview with the founder of Siri is here. Well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EySAW1C60is&feature=related

If an agency names itself Anomaly, it forces a burden of proof on itself that wouldn’t be there, had it just picked a bunch of initials. However, Johnny Vulkan, one of the founders of the New York marketing outfit, doesn’t look like he’s about to crumble under the pressure: “We don’t think of ourselves as an advertising agency.” he insists.

Strange words from an company that just took home the Outdoor Grand Prix at the Cannes Advertising Festival for it’s “Be Stupid” Diesel Campaign. But what is it then? A lot of attention usually goes to Anomaly’s attempts at creating and owning intellectual property. But you might call that a symptom. At the company’s core lies a different understanding of an agency’s marketing competence, one that encompasses more than telling the right stories.

“Marketing includes the product, the pricing and the distribution, as well as promotion”, and according to Vulkan, most current ad agencies only work on the promotional communication part. This allows them to assemble large teams of highly specialized experts for creating ads. Which, in turn, necessitates massively selling those experts, even if creating ads might not be the best marketing solution. Ad agencies have little incentive to risk other routes of creating economic success for a client’s product. That’s why, regardless of the hours we put in, Vulkan claims that “Advertising is lazy.”

Anomaly aims for more. Like a business consultancy looking for lasting competitive advantage, Anomaly works to let a product win the marketing game consistently; not just when huge media spends spike the customer’s interest.

This sounds great in theory, but we all know that the “lazyness” of advertising is created and supported by many a client’s tendency to underpay creativity and overpay labour. How does Anomaly overcome the problem of putting a price on creativity? That’s where their signature features of creating actual products, co-owning intellectual property, and success-driven pricing come into play. By exposing themselves to business risks, they expect to gain a share of voice in the entire marketing deliberations of their clients.

“When you decide you’re in the business of asking the real questions and solving the real problems, you often find very quickly that the problem is the product itself. … In the old days, the client comes in and puts a mediocre product on the table, and everyone in the room is not saying how this product is not as good as the competition.” I am pretty sure these “old days” are pretty much yesterday’s meeting for most ad agencies.

To be able to criticize a clients product and survive, Anomaly assembled a different kind of team. A creative CFO, a media planner, a Nike brand manager, an Urban Outfitters CD, an innovation strategist,… And it’s not only the skillset that’s different, it’s the attitude, too. From the beginning, Anomaly quickly became “a place for refugees from various parts of the creatives industries.” People who weren’t quite happy with the limits and the isolation of their previous jobs.

“I guess ‘curiousity’ is the main quality we look for.” Vulkan is talking about what the smarties at IDEO have called “T-shaped people”, experts who are able to collaborate and cross-pollinate with other experts: bringing together things that seem apart.

A typically anomalous project – and one of my personal favourites – is “Avec Eric” a television show for Michelin-starred Eric Ripert, Chef of famous NY restaurant Le Bernardin. Anomaly created – and co-owns – the show to raise Ripert’s profile and explore his potential as a brand.

I asked Johnny how the various talents at Anomaly approach such a project. Not surprisingly, it depends on the perspective that promises to be most productive. “If you’re a designer, you look at the form, as an advertiser you might look at the best story to tell, if your a business consultant you understand the cost of a product”. With Eric Ripert, they realized it wasn’t about PR stunts, or great headlines. “Avec Eric was very much driven out of media thinking.” The goal: creating a longform story which gives space to Ripert’s unique character, plus building a sellable media property, while avoiding direct competition with the glut of cooking shows out there.

The result was a combination of travel diary and cooking show. “Avec Eric” centers around Ripert’s convictions regarding the production of food. It shows him visiting producers and friends, and celebrates how their love of quality is an inspiration to him. “We wanted to show Eric as what he really is, this intellectual kind of chef.”

“Avec Eric” was a big success commercially as well as creatively, grabbing an Emmy in its first season, with the 2nd Season wrapped and the 3rd one in planning.

While Anomaly came up with the concept, most of the actual writing and directing is done by a production company specializing in cooking shows. One of my final questions was therefore, whether the Anomaly way of doing things doesn’t move the agency into a mere producer’s role. It might, says Vulkan, but agencies have always done that: ”An Art Director does not take a photograph. They don’t direct the film. Don’t edit it. They ask questions of people who do that.”

Most of the skills that Anomaly’s new world of marketing demands should thus be well within the comfort zone of a good creative. “Open Mindedness is probably the key. … It’s that balance of having a strong opinion, but then having enough humility and space to allow experts to help and lead you.”

After all the talk on how Anomaly is different, Vulkan admits that “that’s actually, bizzarrely, not a new role at all. … We’ve just broadened the number of people we play with.”

With so many more options to do work, the folks at Anomaly might help your brand without ever shooting an ad or writing a line of copy. But you’d be a fool to call them lazy.

Thus, when I recently met Creative Director Juan Morales from SapientNitro in their Miami Beach office, I was curious about their creative culture. They seem to have found a way to use technology to surprise – and even bring forth a chuckle. SapientNitro’s award winning ideas include an icecream machine that dispenses free ice-cream when you smile at it.

Mixing Art and Science isn’t easy: It requires the right people and the right way of working together. So who does SapientNitro recruit? What kind of creative comes up with the idea for something like the Autotrader App that can tell you the value of any car you see?

Apparently, there isn’t a typical neo-creative yet: “We have a lot of kids here that never did advertising before.” says Juan. But as he mentions that there are many web-developers in his team, I can’t help but think that it’s probably easier to move from a deep understanding of technology into branding than going the opposite way.

Either way, once-separate skillsets are finally converging, Juan says: “You get a new kind of creative.”
What is new about them? Mostly, their focus on making those digital things really work: Not just for the red eyed jury member in Cannes, but for you and me when we use it. “We’re consumers first.” says the Creative Director, which is really different from the old style CD who “only” needed to understand the consumer.

That’s why the guys at SapientNitro don’t think of themselves as a “digital” agency, Juan says. His team is creating ideas for their clients, any way they need them. He smiles while he relays some of the initial confusion that SapientNitro inevitably causes: being a tech company – and a creative agency! But the truth is, turning data into value will become one of the biggest fields for brand differentiation, and whoever is creative there, will have the clients ear.

It’s all about creating a fluid experience. One of the most important tools for making that happen will be the mobile phone. And it looks like the biggest motivator drawing us to into that experience will be gaming. Of course, Foursquare won’t keep me up playing until the sun comes up (Assassins II, anyone?). But it is definitely interesting how smartphones, by bringing virtual and physical together, are becoming the perfect “game controller for your life”, as Juan puts it.

Making digital things, mobility, gaming principles: it doesn’t sound like the job of advertising is going to get simple again any time soon. At SapientNitro, collaborative skills are therefore in high demand. To bring science and art together, you need to be great at what you do, but you also must be able to forget for a minute “whose job is what”.

To create outstanding advertising in this new world you still need the passion of a creator. But you need other people even more.

Soul superstar John Legend said something memorable about his recent partnership with American Express on the “unstaged” series on YouTube/Vevo: “It was a relief to not have to worry about how well the songs would do on the radio.” (AdWeek 2010)

In an ironic twist, Branded Entertainment seems to have created a space of artistic liberty that stands in fundamental opposition to the day-to-day economic burdens of a platinum selling star.

John Legend’s comment sheds light how record labels are losing their protective function. First the download model robbed them of their production power. Then, the fall of record stores took their distribution powers. Now the uncertain economics of the new music industry have robbed most labels of the incentive and the ability to be courageous.

“We never had to think about how these songs would do against Lady Gaga.” As brick-and-mortar retail visibility drives less and less sales, radio has become the dominant gatekeeper once again. And the computer-generated playlists that dominate programming today, lead to a dramatic reduction of songs on the air. Sometimes this creates rather surreal experiences: I remember last December, while surfing the english speaking radio stations in Miami, I was sometimes able to hit Jay-Zs “Empire State of Mind” three times in a row.

In this situation, brands are redefining their role they play for artists. While advertising money has been behind most of the content we enjoy, it usually comes to the artist via a complex redistribution network of labels and media. This paid many a middleman’s paycheck, but it also created a layer of protective anonymity. The artist was free to do what he wanted, as long as the label believed there was money to made. But with the redefinition of media and label economies, artists might be better off to forgo the anonymous relationship for a much closer one with a corporate Maecenas.

The freedom from the dictates of a fickle market creates new constraints. These too, are more personal than those of playing 2nd fiddle to anonymous demand. At one point during the AdWeek event, the discussion drifted towards the motivation behind Legend’s cooperation with The Roots. Both Legend and ?uestlove were adamant about their commitment to the political agenda of Barack Obama, and the need to answer the backlash of the Tea Party movement. Meanwhile, you could physically sense the discomfort of American Express marketing manager Courtney Kelso. But she did not interfere.

Shortly afterwards, Kelso was called on it by the excellent moderator. How much was she willing to risk? Her answer seemed to prove that American Express had thought about this long and hard: “We are a 160 year old brand, so obviously we have to be careful about who we partner with. But censorship was never an option”, Kelso says. Why is Amex willing to take the risk of an uncontrollable messenger? They wants to reach a new demographic, and these people won’t be impressed by something as sanitized as, say, Michael Bolton.

The inherent unpredictability of the patron-artist relationship outlines the importance of trust in branded entertainment. It is radically different from the anonymous transfer of funds that kept the old rectangle of advertising money, medium, artist and label going.

While this makes creating Branded Entertainment a little bit harder. It also makes it a lot more interesting.

Looking at their philosophies duking it out in this rap video -- I’ll be rolling with Keynes. Limo!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcqUGKszi7s