Our conversations led us, at PepsiCo Beverages, to first use Bluefin Labs to power the Pepsi Music Index at SXSW 2011 and then to become one of the first brand clients for their Social TV platform. So it is no surprise that I'm excited to hear that they are being acquired by Twitter. This acquisition is important and it means a few things in my opinion for Twitter and the social media ecosystem:

If there's any sign that the media ecosystem is on the verge of dramatic change, then these four digital trends bubbling to the surface are the latest proof points of that. These aren't random trends but are illustrative of tectonic shifts that will change the media business dramatically. Tectonic shifts of the type that we have witnessed in the music and book publishing businesses with the rise of the internet. Shifts that won't change the media landscape in time for the next upfront, but will reshape the landscape over the next five years. Here they are and what they mean for advertisers, agencies and the traditional media companies alike.

1. Mobile monetization will be through sponsored stories. That's smart and insightful. No mobile experience can truly support a variety of ad formats. Mobile banners are certainly not the right approach for Facebook. And their own other ad units will significantly degrade the mobile experience. Sponsored stories is the only ad format that doesn't do that. Sure there are privacy questions that remain with the use of sponsored stories but if there's any type of advertisement that I'd be willing to accept amidst limited real estate that's a cell phone, it would be a sponsored story telling me about actions that a friend or a brand has taken. This will scale up in time especially when you throw in location specific sponsored stories (not just on the targeting end but localizing the sponsored stories based on where you are.)

2. Investors and even many marketers don't understand the potential. The second key takeaway for me was that most investors do not understand the potential of the Facebook social graph. In my mind, it's like the intangible brand value associated with iconic brands. You have to put a dollar value on its very existence as it can be monetized in ways yet to be reflected in the marketplace. Mark Zuckerberg seemed to hint at this issue when he said, 

Can you put a valuation on this potential today? Do you think many investors are thinking about this? Probably not but that's what's going to be at the heart of Facebook's future because 1) no one else can create social experiences in a similar fashion without access to the Facebook social graph 2) as the generation that's growing up with Facebook starts to have real spending power they are going to expect their social graph to travel everywhere with them...into their cars, refrigerators, televisions and hotel rooms. I'd suggest that marketers don't understand this potential completely either otherwise more companies would be thinking about creating Spotify and Pandora type applications on the platform and leveraging the social graph in more unique ways into their own products. Facebook on its part needs to share of its payments and mobile strategic roadmap.

Well first and foremost, I was hoping for more details on the Facebook advertising products and how the company plans to further evolve them. Lawsuits aside, Facebook continues to bet heavily on social advertisements even though that may limit its revenue growth. That's a relief. The last thing I would want is for Facebook to over-monetize the way MySpace did and degrade the experience for users and advertisers. The downside to this is that these are ad units that the marketing ecosystem isn't too familiar with. A lot more education and measurement will be required as a result. No surprise that the Facebook headcount has gone up dramatically. I suspect a lot of the new employees are sales people who will probably share the details of the evolving Facebook advertising strategy in 1:1 meetings.

Secondly, a lot can be gleaned by what a company chooses not to talk about during an earnings call. The company didn't talk about why the Fortune 100 advertisers aren't spending more on Facebook and what the company is doing to address that challenge. It maybe early days for this but I'd love to see Facebook be more transparent in how their advertising machine is performing and what the major barriers to driving more advertising growth are. I loved hearing about the three brand examples. I think that's really an important step to transparently demonstrate the impact that Facebook advertising can have. I want to see more and more specifics though and a much deeper Nielsen partnership. Maybe even something tied in with Catalina or an SymphonyIRI. Talking about the brand studies is valuable, but it isn't enough. More is needed.

Lastly, but not the least what's obvious is that Facebook is being coy in how it plans to use all the data it has about its users and its advertisers. Along with the social graph,  I believe this data trove is one of Facebook's most valuable assets. An asset that can be monetized as a real-time research product for brands (with anonymous data of course). Arguably, the data can even help governments, businesses of all sizes, researchers, students and scientists. How my brand is talked about relative to competitor brands on FB can be a leading indicator of brand health and sales in a way no other measure maybe.  How people live their lives as reflected by their online conversations with certain friends is massively powerful insight for companies. Facebook has access to that data and the metrics that they share publicly today are severely limited and arguably not always credible (Like counts, Chatter analysis and PTAT data). There's a lot more that could be shared. The earnings call pointed out that Facebook is no rush to open this data to marketers. That's a pity.

But most of the stories in the press discount what Yahoo needs most and why Marissa Mayer is such a smart choice. There's no use in Yahoo thinking of itself as a media company or a technology company if it doesn't understand user experience deeply. That's why Steve Jobs was special. That's why Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook is too. That's also why two decades ago David Filo, Jerry Yang and Marc Andreessen stood out at Yahoo and Netscape. The Yahoo CEO needs to understand how real people want to engage with digital products. But more than that the person has to have a specific vision for how people will engage with them in the future. No focus group will answer that for the CEO. It is the most critical skill/intuition that any leader who works in technology must have. The Yahoo CEO needs to use that to guide every decision. And it is different from having product chops.

Not enough senior executives have that brain muscle. Many of them (no offense meant), grew up being forced to spend inordinate amounts of time looking at excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations in MBA programs or early job assignments that stifled creativity. Not enough spent those years creating wireframes in Visio, pushing pixels in Photoshop or sketching in notepads on their weekends. Not enough were liberal arts major or sociology graduate students. This may not matter for brick and mortar organizations that change slowly and have much deeper barriers to entry and where business processes and efficiences drive the business. But it isn't in the case with digital. A Yahoo CEO cannot be rooted in media, technology or even content. Yahoo desperately needs a user experience visionary. It has all the assets in the world and if there's anything that Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and Pinterest has taught us, its that this is not about the technology either. 

Steve Jobs described the need perfectly when talking about Bill Gates in a story on how Microsoft lost its mojo. Here's the quote from the Vanity Fair story that captures his view -

Yahoo needs to recover. A lot of us still remember the day the directory was launched and want Yahoo to succeed desperately. The board  of Yahoo did its job in choosing someone who has a history of making great products and focusing on the user experience. Now its time for Marissa to do hers.

Once you're done reading Do or Die, a very different book to pick up is Rex Briggs's SIRFs-Up which explains how measurement and marketing effectiveness should really work. I've always been impressed by Rex's thinking and his contributions to our industry. He won't let you down with this book. Covering spending levels, medix mix, forecasted sales and performance metrics it'll help you answer the tough questions that you may get from your CEO or CFO. I was also interviewed by Rex for SIRFs-Up.

I couldn't be more impressed with the initiative. It's been done on a smaller scale by other companies on the platform but Facebook is scaling it up. It's an imaginative idea and something only Facebook can do in a uniquely Facebook way on mass scale. Uniquely Facebook in how the social networking site is depending upon peer influence to spur action among millions of people. Best of all it takes very little effort by anyone for this to happen. More companies should think this way. It's a lot easier (and less expensive) to make a change, to positively impact the world around you than you may often realize.

Hence the rise of Facebook and Twitter as major marketing platforms. Facebook's revenues appear to have more than doubled year over year. They realized as did many marketers that while social media marketing is critical, it alone without highly synchronized paid digital media investments won't give the consistent scale that a marketer needs to achieve business results. That's why dollars are shifting to Facebook and Twitter so dramatically. The platforms allow for organic, authentic social media engagement to be scaled up with paid investments through advertising products like Reach Generator and Promoted Trends.

This leads to another challenge though - and that's in how you do budgeting. Historically in most corporations, social media spends have been tied to digital cash budgets and separate from the digital media spends. Those budgets were aligned more tightly with the TV, Radio, OOH and Print spends. Certainly not through the same lens as the social media organic spends. In many cases, they even had different budget owners and organizational hierarchies around them.

Now the two sides of social media marketing need to be executed together and therefore the budget needs to sit in one place as does the accountability. Separating out paid digital media as a separate budget bucket from organic social media makes less and less sense. Thinking of paid, owned and social media as fundamentally different is wrong too. They're intrinsically linked. However, your organization is probably not making that change. It probably even uses different agencies to manage the different dimensions of social media marketing. That's a problem. Break down the paid, owned and social media chinese walls right now.

For more on this read the 2nd edition of Social Media Marketing for Dummies.

1. Releasing ads online early is becoming table-stakes. Nearly everyone seems to be doing this and with good reason. It's about building momentum into the Super Bowl typically done with a mixture of paid and organic promotions of the TV ads online.

2. The smarter advertisers are constructing narratives around teasers, the TV commercial and what should happen after the ad airs. Some are even focusing on second screen social TV experiences (we being one of those).

3. A much smaller subset of advertisers are recognizing that there's more to the Super Bowl than just the advertising or their own advertising. As a result, they have a more integrated, cohesive strategy build around the entirety of the Super Bowl experience. More will move in this direction next year.

4. Hashtag mania is taking hold. Lots of advertisers will be promoting hashtags. Many over their Facebook urls or website address. Time will tell whether these are valuable or if they get lost in the clutter of the moment. How many people will use those hashtags that are promoted?

5. Ad-meters galore for certain. Last year we got to experience lots of different ad meters. This year there are going to be even more with many varied measures of success. What's certain every advertiser will probably have at least one meter that they will be able to point to and say that they did well! In another year or two, the ad meters will reduce in number.

For more on the Super Digital mania, read this Reuters piece and this Ad Age story where our Pepsi plans are discussed (there's more detail in the Ad Age story)

Yes, we absolutely live in a real-time world and we have to be hyper-quick. But at the same time changing consumer perceptions of a brand sometimes can take years just as meaningful competitive marketshare moves take time. Influences affecting consumers are more varied, more random and less controllable than ever before too. They're also global and hyper local all at once.

It is indeed a fascinating time to be in marketing. And while some facets of marketing make it an extremely sexy discipline, others make it a more difficult discipline than ever. In this world, the adage, don't mistake motion for progress gets infinitely more complex to recognize.

When you look at the statistics, the reasons are obvious. According to a recent study, 60% of television viewers also look at their mobile phones while watching TV shows. 33% have their laptops open in front of them and most interestingly, iPad owners spend the most time in front of the TV with their tablet than any other activity. It makes sense for TV advertisements to be thought of as an element in a broader narrative arch for the brand - a narrative arch that allows the brand to tell a more complete and a more interactive story. But what are the implications for marketers today? Read the complete post on the Harvard Business Review website and catch the earlier piece that I had written for them too.