But first, the economic implications: as it ends up, Valentine’s Day is big business. It’s the third largest consumer spending holiday, second only to Christmas/Hanukkah and Thanksgiving. Valentine’s Day spending accounts for 7.7 percent of annual consumer holiday spending, coming in at a whopping $17.6 billion. With that kind of money on the line, marketers are capable of stooping to a crass transactional approach to romantic love.

Three examples:

Teleflora is running one of the most seductive ads in recent memory featuring supermodel Adriana Lima, whose less than subtle advice to guys is “Give, and you will receive…”

A PajamaGram ad tells men that “It will look like you spent hours choosing just the right gift.”

Edible Arrangements, the fruit shish-kabob folks, tell gents that one of their gift baskets is “Your secret weapon this Valentine’s Day.”

So to summarize, Valentine’s Day gift buying is:

1) a quid pro quo for getting sex;
2) a means of deception; and
3) a secret weapon.

It’s hard to tell whether the view of men or the view of women is most denigrated by the marketers behind these ads: men are assumed to be 1) selfish, 2) deceptive and 3) requiring weapons. Women are portrayed as 1) calculating, 2) easily fooled or 3) witless victims.

These ads don’t attempt to play on the perpetually adolescent male persona that beer ads have turned into an art form, nor the tough-guy persona of truck ads. Instead, these Valentine’s Day ads take a fundamentally artless approach to creative. It’s like a sitcom whose unoriginal writers resort to sexual innuendo and put-downs for most of the laugh-lines. The Valentine’s Day ads cynically present men as willing to embrace a transactional approach to sex-based relationships, which itself depends on a view of women as susceptible to being conned.

Whether people like to admit it or not, advertising contributes to self-perception and self-definition. As immersed in the media culture as we are, it’s naïve to suggest advertising isn’t working. Tens of billions of dollars say it is.

So while ads like this may be effective, they aren’t really giving us a lot of love.

The agonizing time-looping experience of Phil Connors, the self-absorbed TV weatherman played by Bill Murray in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, has become idiomatic for any endlessly repeated experience. (Even those in the military refer to a repeated tour of duty as “Groundhog Day.”)

There is something within us that recoils from the thought of reliving the same things over and over and over again. We’re wired to embrace that which is new. In her fascinating book NEW: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, Winifred Gallagher writes that we “are biologically as well as psychologically primed to engage novelty.”

For marketing professionals, the idea of offering something new is so central to their work, that I think it almost goes by undetected—a baked-in assumption that anything worth promoting must be new.

New = Better, right? You’ve never heard of “Old and Improved.” It is axiomatic in the packaged consumer products business that merely adding the word “NEW” on a product label increases sales.

Any hint that a product—from software to soft soap—is a retread of an earlier idea is a curse. Politicians accuse each other of trotting out “old tired ideas.” The phrase “been there, done that” is the epitaph of many a poorly-conceived marketing effort.

In creative contexts like design, music or architecture, we often refer to a particular effort as being “derivative” of previous work. This is almost always a pejorative term as folks in creative fields are supposed to constantly be coming up with new, never-before-seen ideas.

But in reality, creative progress usually takes place along a pattern that looks something like this:

A radically new idea comes along … followed by multiple riffs (or rip-offs) of the idea … the new idea stops looking so new, so another innovator comes along and ups the ante with something totally new, is heralded as a visionary, and the process repeats itself…

In other words, the creative ecosystem is largely evolutionary and iterative, yet periodically thrives on fresh infusions of creative ideas: quantum leaps that can truly be described as new.

In the course of history, we see scientists, artists and philosophers who were the quantum leapers of their times: Copernicus, Mozart, Gandhi, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Josephine Baker, Jim Henson, Steve Jobs. It should be noted that these innovators had paid their dues and mastered the disciplines of their craft long before introducing massive novelty. They stood on the shoulders of the generations before them. But then, the big synapse occurred, and they took things in a new direction, and to a whole new level.

Today in business, few organizations can afford to take these quantum leaps. The obvious exception—Apple—can take big risks, like introducing the initially maligned iPad. Apple could do this because: a) they had the money; b) they foresaw a new market where none had previously existed; and c) they were … well … Apple. A track record of successful Jobsian innovations opened the door for a new something new.

But for most marketers today—both agency folks and in-house creatives—the challenge comes in finding the right proportion of novelty and familiarity in the day-to-day work of marketing communications. That’s because you have to communicate with real consumers and businesspeople, and get them to open their wallets. Art for art’s sake can take more risks. But creative marketing, while still an art form, works under different constraints. Someone is paying for—or more accurately, investing in—the marketing effort and wants to see an ROI.

So for nearly all marketing efforts, there needs to be a perfect blend between novelty and familiarity. Enough novelty to get noticed. Enough familiarity to be relevant.

Avoiding Groundhog Day Syndrome (or GDS) requires taking time to think about how far your audience can be drawn away from oft-repeated marketing norms in order to embrace something new.

This balanced, innovative approach to marketing often means exploring counterintuitive solutions. Infusing things with just enough unexpectedness to hook an audience. Its like an unforeseen plot twist in a movie. It rivets the audience’s attention.

New can also involve a fresh, reimagined interpretation of something from an earlier era. AMC’s Mad Men or the new Sherlock Holmes movies are good examples. O Brother Where Art Thou? was a re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey

We live in a world where there is a lot of “new” but very few surprises. Google feeds back exactly what we asked it for. News feeds and Twitter give us news, but not much that is new. Talk radio—pick your flavor—has enabled the creation of Groundhog Day-like echo chambers where pundits and their followers hear nothing but their own voices.

Thus, to offer something truly new may be a public service as well as a smart marketing move.

Screens are Getting Blurred

Even as hi-def gets higher and def-ier, what the world is experiencing is the blurring of the four screens that define media consumption: television, computers, tablets and phones. (We see this statistically validated in the web traffic reports we run for our clients, with more and more visits coming from phones and tablets.) Developing any major new marketing initiative in 2012 will require a four-screen strategy. From day one of the design process, all four screens need to be accounted for and leveraged for maximum impact.

It’s Showtime!

Despite its proliferation ad nauseam on an increasing number of sites and covering the most bizarre and obscure topics—video content is still the straightest, shortest distance between two points: you and your audience.

While text can still attract the SEO-friendly eyes of Google (and, oh yeah, there are still some other search engines out there…I just can’t remember what they’re called), words on a printed or html page are struggling to hold the attention of both consumer and B2B audiences. A 30-second video beats a 300-word page every time. Plus Google is giving preference to keyword-tagged videos in its search results.

They Might Be Giants

The world of information, commerce, media and technology will increasingly be defined by the big four giants featured in a recent Fast Company magazine article: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. (Noticeably absent from that list are Microsoft, Comcast and many others). Amateur marketers and seasoned business professionals alike need only monitor and apply the Big Four’s strategies and tactics to be able to imitate some pretty safe formulas for success.

Reviving the Lost Art of Perusing

The odds of someone discovering something truly unexpected is diminishing daily. Pre-defined news feeds, the echo-chamber known as talk radio and context-based online ads may reach their intended audience, but they don’t awaken anyone to any new ideas. As we race to the eventual retinal-scan-driven personalized advertising of Minority Report, creative agencies like ours that figure out how to find new audiences for new ideas will be doing a great service to their clients.

Ink and Paper

The email flotsam that appears in your inbox every day is sad testimony to an increasingly less useful communications medium. Businesses large and small get lazy and justify their use of email on the basis of cost effectiveness and measurability. But just sending out an email for lack of anything better to do is about as creative as a keyword search on iStockPhoto.com to punch up that PowerPoint you have to deliver in the next ten minutes.

This all adds up to a new resurgence of direct mail and printed communications as long as one’s list is on target and the content is relevant and creative. Also, because trade media publication address such narrowly defined B2B audiences who are interested in the subject matter of the publication, they still represent a good advertising buy.

Much of the original research behind diffusion was based on the introduction and adoption of hybrid seed corn in the Midwest during the 1930s. Within four years after hybrid corn was introduced, two-thirds of the farmers had changed to the new seed, largely based on the influence of their friends and neighbors.

There are a lot of reasons why some innovations succeed when others fail, including the relative advantage of the idea; its compatibility with existing societal values and norms and sometimes, existing technology; its complexity; how easy it is to use on a trial basis; and whether people can see the innovation in action and judge its results.

For example, Apple’s retail stores make it easy for people to determine the complexity of an iPad, iPod or MacBook. Putting the merchandise on display encourages people to try it before they buy, and lets them see it in action. These stores are often jam packed with people exploring Apple’s innovations.

Whether an innovation is “adopted,” or actually used, is also related to the communication channels involved in spreading the message:  mass media wins for building awareness, but it is usually word-of-mouth, including information from trusted friends and neighbors, that has the greatest influence on people who decide to adopt a new product or idea.

There are several categories of adopters: the innovators, who make up a mere 2 ½% of a typical population; the early adopters (13 ½%); the early majority (34%); the late majority (34%); and the laggards (10%). Everyone knows an innovator, the guy on the block who bought HD DVD before it was clobbered by Blu-Ray, who still argues the merits of Betamax vs. VHS.  Sometimes these folks are considered prescient; sometimes they just wind up with a garage full of junk. Clearly the majority of people wait awhile before deciding to adopt a new product.

Of course, once an innovation is adopted, it may not be used as intended.  Or, its use may spark unintended consequences that ripple through a society. The masterpiece on diffusion theory, “Diffusion of Innovations” by the late Everett Rogers, has several examples of innovations gone awry.

One of the more far-reaching was the introduction of snowmobiles among the Nordic indigenous peoples (“Sami,” formerly known as Laplanders) who hunted reindeer. From the first snowmobile, purchased in 1961 by a Finnish schoolteacher, this innovation was rapidly adopted with the number growing to 60 by 1963/64 and to 335 in a couple of more years. The adoption of the snowmobile had unintended consequences for the regional economy (fuel costs), the social structure (not everyone could afford to remain a herder, or cared to retain the knowledge of older practices), and the ecological backdrop (mechanization made it easier to slaughter more reindeer, decimating herds).

Sometimes unintended consequences create new opportunities. The introduction of hybrid seed corn in the 1930s helped create a cottage industry for detasseling – pulling off the tassel from certain rows of corn to encourage cross pollination with other rows, yielding an especially productive corn seed. Each summer legions of teenagers in the corn belt roam the fields, detasseling.

At The Creative Alliance, we work with you to diffuse your innovative ideas and products.  We’ll help you determine the best ways to move your target markets toward adoption, and we’ll help you anticipate possible unintended consequences, both positive and negative.

By creating an immersive environment in which the young up-and-coming actors could interact with their legendary hero—a cinematic father figure—Coppola instantly produced the familial relationships that would eventually define the movie and the roles of the actors. If you’ve seen The Godfather, you know how important “the family” is to the plot and the development of the characters.

There’s a great lesson for marketers here, especially those involved in the work of branding. Branding is a distillation process whereby the essence of an organization is closely examined and then reduced to its essential qualities. It’s an experiential process that we enjoy here at The Creative Alliance. We study our clients at close range, playing anthropologist, artist, chemist and engineer along the way.

Hopefully, what we end up producing is an authentic reflection of our client as a result of having plumbed the depths of their world and the world of their audience.

But more than just a reflection. A projection as well.

Just as Coppola was able to create a cinematic experience from Mario Puzo’s book and the fine actors he had at his disposal, so a brand, properly developed, will create a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. So just as every scene in The Godfather could win an award as a finely composed photograph, so also every expression, every possible touchpoint of a company’s brand should be artfully and consistently executed with that same attention to detail.

Only with the commitment to build on an authentic, relational experience like Coppola did with his actors, can an agency succeed in stirring the hearts and engaging the minds of a client’s audience. Rather than rushing through the branding process and failing to uncover the “good stuff,” a thoughtful, immersive approach to studying a company in order to evoke a breakthrough expression of its brand is an offer you can’t refuse.

The 20 x 20 NationAir booth includes a private, internal conference room, brand–reinforcing visual identity, external seating areas and large, full-panel graphics of various aircraft.

“The booth made a statement about the company’s leadership in the industry,” said Bob Byrd, vice president of client services. “It also provided a comfortable place for NationAir to meet with its clients at the largest aviation conventions in the nation.”

It is a privilege to be here today among such distinguished innovators, experts and investors.

The mere fact that a travel technology innovator is present this week at the Travel Innovation Summit is a great honor, and is likely a harbinger of success in a competitive, fast-changing market.

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

As we see Washington DC mired in its stultifying paralysis while the economy languishes, it is precisely the people in this room—inventors and investors—who are giving life to an otherwise moribund economy.

Talk is cheap. Doing and investing are expensive. But the rewards are great.

The Travel Innovation Summit will have a winnowing effect this week, separating the greatest from among the great.

And as the winners and others leave here to get back to the hard work of further innovating and the arduous tasks of making deals, promoting and selling their ideas, and building their brands, the question arises: What next?

It’s reminiscent of the 1972 movie, The Candidate in which Robert Redford stars as a young political phenom who wins election as Senator of California.

In the movie’s iconic finale, Redford escapes the noisy victory party, pulls his campaign manager into a room while throngs of journalists clamor outside, and he says: “Marvin … What do we do now?”

So…what do you do now? What does a great travel technology innovator do after the Travel Innovation Summit?

There are many technical, financial and operational answers to that question. But for innovation to reach its pinnacle of success, it must inspire something very un-technological:

Love.
 
That may feel terribly unsatisfying for the technical and financial minds represented here; but just as psychologists have long recognized the importance of IQ or Intelligence Quotient, so also they have more recently acknowledged the importance of EQ—or Emotional Quotient.

Successful brands are fueled as much by emotion as they are by cognition.

A heart full of feeling usually trumps a head full of facts.

Even the most rational buying decision—whether that of investors, strategic partners, or the end users of travel technology themselves—is driven by these emotional factors.

There is no Google algorithm for love.

There is no geo-location or semantic search for the human heart.

A brand that inspires devotion transcends marketing metrics. It is better felt than told.

It is seen in upscale brands like Apple and decidedly downscale brands like Southwest airlines.

Sure, there are many successful companies that are rather unlovable. But for an emerging brand to captivate the marketplace, and maintain the all-important ingredient of sustainability—that is loyalty.

It must inspire something heartfelt. It must inspire love.

There is no easy formula for creating this love of brand. It is a process of discovery, of listening to customers and critics alike.

Inevitably, it will lead to the realm of aesthetics. Because anything that is beloved is also beautiful.

Again, we reference Apple as the pinnacle of this profound integration of technology, of style and of the self-perception of its customers.

Much of this aesthetic comes in making the complex simple, and the simple profound.

As with all art, the great ones make it look easy.

This is where the art of technological innovation must be mirrored by the art of cultivating a beloved, memorable brand.

If properly cultivated, a technology brand can achieve the status of art…something that evokes a host of feelings and loyalties and eager recommendations by ardent customer-evangelists.

In these rare instances, a certain transcendence is achieved.

This is not to say: become the next Apple.

Rather it is to say: become the next you: in a form that is beloved as well as utilized…clearly differentiated rather than sounding like a hundred other innovations…infused with the ability to communicate in seconds—not minutes—why your innovation is indispensible to people’s lives.

To achieve this “brandsendence” you may need to channel that moment when the idea for your innovation first came to you. (Perhaps you still have the napkin you wrote it on!).

Add to that passion, an appropriate level of risk to creatively stand out from the crowd, refusing to play it too safe, and you are well on your way to sustainable success.

The site serves as an important resource for parents, educators, healthcare professionals and others assisting individuals with ASDs. The new website can be viewed at www.tbh.com.

“Trumpet Behavioral Health needed an effective way to present its vast resources and capabilities through its website,” said Jessica Engel, client services coordinator. “The new website makes it easier to find information on the services most relevant to the needs of those with ASDs.”

A photographer asked if she could help a local Animal Rescue Center. She noticed that the photos of the dogs up for adoption were pretty sad; bad lighting, bad angles, bad everything. And since all were taken without the poor critters being cleaned up—and with a cage or wire fence before them—most looked like canine criminals. The photographer decided she would use her skills and equipment to do “professional” portraits of them.

She staged each dog in an environment that showed off his or her best features and qualities. Soon there were dozens of beautiful, high-quality photos like a female Dachshund with a pearl necklace laying on an elegant sofa; a nicely groomed Collie mix with a blue bandana; a Labrador Retriever in a colorful vest holding its paw out to shake hands, puppies together on a bed…

These wonderful, new artistic photos graced the adoption website, replacing the old post office-like Polaroid pics.

After a week or two there was some big news. The Rescue Center was having a record number of pets being adopted! In fact, whereas half of the animals in the past had to be moved or destroyed—now 100% of the dogs were being adopted.

The only change: better photos.

In our brand-dominated society, image is everything. Our eyes are so inundated with impressions, that we are instinctively aware and acutely discerning about quality, or lack thereof.

Our memories and emotional recall of beloved pets register so deeply that if we see a line-up of dogs (or cats) up for adoption, it’s difficult to walk away without a strong urge to adopt.

Add in some strong brand marketing from a caring and professional photographer, and we are hooked! We now relate to these animals more like family, instead of seeing them just as pets.

Now many Rescue Centers and Humane Societies around the country are doing this—and getting similar results.

And why not? Dogs are the most consistently friendly and loveable members in any family. They are always happy to see you, never have anything bad to say, enjoy a good walk, are great listeners and are loyal to the bitter end.

For those of you who have had dogs throughout your life, you know how heartbroken it is to lose these trusted friends and companions. My dad used to say that he loved dogs more than people. I can see why.

This is a simple lesson in brand marketing.

How do you come across to your clients and/or customers? Are you happy? Do you listen? How does your office, your store, your website look? Do your customers love it when they’re around you?  Do they trust you? Are you loyal to them? Do you go out of your way to please, or even delight them?

In other words, do you treat them as well as a dog would?

“You can say any fool thing to a dog, and the dog will give you this look that says, `My God, you’re RIGHT! I NEVER would’ve thought of that!’”
- Dave Barry

“We were challenged by Global Aerospace to make the topic of safety as engaging and memorable as possible to an audience of aviation professionals who are inundated with information,” said David Heitman, TCA president and creative director. “After exploring numerous creative approaches, we settled on a 1960s-era movie poster style that Jodee Goodwin, our VP of creative services designed.

The dynamic color scheme, bold visuals and rugged typography were given a modern twist, and all four posters leverage the theme of a chess match—-an apt metaphor that Client Services Manager Amy Hickey suggested in one of our creative brainstorming sessions. “Given the strategic and tactical challenges that flight departments face in keeping safety their top priority, the chess theme was perfect,” David said. “Chess involves big picture planning, precise tactics, dealing with setbacks and having multiple preventative strategies in place.”

The four posters in the series address each of the four pillars of Global Aerospace’s SM4 Safety Program: Planning, Prevention, Response and Recovery.

“It’s an honor to serve a company like Global Aerospace,” David said. “They have invested tremendous resources into safety training and promotion, and offer them all to customers and non-customers alike. Theirs is a truly authentic commitment to safer air travel for all of us.”