Marketing and Nerdom collide in glorious fashion this week in Austin, Texas, site of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. And because Red Square lives at the center of both worlds, we’re there.

Digital wunderkinds, Karen Sullivan and Jeff Whitlock, are on hand to absorb as much knowledge as humanly possible. They’ll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and flickr’ing the whole deal, so stay tuned. If you want to catch up with them in Austin, hit ‘em up.

Also, a small aside: We are quite humbled and excited to be on the list of finalists in the interactive awards show for our BCBS work. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

Recently Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, wrote a piece in the WSJ entitled The New Rock-Star Paradigm. The article is an astute summation of the present state of the music business, specifically how the business has changed in the face of maturing digital communications. The guy isn’t your typical rock group frontman.Kulash’s thoughts apply outside of the music industry. How’s your business model holding up? Are you prepared to alter how you self-promote? Can you change how you operate and still make the cash register ring? Something to think about as we begin 2011.

Note: if you haven’t heard of OK Go, see “YouTube.” If you haven’t heard of YouTube, see “the Internet.” If you haven’t heard of the Internet, see “Al Gore.” And so on.

Everyone is enamored with social media right now. As such, there are countless self-proclaimed gurus who sling about meaningless buzzwords and hyperbolical claims. Alex Blagg is the greatest of them all. In fact, he’s probably read the whole Internet five times. See for yourself. This video makes me laugh. And his blog is outstanding.

Does one have to be a lunatic madman to be an entrepreneur? Are all visionaries nutjobs? Highly debatable. However I recently happened upon two pretty compelling pieces of evidence that point firmly to “yes.”

The documentary film We Live in Public chronicles the rise and fall of Josh Harris, the most famous (and incredibly eccentric) Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of; in 1992, he predicted much of what the web has become:

The Internet is like this new human experience. At first, everybody’s gonna like it, but there will be a fundamental change in the human condition.

The film highlights Harris’ social experiments and how they ultimately predicted the exhibitionism that marks social media today. We do live in public. Harris called that shot years before YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.

And in Sunday’s New York Times, there was a feature on Seth Priebatsch and his start-up company Scvngr (pronounced “Scavenger”). The story focuses on the 21-year-old wunderkind who wants to “build the game layer on top of the world.” Huh, right? That sounds crazy, but so did the premise for all of the other sites that millions and millions of people use every day.

Recently I read a quote on the stages of a visionary, world-changing idea: silly, controversial, progressive, then obvious. When you think of it that way, crazy starts to make a lot of sense.

Our first campaign for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama launches today. Hey hey! It’s their first new branding campaign in over twenty years, and to prepare for it, we studied closely how they’ve advertised most recently. Campaigns have focused on specific customer stories told through well produced, documentary-style television. For instance, spots have featured a middle-aged man whose daughter was diagnosed with cancer, a young man who contracted malaria while traveling abroad and the HR manager of a mid-sized company. The implicit audience take away: because these people have Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, they are able to be a father, to be adventurous and to be competitive, respectively.

Sound strategy. We just needed to execute against it in a fresh way. So we began the distillation process:  BCBS exists to help its customers live life to the fullest -> BCBS provides peace of mind that allows you to be whatever you need or want to be (a father, adventurous, competitive and so on) -> when your health is protected, you can focus on being you -> BE YOU.

Be You. This articulates the key consumer benefit BCBS delivers, but does so in a very open manner, such that anyone at any stage of life can identify and relate with the brand. And though the campaign utilizes traditional media (TV, print, newspaper, outdoor, radio), we’ve added digital and social media to the mix to allow a new kind of emphasis on storytelling. We want you to tell the stories.

First, have a look at a couple of thirty-second television spots for the campaign here and here.

We also produced a series of fifteen-second television spots with the message tailored to the programming in which the spot is placed; for example, we will have spots airing in Dancing with the Stars and American Idol that play off the content in those shows. And it’s football season in Alabama, so we absolutely had to produce a spot for the Crimson Tide and one for the Auburn Tigers.

Customer storytelling has been at the epicenter of BCBS’s advertising for many years, so we built a social sharing site that allows the public to share their own “Be” stories. The site is promoted on all of the traditional media (tagged with bcbsal.com/BEYOU) and through digital media placement on sites such as Facebook, Pandora, YouTube, Weather.com and al.com.

At the site, visitors can browse stories and/or share their own. The stories are rated, are searchable and can be shared via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail. Content is moderated and monitored for appropriateness.

The “Be You” campaign is unlike anything else in the healthcare insurance industry: in its tone, in its breadth and in its thoughtful utilization of digital media. Needless to say, we’re excited about the launch. Hope you like it. And be sure to share your story with us.

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We’d be complete jerks if we didn’t thank a few people who helped get this campaign birthed in a compressed period of time. First, our amazingly trusting clients at BCBS of Alabama. Just awesome. Second, our incredible production partners: Sam Crawford and Crossroads Films, Miller Mobley, Tim Vece and Jason Dettmer at Outback Editorial, Chris Bodie, Artifact Design, Struck/Axiom, New Uniform Design and Dennis Gould at Soundworks. Thank you.

Finally a reason I might buy an iPad: Flipboard. Billed as your own personalized, social magazine, it gathers all of the social web content you care about into a single, pretty slick-looking application. Here’s an overview video.

Kind of a creepy video, though. Particularly when the half-asleep hipster dude tells me that Flipboard knows who my friends are. Reminds me of this.

You can download the app here. (P.S. Thanks to the nice people at Flipboard for sending me some press pics.)

Good advertising gets people talking. Great advertising talks back. Example: Old Spice’s “I’m on a horse” dude responds to commenters and bloggers directly on YouTube. Here, he’s got a message for celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

Pure genius.

We’re experimenting a lot with Facebook, from the conceptual to paid advertising. As for the latter, these placements are proving to be some of the most cost effective in our arsenal right now. The ROI is pretty incredible.

eConsultancy just posted a great article on advertising via Facebook.

We are fans. I mean, we like.

Who doesn’t want to be treated like a rock star? We really couldn’t think of anyone, so we created 1-Day Wonder for our friends at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Biloxi.

Here’s the deal. By becoming a fan on Facebook, you are entered for a chance to be treated like a rock star for a day—free room, tickets to a show, dinner, drinks on the house, spa treatment, you get the idea. Each month, a new 1-Day Wonder will be selected.

So get in there and fan up. Who knows, soon you might be demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed.

Our pals and sometimes partners-in-awesomeness, Struck/Axiom, recently helped Gatorade with its new social media command center.

The mission-control-like room features large screens with various social media visualizations, such that Gatorade marketing pros can monitor real time conversations not only related to the brand but its competition, sports nutrition, athletes and other popular culture topics its consumers care about. Here’s a YouTube clip overview.

Carla Hassan, Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, says the goal of this project is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into the largest participatory brand in the world.”

What Hassan is really talking about is an unprecedented level of brand engagement. Brands by their very nature are participatory. After all, brands are merely the aggregate of consumer perceptions, and these perceptions are shaped by consumers’ interactions or participation with a given brand.

The difference today is that people have social media which acts as an amplifier. Anyone can be a media source and build an audience. Smart brands understand that and embrace engagement.

Congrats to Struck/Axiom and Gatorade.