The average person is so assaulted by different messages that they need to tune out everything that isn’t relevant, or they’d go crazy. Filtering stuff out has become a way of life. If your messages are fractured or inconsistent, you don’t stand a chance of making an impact.

It’s surprisingly common for an advertising channel to drive someone to a website, only to have the prospect encounter visual styling so inconsistent with the previous messaging that he thinks this must be a different brand and clicks out. With many companies putting their websites completely in the hands of an IT department, with little or no influence from the marketing team, this happens all too often.

In fact, so few companies are good at brand consistency that those willing and able to widen their brand gain greater influence than ever before. They look larger, more influential. They stand out simply because their consistency draws attention.

Imagine a delivery company with a fleet of trucks, every one painted a different color. They travel throughout a city, day after day, while each individual truck has no chance of gaining attention on its own. Paint them all the same — a relatively small investment — and suddenly it seems that one company dominates the city’s trucking industry. This is the essence of brandwidth, but it goes much deeper than just visual styling. It includes knowing what you want to say and sticking to the plan. The great brands haven’t changed their messaging for years, even decades. Even how the phones are answered can contribute to the consistency of messaging.

Think of the great brands. They all have the same thing in common: consistent brand messaging for decades. That’s the power of brand width. How wide is your brand?

What I particularly like is how the flow of it, despite being a single column, is organic. The eye keeps being surprised by new touches like a bar chart following a pie chart (as compared to two identical styles), images moving from one side to the other, icons like checkmarks next to bullet points and so on. Engaging enough that you want to read all the way down to the bottom. The colors are coordinated with those of the brand, and are always legible where they need to be.

Overall a good job. Here’s what it looks like:

FourSquare uses a concept of having people check into places they visit, and the one who visits most often is declared the “Mayor” of that facility. The Cactus Club clearly understands the power of talking directly with the people who use that social media environment, sending me the message simply because I was within walking distance of a Cactus Club location. Perfect! I had long been advocating that restaurants use the power of Mayorship for marketing, so I was thrilled to see that the Cactus Club was doing something with this.

The most common argument I hear about using social media is that the audience is relatively small, compared to such things as flyer drops into the community or running an ad. Yes, it’s true that there’s only one Mayor per establishment, and there may only be a few thousand FourSquare members in your city, with only a few hundred potentially in your community. So what? These are highly targeted people. They fight over becoming Mayor! When you lose a Mayorship because someone else passes you in visits, it’s a big deal for FourSquare users. Any business can gain repeat visits, and by definition, additional sales, by using this strategy. I believe that because of the nature of foodservice, restaurants can gain more than most other retail services.

The Cactus Club was offering a free gift card for whoever was mayor on a particular day, at a particular time. That’s extremely powerful, and a brilliant example of using social media marketing. I hope this is only the start of better use of social media.

Other restaurants are also starting to “get it” when it comes to the power of social media.

Morton’s gets it, too

Roger Drake, senior VP of the Morton’s steakhouse chain, explained that they make significant use of social media. One strategy they’ve applied with great success is bringing in celebrity servers for fund raising, then using Twitter to tweet their appearance. Followers on Twitter receive “inside” information that an NBA star or other celebrity will be at Morton’s, creating a buzz about the event.

Morton’s also offers Twitter followers bar bites in the bar. They encourage people to tweet from the event, to create powerful word of mouth awareness. They hold special events called “Burgers for Bloggers” where they serve mini Prime Cheeseburgers. This is great stuff!

They also use Facebook effectively. For Valentine’s Day, they asked guests on Facebook to send photos of their Valentine’s Day experience at Morton’s. “We got more than 50 photos,” said Roger. One couple got engaged in the restaurant, and this was mentioned on their Facebook page, providing powerful emotional appeal and creating a strong connection with fans. For Mother’s Day, they will have people go to the Morton’s Facebook page to post their favorite Mother’s Day Morton’s dinner photos.

It’s about relationships

When using social media, don’t spam people. Don’t think of it as a way to stream out one-way promotional messages. Use it to create relationships. Seek out the people who post frequently on your Facebook page, and offer them special incentives. You can even make them administrators of your page, an unpaid task that can have huge rewards because these are among your most faithful guests and their voice can serve more effectively than anything you say. With Twitter you can announce special spur-of-the-moment offers, perhaps a discounted appetizer or beverage special. Have your guests mention a phrase you use in a Tweet to get special treatment, and they’ll love you for it, because you’ll be making them feel special and creating that dynamic two-way relationship.

Starbucks applied a FourSquare strategy in which they offered the mayor of any location $1 off any of their new anyway-you-like-it Frappuccino. It was a reasonable strategy in some ways, but the $1 wasn’t a big enough draw, in my view, to be significant. There’s only one mayor of any location at any given time, so it’s not like you’re giving away the keys to the store by making the offer more meaningful. A screen shot of the coupon is shown at right.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter require an ongoing, consistent effort to be successful. That’s another thing often mentioned as a negative. Why would that be that any different from any other daily task, assigned just as you assign a day chef to start your food preparation? Approached with the mindset that this is a long-term process, a consistent effort to connect with people around you, social media will have a strong impact on your sales.

Some people might think of it as a book for advertising professionals, because John comes from an agency background. But it’s really just a book for anyone who ever makes any kind of presentation — business or otherwise. This common-sense view of the art of presentations focuses on how every presentation is essentially a conversation. It doesn’t matter whether your audience consists of one person or a thousand. Whether you’re presenting an idea, proposal, or your potential as a great employee, you’ll benefit from this viewpoint.

John gives the example of a meeting with Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, contrasting a briefing by Steve with an earlier one by two senior Apple marketing executives. The account is humorous and insightful. After the two executives attempted to bore the agency team to death with a bad, rambling Powerpoint presentation, Steve used a marker pen on a whiteboard to give an unforgettable, highly focused presentation that cut to the heart of the problem. He was transparent, clear and passionate. This is the essence of a great presentation!

Think of every ad, every brochure, and every website you create as a presentation. Then take it further and think of them as part of a conversation you’re creating with potential customers. What are the questions they’re asking when they begin to engage with the content? What do they need to know? What are their dreams? What’s their vision? What does a successful outcome look like?

Imagine yourself face to face with each one of them. How would the conversation flow? How would you make the same pitch if sitting across from them in your local coffee shop?

I’ve enjoyed a pretty good track record in new business presentations, with more than 80% of all my presentations leading to a business relationship. This success rate has been the result of having great mentors when I was first getting started, people who were honest and firm in forcing me to evaluate what I was doing from the customer’s perspective. It has also been the result, in many cases, of having a great team around me who did the rest of the work, from researching information I needed to building relationships with the prospective client. But I’ve noticed that one element has been consistently important: caring about the other party. You have to listen, really listen, to what the other person is saying. If you don’t, then nothing you say will be relevant.

I recall one presentation made after I started my young ad agency when I was just 24 years of age. The prospective client had already been pitched by four large agencies who wanted the account. Here I was, young and inexperienced, though passionate about what I could do with my small but talented team. I asked the company’s marketing team what they wanted to achieve, what their goals were and how they saw their business five years down the road. I mostly just listened, yet it was a conversation. A few minutes into the pitch, the company president stopped me and said something I’ll never forget. He explained that every other agency had come in and shown a bunch of work and talked and talked endlessly about what they could do. They were pitching without understanding. I was the first person who had even asked any of these questions. He awarded me the account on the spot.

Perfect Pitch is an excellent book and a worthwhile read for anyone, especially people who have to pitch new business. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. The heart of the message is to think of your presentation as a conversation.

I love how cleverly the Facebook information was used. You see images from the profile dimmed behind the water, and even the use of the person’s name in an obituary. At the end is a posting showing that the position they held at work is now vacant, with the company seeking to have it filled. Really brilliant stuff. Not overplayed or heavy-handed, but just right.

You can see what the experience looked like for one user, Nick O’Neill, right here.

This promotion was dreamed up by Campfire, with the actual code and strategy developed by Your Majesty and The Advanced Guard. Kudos to everyone involved.

Another attempt to use this approach was the promotion by 20th Century Fox on the rollout of the 10th anniversary edition of the cult classic film “Fight Club.” In this case, Facebook profile information was accessed to produce a trailer. It was ridiculously slow and not nearly as well made.

This brings me to the point of the article. Along with the power of social media to create amazingly effective stuff come several big challenges. These aren’t new, but in the frenzied excitement of trying to push the bleeding edge (sorry) of marketing, many people are forgetting to address these basic foundational issues.

Getting in the front door

Every savvy Internet user is well aware of privacy and guards it well. For any social media tool to play down these concerns would be suicide (and usually illegal), so Facebook asks for permission before an application like these can access your profile.

Obviously, only those who are totally blown away by your creative will be interested in granting such access. But how will they know that it will be good? Most people won’t have a clue what your Facebook Connect app is going to do. As a result, they aren’t going to grant access. Nobody wants to have an application post something stupid or annoying on their public profile!

This creates a whole new element of complexity for those who produce the campaign. It’s no longer enough to simply express excitement and hope people will come along with you. It’s absolutely critical to tell them what they’ll experience ahead of time. You have to show what a typical Facebook wall posting looks like, tell them why your application is worth loading, and find ways to add extra value to the equation.

I think the Discovery Channel promo was quite sensitive. The Facebook postings were smart enough that they wouldn’t serve as an embarrassment to anyone.

Adding value

People will add your app if there is sufficient value for them. If you’re a major coffee company and want people to post their favorite drink to their profile, fine. But what’s the point, really? What’s in it for them? Why not raise the bar by giving them a free beverage each time they do so? Now you’ve got a true partnership and that’s what social media marketing is all about.

I have two iPhone apps which represent opposite sides of this reality. One lets me track my running or cycling workouts using the built-in GPS, and posts the results to my FB profile and wall. It’s very cool because the social media posts it creates are subtle, not too promotional or “pushy” in style. When people click the link in the post they can see the details of my workout, including an actual GPS track and stats. This is useful! My friends can compare their results against mine. These guys get what social media is all about, letting me become a “trust agent” as Chris Brogan calls those who influence through their posts. The other app is nicely designed and lets me design and track my gym workouts. But these guys don’t get social media. The postings the app creates are purely promotional. The links in the posts are only designed to sell the product itself to others, with no “added value” for my friends. They can’t see any further info about my workouts. So what’s the point? I’m embarrassed about what it posts to Facebook and am feeling great pressure to turn that posting feature off. (Update: I did give in to embarrassment and turned off that feature. My desire when I let apps post info is to add value through those posts, not to boast about my workouts)

No matter how creative your promotion, if it’s self-serving and offers no real value to those you’re trying to reach, they won’t bother with it and all your effort will be wasted. So spend time figuring out what will make it useful for those who see the postings.

In the case of Discovery’s Frenzied Waters campaign, the value was inherent in the video production itself.

Load time

Another factor with apps like these is load time. Some, like the Fight Club promo, simply take too long to load. People are busier than ever, trying to fit more stuff into the same 24 hour days we’ve had since the first loin cloth was sewn from fig leaves. If your app doesn’t load in 8 seconds, you’re toast. Women are even more impatient than men when it comes to online activities. Their timeout ratio is 3:1 compared to men, so you better plan on a load time of 3 seconds if you don’t want to lose huge percentages of the female demographic.

The Discovery campaign loaded very quickly, just 3 seconds, while the Fight Club promo took over a minute, rendering it essentially useless.

Regardless of how effectively your creative applies the powerful tools available through social media, you better make sure it meets the real-world people tests or it will fall flat on its Facebook.

Many online sales channels are simply cannibalizing offline sales. In 2005, a study showed that only 6.5% was actual incremental sales. At the same time, five times as many young people were going online to make their purchasing decision than were doing so just five years earlier. 70% of all purchasers go online to conduct buying research. In one study from 2002, a staggering 12% indicated that they switched brands purely because of what they learned online. This is unheard of in traditional media!

What does all this mean? It means that what you communicate matters more than the media you use.

Instead of using your site to scream at people to BUY, BUY, BUY! you should be using it to talk to them, educate them, and tell them more about your company or products. The sales will come as a result, especially if your site becomes a trusted source of meaningful information. These same principles apply to social media, as these channels are even more influential as a form of educational interaction with customers.

Relationship marketing may be a buzzword that’s been overused in the past couple of years, but it is a valid concept and works very well online when done right. Those who engage in a digital RM program show more than 600% increase in conversion to purchase when compared to traditional RM relationship marketing programs. The web is an information place and should be used as an information source. People expect it.

Many CEOs who spend hours working on their brand message have no idea of the value of their brand when people actually type the band name into a browser’s address bar. People come to your web site, or sign up as a Facebook fan, with a genuine desire to interact with your brand. How much better can it get?

The single biggest advantage of the internet is the ability to educate your target audience. Think about how this compares to other media. This is almost impossible with a television commercial.

Invite your audience

On the web, sites are most successful when they invite people, treating them like intelligent beings who can make their own decisions. You never shove stuff down their throats. This doesn’t mean you can’t be aggressive. Mercedes only allowed people to get info about the C class online. There was no other way to get information during the pre-marketing process. But the web can appear to be disrespectful more quickly than other media, so you have to be warmer and more gentle in your approach.

Once you invite, you have to engage your audience or you’ll effectively kill your brand. If you invite them to a party, make sure a party is what they find. Competitors are one click away, and if they do things right while you don’t, chances are very slim that the online audience will give your site another opportunity in the future.

Treat people like, ah, people

Give your audience the facts they need to compare. You can’t be successful online without providing real information. There are never enough facts! Find things you can point to, like independent third party comparisons. Allow people to sign up for news or to join membership programs. They want you to assist them in making a purchase, and things that make them feel like insiders to information not available elsewhere works wonders. Mercedes dealers allow people to register online for a test drive, indicating ahead of time what kind of car they wanted to test. This allowed the dealers to be fully prepared. But with 3000 daily requests for a test drive, responding efficiently can be a challenge. You can’t delay. Dealers who didn’t respond in 48 hour lost their status as an online retail link. Nike ID was actively used as a test bed for future shoe designs. It wasn’t meant not to make a profit online, but as a research tool.

Getting to yes

All of this leads to the transaction. The interesting thing is that while 95% of all purchases are still made offline, those customers have already made their decision online because they’re empowered by what the web offers them in terms of information. Automobile companies like Mercedes have found that customers no longer ask any questions from salespeople. They walk into the dealership already knowing as much or more about the cars than the people who work there. They’ve been empowered by e-communications.

Defend your brand with conviction

If you know that 70% of your customers are making their buying decision online then why is your online budget only 3%? You can’t expect to have a successful site if you don’t support it. The best companies spends at least 10% of their marketing budget in online initiatives. Non-tactile products are easier to sell online, but the principles are the same.

Your customers are friends

In the past, we called them the “target market.” Then we called them customers. Today, you have to call them friends. That means you have to treat them as friends. E-Communications means carrying on a two-way dialog. Feedback channels are critical. Being respectful of even the most critical comments goes without saying. Don’t sweat it so much when people bad mouth you, because they were always doing that, just not so directly in your face. This happens in friendships. It’s the result of people who care enough to let you know when you let them down. Listen and respond.

Don’t be so bent on building an online store. Instead, focus on building an online community if you want to watch the sales climb.

Alfred Korzybski, who developed the concept of general semantics, explained it this way: Insane people try to make the world of reality fit what is inside their heads.

Someone who thinks he’s Napoleon makes the outside world fit that notion. He filters and interprets the events and signals around him to fit that belief. There’s no room at all for facts.

But the sane person is exactly the opposite. She constantly analyzes the world of reality and adjusts what is in her head to fit the facts. In other words, while the insane person has only opinions, the sane person never has opinions or feelings. She would be totally unaffected by colors, shapes, other people’s viewpoints and so on — using only cold, hard facts to make every decision. She would buy a mustard-colored sports car called the Slug on the same emotionless basis as a bright red Viper because issues of color or semantics have nothing to do with actual performance. What friends think wouldn’t even be an issue. Indeed, a completely sane person would be like a computer, and in many situations would be unable to make any decision at all! If you were truly making your decision on logic alone, you would often be unable to make a decision for lack of sufficient input.

Most people are somewhere in between. You make up your mind about something you like based on input from many sources, including visual appearance and emotion. A lot of it comes from your gut reaction, how you feel about it overall. You might like the color of the red car, causing you to prefer it over the brown one, even if other aspects of the car are less favorable. Once you start to form your opinion, you look for additional pieces of information proving that you are making the right decision, despite the fact that many aspects of your decision are not based on fact. You may even find the nearest expert (or non-expert) and accept his or her opinion. That way you don’t have to bother with too many facts. In the advertising business, that’s called “word of mouth.” So how did the ‘expert’ you went to get his or her opinion? The same ‘unsane’ way you did!

A good marketing or advertising strategy makes use of this psychological process. A good strategy must be simple, fitting easily into the mind of the prospect. It must be memorable. It must provide just enough facts to be believable. And it must strike an emotional chord to satisfy “unsane” people.

So how does this actually work in the real world?

Strategies and brand positioning are used to appeal to the emotional part of our decision-making process. Very rarely, if ever, are these designed to appeal to logic.

When Apple computer said, “Here’s to the crazy ones,” it was talking about all of us. That “think different” campaign was entirely pointed at our emotional response to being seen as leaders and innovators in a world of followers. This claim had nothing directly to do with whether the computer was better than the competition, because those arguments would have had no impact. People don’t want to hear that they made a bad choice. They want to be inspired by their association with one brand because it is cool, or thoughtful, or daring, or whatever.

Here are a few other historical examples of unsane marketing at work:

Pepsi: The Choice of a New Generation

This campaign used emotion to trigger existing feelings of rebellion in young people, giving them an option to drink something different from what their parents were used to. Does this have anything to do with taste? No. But it worked wonders with an unsane audience.

Coke: The Real Thing

This campaign stood on Coca Cola’s position as the “original” soft drink. The factual side of this strategy combined with the implied perception that any product that has been a leader for so long must taste good. Personally, I think it’s a weak campaign (there’s no product definition), but it served the need Coke had to re-establish its position as the “original” cola.

BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine

Despite the fact that this car doesn’t look anything like a true sports car, this campaign effectively positioned the BMW as a driving enthusiast’s automobile. A certain amount of factual information had to be used to make the statement believable, but I wonder how many people make a sports-car buying decision without ever trying a Porsche.

United: Fly the Friendly Skies

This campaign ran for many years, and was very effective. Yet while it ran, I flew many different airlines and found staff at most of them equally friendly and courteous. This ad campaign worked because people want to believe that there’s a difference. Of course, success with this type of approach means you better be as good or better than others in the area you’re talking about, or you could crash and burn (it won’t be pretty).

Budweiser: King of Beers

Now, Bud may be a great beer, but exactly what makes one beer a “king” compared to another? Nothing, except the image of that bottle cap turned upside down. A brilliant campaign, directly targeted at the “unsane” nature of how and why we make buying decisions. It has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with emotion. Long live the king (of beers)!

Have you noticed how textures have become popular? We see this influence in the kind of papers used for brochures and packaging, to interior decorating trends, to the strong textures showing up in clothing styles. I believe this trend is directly related to the growth of Internet communications — a flat, untouchable medium that looks pretty but never offers any real tactile essence.

This isn’t the first time a communications trend has affected us culturally. The growth of television in the late 1950′s had a similar impact, though in those days it was checkered tablecloths, wrinkled chiffon dresses, silk shirts, and corduroy pants.

People have had enough experience with the internet and interactive presentations by now. The excitement that characterized the 90′s is fading. The internet is now an everyday tool. Meanwhile, people are getting tired of the pretty pictures behind glass. They are yearning to touch something real. They want to feel blind embossing and corrugated cardboard. They want to watch the shadows interplay from die-cut openings and edges. They want to run their fingers along unusual bindings and shapes of annual reports that look more like packaging than business documents.

Advertisers who wish to maximize the psychological impact of this trend should combine their internet strategy with extra effort on production of collateral materials. The most effective strategies will probably involve the use of highly tactile print communications combined with highly interactive and informative online communications. Especially if one requires or supports the other to complete the message.

Watch as social media continues the transition in our expectations. We now want our brands to interact with us, not to talk to us in a one-way message, but to demand a two-way dialog. Ignore these developments at your own peril.

Life moves. From the moment our eyes behold their first blurry view of the world around us until they close for the last time, life is a blur of activity, colour, sound. Is it any wonder we’re fascinated by video? Movies, and then television changed our world. After more than 100 years, motion pictures still capture our imagination, holding us in their enthralling grip for hours at a time. On a recent flight, I was amazed by the number of people watching DVDs on their personal computers. We love moving pictures! No wonder advertising people feel that being part of an industry churning out creative 30-second mini movies is one of the best jobs in the world.

CROSS DISSOLVE. NIGHT.

My family reviews some footage I recorded when my kids were little, edited to music and burned to DVD for the grandparents. We laugh. But emotions soar, roused through a simple combination of moving images and music. So, with our universal fascination for moving pictures, why don’t more companies use video for marketing?

CROSS DISSOLVE. OLD MOVIE FOOTAGE.

It used to be a big deal to use video in a corporate setting. Few people knew how to use these high-tech tools. Equipment was bulky and expensive. Editing suites were big rooms with lots of buttons and dials that only experts understood. You had to find a specialist just to script the thing, never mind finding someone with an eye for motion graphics to produce it. And getting decent production values required a financial commitment beyond all but the biggest firms.

HIGH ENERGY FAST CUTS WITH MUSIC.

No longer. Today, high school students armed with mini camcorders and free software like Apple’s iMovie are turning out products that are staggering in both creativity and quality. The tools for video are getting better, faster, cheaper. Eventually even e-mail will be video-based (I’ll bet everyone who has trouble typing can’t wait for that day). Have you seen what today’s young visionaries are doing with video? While helping judge the Alberta New Media awards, I was amazed at the high production value of student submissions. They not only had the tools, they showed vision and a creative understanding of how to edit footage to communicate effectively. Young people in summer camps and churches are doing more and cooler stuff with video than are most corporations.

Here’s an idea. Put them to work on marketing projects and watch how it infuses your brand with power and energy. Equip enthusiastic employees with a low-cost video suite. Invite them to use these powerful tools to create motion-based brand messaging. Training videos. Corporate newsletters with on-scene footage of the manufacturing process, new products, or interviews with new staff. In our agency, we use video as a way of enhancing new business presentations.

Don’t worry so much about the quality. Modern equipment is good. Just get started. Find people in your organization with vision and enthusiasm. Empower them. A new Macintosh computer and a $1,500 digital camcorder is all they need to turn out above-average productions. They’ll even be able to burn those videos to DVD for easy distribution. Double that investment and the quality will come close to that of professional-grade tools.

Is it really that easy? Yes and no. You do have to provide leadership, management and accountability. You need to get signed releases from staff appearing in your productions to ensure that you can continue to use the material after people move on. But those are minor issues in terms of the big picture. Sales. Not to mention the future of your brand.

The point is that there are virtually no barriers left to using video to enhance your brand messaging. Corporate video is now affordable. It’s accessible. It can be reformatted for other media such as Web delivery. It’s dynamic, vivid, fresh. Getting started now will breathe new life into your brand.

SUPER: “Life moves.”

Technology isn’t going to stand around waiting. Imagine how your company’s digital streaming video annual report 20 years from now might show some of the archival footage from the past. Sure, people might laugh. But emotions will soar, grateful you showed the way.

Rip. Giggle. More ripping. Squeals of delight. Perhaps our society’s fondness for consumer goods has its roots in the opening of gifts and packages, an activity we’ve all enjoyed since childhood. An aspect of marketing too often ignored, product packaging is about to see revolutionary change.

Packaging has become smarter, slicker, more colorful. It is more responsible, with less wasted paper. Smart marketers have recognized its contribution to the total brand personality. Yet one component of the box has not progressed for a hundred years.

I’m referring to the user manual.

A couple of years ago I bought a new camcorder. The box was gorgeous, transmitting the experience it stood for. Parts were individually wrapped in protective plastic bags. Cords were neatly folded and tied. Inside, the lens even came in its own glossy full color box as elegant as the main package. The entire experience was delightful, a fitting resolution to the angst involved in the decision to buy this particular make and model. Then I saw the user manual. It was nice enough as manuals go. But it just felt wrong. Low tech. Bulky. Wasted paper. For all the sophistication we’ve reached in packaging, today’s user manuals are fundamentally the same as those that shipped three decades ago.

A new technology is emerging which, I believe, will convert the lowly user manual into the pinnacle of the product packaging experience. It’s called DVD. Ultimately it will find a meaningful place in the presale brand identity mix, but the adaptation of DVD as a marketing tool will very likely begin with packaging. Picture your next camcorder box. Unlike previous purchases, this contains something extra — a shiny silver disc. You anticipate something special, and the disc delivers. Not only are there video segments on how to use your camera, but video articles helping you make better movies. A CBC Newsworld camera operator hosts a session on how to shoot great documentaries. Steve Martin hosts a funny piece on how to create a wedding video. And the product manager looks you in the eye and tells you that she really does care about your satisfaction and if you have any feedback, here is her direct e-mail address. Played on a computer, you could even click the link and send an immediate e-mail message.

The scenario works for most consumer goods. A new espresso machine can have videos on making the perfect latte. A watch can include a limited-edition, for-owners-only documentary on how this brand has been featured in action movies and traveled to the top of Mt. Everest. Such new product DVDs can include web links to discussion forums and membership areas limited exclusively to owners of the product. It works for travel, too. Imagine getting a detailed video preparing you for that cruise you just booked. Even B2B can benefit, where the DVD manual is used to orient and train people in safe equipment usage and techniques. Brands become more meaningful through digital user manuals.

A number of consumer realities point to a rosy future for DVD in marketing. There’s the simple fact that it is a standard. There are no concerns about whether or not you’ve got the right system to run it, as there were with CD-ROMs. Players are now priced below $100, making them affordable enough for any home or office. Its acceptance has grown exponentially — DVD households have doubled each year since 1998 and should reach more than 70 million worldwide by next year. The format has enough tenure in the entertainment industry to build consumer confidence. People are comfortable watching DVD videos both individually at their computers and in social settings.

Significantly, the format fits with a new consumer emphasis on being real. According to Yankelovich Research, the tragic events of September 11 accelerated an attitude that consumers have already felt for some time, but that marketers have been slow to understand. People want to stop being “sold” things and want to connect. With family. With friends. And with brands. They want marketers to be honest, to get real. Is it any wonder that reality television shows and “live camera” visual styling have been all the rage? Video makes sense in this marketing environment.

Some companies, like Britannica and Apple, are leading the way with DVD. What about you? Is your company ready for a revolution? Maybe it’s time to rethink how your packaging might contribute to your overall brand identity.