As media environments such as social networks and avatar communities become more immersive, the job of advertiser becomes more complicated. It’s no longer acceptable to whisk consumers out of these environments. Rather, advertisers need to add some sort of value that makes the experience more immersive.

Widgets further strengthens this idea. Now, its possible to literally embed experiences within any old website.

So it’s imperative to carve a perfect balance between distraction and engagement - distracting consumers enough so that they notice you but engaging them enough in their current experience so they aren’t distracted by you.

Ghandi wrote that you must be the change you want to see in the world.

While it’s a bit dramatic to compare marketing advice to Ghandi’s advice, the same does apply. If you want to change consumer behavior, you have to become the consumer you are trying to change.

This is why strong brands - from Grey Goose to Apple to Us Weekly - are very much the personification of the visionaries behind them. Because the visionaries behind these brands simply created brands for themselves. In other words, they were their own best consumers.

I was having a conversation today about the way marketing and advertising agencies position themselves. An advertising agency is understood to be a company that develops traditional advertising - television, print, radio, outdoor. A non-traditional agency does all the other stuff - online, mobile, events, street, etc.

What’s ironic is that today, especially when you’re talking about the young audience, non-traditional is actually considered to be traditional. Television and radio are the non-traditional forms of media. If you’re not communicating to young consumers online or through mobile devices, if you’re not launching events, if you’re not appearing on blogs, you’re fast becoming an artifact of the past.

So while agencies are busy crafting positioning strategies that address the traditional vs non-traditional quagmire, consumers have decided that non-traditional is the new traditional.

There’s an article in the July 9th edition of Adage that discusses the power of advertising in the context of Geico’s massive 75% advertising and media spend increases since 2004. The article states that an increase in advertising spending leads to clearcut results. Geico is now number 1 in new-customer acquisition, has experienced double-digit growth during the past four years, and has seen a 9% increase in brand awareness over the past 6 years (from 82% to 91%).

But it’s not the increase in advertising spend that has led to this success. These results are a function of Geico’s creative - one of the most unique and disruptive creative campaigns to emerge in the past decade.

The point? The success, or lack thereof, of any campaign will always come down to the central idea behind it. Everything else comes second. It seems easy to forget that as we are bombarded with stories about the fractured marketplace, do-it-yourself media, viral marketing, the death of advertising, and so on. No matter how much money you spend in media, the campaign will only be successful when there is a great idea behind it.

Cool is when you are you. For a moment, I thought that was the best definition. But then I heard, it’s not you if you’re not cool. Maybe so. Also, I heard that it’s the perfect balance between accessible and aspirational. I liked that one too. Just about everyone has a different definition. But what became glaringly apparent during the process of writing this book is that while most people have a relatively subjective definition of it, so many companies ascribe an objective definition. That’s what makes the chase after it so paradoxical. What are they chasing?

Is it Steve Jobs’ definition? Jay-Z’s? Tony Soprano’s? Perhaps Christina Aguilera’s? How is it possible to catch it by chasing another person’s definition? Our tastes change as consumers. Our culture shifts. What worked in one place might not work in another. What worked in the past most likely won’t work in the future?

The way to build a true communion with an audience—to a point where they might deem you or your work “cool”—is to follow your own personal vision and stay true to that vision no matter what. In the final analysis, cool is really about achieving relevance—to a particular group, small or large. Then somewhere down the road, cool might find you.

Compartmentalizing consumers into demographic categories might have some benefits but it has a major flaw. It doesn’t take into account the powerful force of aspiration.

Aspiration is the act of striving for what you don’t or can’t have. Since so much action is driven by aspiration, marketing people need to spend more time thinking outside the realm of demographics and focusing instead on how groups cross demographic lines: old wants to be young, young wants to be old, rich wants to be poor, poor wants to be rich (think designer ripped jeans), white wants to be black, black wants to be white, and so on.

For example, the majority of Hip Hop culture is produced by black people, but white people are the biggest consumers of it. So when you’re trying to appeal to Hip Hop culture, who are you really targeting?

Giving someone upside in a business provides obvious incentives to get a person engaged. But what happens when that upside vests? And how do you retain top people once your stock prices hits a ceiling and offering upside no longer carries much weight?

This seems to be the perennial problem that companies, in particular new media companies, are facing these days. It’s hard enough attracting the top talent, but how do the Yahoo’s, AOL’s, and Google’s of the world retain that talent once options vest?

There seems to be a mass exodus that occurs around the 3-4 year mark after top executives have been hired and those same executives’ incentives have run dry. Perhaps this is why so many companies have such a short-lived stay at the top of the pyramid.

I recently read a story about an ad agency hiring a branding company to rebuild that ad agency’s brand. It got me thinking about the subject of internal culture and outsourcing.

I firmly believe that it’s not possible to bring something in from the outside unless the internal culture is set up to embrace it. So it’s ironic when an ad agency outsources its image to a branding agency. Isn’t an ad agency supposed to build brands for its clients? How can you be responsible for another company’s brand if you cannot be responsible for your own?

Michael Francis, head of Marketing for Target and one of the book’s contributors, described his experience re-building the Target brand as a “long runway.” Target, he said, most certainly did not become known as Targét over night. The company made a long-term commitment to upgrade its product, aesthetic, and overall image. In fact, it was a 15-year process.

I was asked recently to name the single thing that I learned most from writing this book. What I realized is that while it was incredibly difficult and often times painful to not really know where we would end up, the essence of the book emerged out of the process of writing it. In fact, as counterintuitive as it feels in the midst of it, I don’t think you can really build anything unique unless you embrace the process itself - and the risks, mistakes, and experiments that are part and parcel of it.

It’s a funny thing about my generation. I’ve found that we are process-averse. We like the ends. We want to get to the exit before we’ve had the chance to walk down the hall. In fact, I think the term exit strategy - coined to describe a company’s vision to either sell or go public - emerged from my generation’s desire to have an exit planned the day we’ve started a company.

But as the artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel said in his remarks which end our book: “The process is the prize.” That really stuck with me.

Today, I heard the term “viral” used yet again in front of the word marketing. “We need to make it viral.”

I’ll keep this one really simple. What is marketing if it’s not viral? The objective of marketing is to spread the word so if something is marketed well it’s inherently viral. In other words, the term viral marketing is redundant.

Maybe someone should coin a new phrase to define marketing that isn’t viral: Bad Marketing.