Something strange has been happening to my friends, both online and off. It goes something like this:

OK, so that might not seem so strange to you, but I know Justin. Justin is a killer photographer who loves track bikes and drinking Lone Star and going to see shows. Justin isn’t the type of person to be Twittering about the Fiesta Bowl. Justin, I would wager, has never worn burnt orange.

But there it is, clear as day. And you have noticed it too…the indie friends and D&D gamers that you know, the ones who eschewed sports and jockiness as a general defining characteristic, have suddenly started debating Teixiera going to the Yankees and Matt Cassel’s free agency situation. They have become informed, engaged, well…fans.

I can’t claim to be any different. Anyone who knew me in college would be aghast at my fandom these days. I follow the Red Sox like I have money on the games. I got up at 6am last spring to watch the exhibition games in Tokyo. I even follow the Globe Sports section on Twitter so I can be the first to know when Varitek re-signs (please re-sign!).

Why has this happened? I think it has to do with the quest for meaning. The quest, that is, for Authenticity.

My favorite blog in the entire internet, Hipster Runoff, has made it a central mission to define this desire for authenticism, the science of explaining what it means for something to be authentic, and why things that are authentic appeal so strongly to those of us who are constantly searching for what’s next. And it goes something like this:

In an increasingly scripted, focus grouped and branded existence, the true things, the authentic experiences, are becoming harder and harder to find. We feel starved for something familiar and worthwhile. Sports provides this, not only because it’s the only thing left on television that is almost always unpredictable in its outcome, but because it is a classic thing to participate in. It is a pastime.

It’s trite to say we’re all searching for something true, but I’ll say it anyway: We are all searching for something true. We want to be connected participants of things that are genuine, that aren’t trying to trick us. It’s why we constantly hunt for vintage Belstaff Trialmaster jackets on eBay, why we listen to Merle Haggard on vinyl rcords played on vintage turntables and tube amps.

You know this to be true. It’s why we got into Lone Star and track bikes to begin with, isn’t it? Both, in their way, connect us to something that has its roots in our collective culture. Lone Star becomes a vessel for us to connect a simple, more honest (and nostaglic) time, and track bikes allow us to be part of a niche, specialized and purely functional sport. Jack Daniels, despite its being featured at TGI Friday’s, is still the de facto whisky. Polaroid, despite becoming a watered down brand for second tier TVs, is still equated with precious, poorly-exposed topless photos.

These things are all genuine, even if the way we experience them is not.

And it’s not just sports and beer. Recently I’ve noticed a lot of my friends, including fellow Barbarians, are genuinely getting into guns (or, for those of us in NYC, the idea of guns). In fact, I called that as the breakout trend for 2009 on my Twitter. It would seem that as our cultural history gets more and more strip-mined of authentic totems, we have to dig deeper. We have to go to the most honest, the most pure, the most authentic. And in doing so, we have to betray the old definitions on what it meant to be alt.

Mainstream is the new alt.

The Internet may not have begun this race to authenticity, but it certainly sped it up. Suddenly, anyone with a decent internet connection can be as alt as anyone else. Trends used to be born geograhically- cities were the epicenter of cool, and eventually it trickled along the highways to middle America. Now hipness is a science, one that can be learned, studied, and challenged. The Internet allows trends to be born, thoroughly researched, surface, and die at an alarming rate, effectively speeding up the evolution of the culture. Alt culture has up til now been a self-referential snake eating its own tail, and suddenly it finds itself gnawing at the back of its head.

Of course, there is one deeper, more authentic and traditional trend that has yet to be embraced: Religion. If that happens; if you start seeing alt-beards at Sunday Mass…well, you heard it here first.

Really interesting article over at WSJ on the Wassup guys, whom were made infamous from their Budweiser commercials of the late ‘90s. The interesting thing to me, is not that the actors all got together again to make this updated political statement, but rather, that this is a case of a film maker who licensed his idea to a major brand for a set period of time, and now since the licensing deal has been expired for the past 3 years, that film maker is able to feed off of the fame it already produced for him. Its a very smart way to work.

It has me thinking, what if our brands of yester year were always licensed like this? What if Tony the Tiger’s contract was up and then he moved on to promote the green party to help conservation of our natural resources and wildlife? Or imagine the Country Crock couple endorsing their religiously motivated family planning issue? To me, this is opening a whole new space for consumerism to turn into activism. And maybe that is a good thing right now.

Good lord, have we had a lot of requests for iPhone Apps lately.

And who can blame these companies? With the iPhone fast becoming one of the most prolific and exciting new developments in mobile computing, with the App Store seeing stratospheric download rates and profits, who wouldn’t want a piece of the action? If you’ve got a brand, you need an iPhone App.

Except, really, you don’t.

So one of the greatest lines in Advertising history is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this summer, Nike’s Just Do It. Awesome. And congrats to Nike and to Wieden & Kennedy.

When I was a marketing director at Miller Brewing back in the mid-nineties I had the pleasure of working with Dan Wieden and Dave Luhr and the rest of W+K Portland. At that time we were looking at re-introducing the phrase It’s Miller Time back into the American lexicon and we were debating where the line should be used, under what circumstances, and how often. My initial reaction was everywhere, in all cases, as often as possible. Dan Wieden then described how Just Do It is used, or more precisely, not used. “Only use a brand motto (that’s what they called Just Do It, it’s certainly not a slogan…) when you can give it meaning. Every use out of context, on say a t-shirt, subtracts value.” Or something like that. And then I realized I had never seen a t-shirt with the words Just Do It, or a hat or a bumper sticker. What does a bumper sticker have to do with authentic athletic performance? Nothing. In fact, he went on to point out that most Nike TV spots do not end with Just Do It. I said I didnt believe him and he showed me a reel of the greatest hits and only a handful actually ended with Just Do It. It was remarkable and made perfect sense. No wonder it has lasted so long.

UPDATE: So apparently it wasn’t the MTA, but our Media Placement Company who made the call to strike the Hello Health ads. So, deepest of apologies, MTA, for being under the mistaken impression that you were bad guy on this one. Tell you what? I’ll buy an unlimited Metrocard and promptly lose it as penance.

I’m historically no fan of brand vehicles or branded content, but I can tolerate it if it’s transparent. The fact that Chris Brown, an “artist” and “musician” (i use both terms with more than a dash of sardonic vitriol) would allow his creative process to be co-opted by….

You know what? I can’t even finish the thought. Let’s go Outback tonight!

As an aside, what could Wrigley have done with the same kind of impact? How about re-buying the naming rights to Wrigley Stadium, and ensuring that they’re preserving an historic part of American History? How about that?

Okay, that last post was a little bit cranky, sorry about that. I suppose I should take the time to show you the positive side. To show you how we do things, how we work with our clients who are building online communities and products, and how it can be done right. This will also, conveniently, help explain to my mother what I do all day.

Let’s say that you are, in fact, the world’s leading authority on, say, orchids. Like you go to conferences and stuff, and thousands of people seek out your wisdom regarding orchids. Let’s then say that you, along with a friend, realize that there’s a substantial number of orchid aficionados out there and that, say, 90% of them use the internet. Let’s say you learned this at first anecdotally, but then, because your friend happened to be a bit of a research buff, you actually confirmed this with some research. Let’s say it transpires that there are 4 million orchid buffs out there on the web, and they happen to have a high disposable income, a predilection for spending time on the internet, and a genuine hunger for more wisdom, discussion, insight, learnings, entertainment, and, in short, content about orchids. And you are fully capable of providing this content because you’re one of an elite band of orchid experts, and they are already sending you weird postcards and stuff asking you questions, and then one day you started a blog and it was so weird because all of the sudden like 50,000 orchid lovers were reading it and you didn’t even put that much effort into it.

So then let’s say you and your friend write up a business plan explaining your vision for a new orchid lovers community site. You’ve done your research and your homework, and you’ve established that THE WORLD IS DYING FOR AN ORCHID COMMUNITY SITE. And you’ve figured out that you need about $3 million dollars to start this orchid community – and you’ve got all your costs worked out: site build, admin/CMS, editorial content and plan, maintenance and continued development, staffing plan, ad sales plan, ad operations plan, etc. And it just so happens that your friend’s college roommate is a VC at some firm on Sand Hill Road and he looks over your plan, and makes modifications here and there but generally is on board with the plan because they’d been doing some research too and realized that this is a golden market – affluent, niche, hard-to-reach, etc. And you have another orchid lover friend who works at a media agency and is like “yes! we’ve got like 15 clients that would love to reach this demographic and I know my friend sally at MediaVest has the same problems.”

So you all shake hands and start a company and the VC writes a check for $3 million and it’s time to go. LET’S DO THIS. WE ARE GOING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. WE’RE GOING TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE WORLD OF ORCHID GROWING.

What now?

Well, this is what you do. You find a CTO. Then you hire some developers or an agency to build your site. Then you hire another firm to handle the information architecture and user experience. And maybe you hire one of those two firms, or another firm, to handle the site design. And of course this needs to be tied into the branding, so then you gotta hire a branding firm to develop your site’s branding. And then you have to figure out a marketing plan for when you actually launch the site. Oh, and along the way you need to hire someone to develop a content strategy, and someone else to figure out the editorial calendar, and probably someone to sell the ads, and someone else to deploy all those banner ads to the site and manage the inventory. And you need to choose an analytics package. And an ad operations package. And maybe you have some e-commerce and need a fulfillment partner. And what about mobile? You’ll end up with probably 3-4 hires, and then something like 4 firms all working on your site. Because you want the best. Who’s the best development firm? Okay, let’s get them. Who’s the best User Experience firm? We sent RFPs to Molecular and Adaptive Path and a few others. Who’s the best design firms? Sent out RFPs to Pentagram (wait do they do interactive?) and those cool kids up in Canada that did Digg and 37 Signals. Wait are they designers or UX? We sent RFPs to Ogilvy and Landor and a few specialized one-person shops for the branding, and we’re definitely gonna call the Barbarians for the marketing. Because they did that Subservient Chicken thing and it was awesome.

So now you have something like 5 different firms and 4 different people working on this, and they all sort of want some part of the other firms’ business, but not others, cuz they all do one or two things and have these mandates to grow their business with additional work from their pre-existing clients. It’s like their business plan or something.

And each of these firms is on a different engagement timeline, with different deliverables, and none of the deliverables are making you the greatest possible product and successfully launching it through an integrated strategy that coordinates content, editorial, pre and post-launch development, user experience and marketing. And there’s no coordination, really, except for the CTO on the technical side (if you’ve been lucky enough to find one yet), and the content editor you hired and your friend from the media company you lured away with some equity. And you. The orchid lover

It is, in short, like herding cats. And, worse, it is painfully sequential, or “waterfall.” The branding firm needs to finish the branding before the design firm can get started. The design firm can’t get started until the UX team has really dug in, and the tech guys can’t do much until you’ve hired your CTO and chosen a platform and some basic requirements have been identified and maybe a few wireframes have been built. And all of this will completely distract you from the marketing of your new site once it’s launched, and you’re still not sure who you’re going to hire to keep developing on the site once its launched, because let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of developers out there who also love orchids and there’s only so much equity to go around and don’t all developers really just want to work at Facebook?

You could, of course, hire all of these people internally. Give ‘em equity in the company, and try and instill a spirit of camaraderie in them. Or you could find one development partner, get the thing built, hope it takes off and then build the business around it (this seems to be the logic of the young turks on the New York scene: Tumblr, Muxtape, Iminlikewithyou, etc).

But wouldn’t it be cool if there was one company you could hire to do all of that for you? That you could work out a deal with to be your partner, before and after launch, and got the right team together from all of these disciplines, and all worked in tandem, in an agile, responsive, nimble manner, with all disciplines working in tandem for a common goal? You handle the internet, I’ll handle the orchids Wouldn’t it be cool if they chose the tech based on not just what’s best for the job but based on what made it easiest to help you in your CTO search? So you could get going even before you found them? Wouldn’t it be cool if some great marketing idea could influence the user experience? Wouldn’t it be cool if the UX guys had an awesome idea they knew exactly whether the development gals could handle it and what the process was for getting this unexpected brainstorm done, because doing it will make the product better? Because everyone wants the product to be better?

This is, in short, the service we have been growing to offer to these people now. All things in the service to interactive marketing. 20 developers. Dozens of creatives. Marketers. Planners. A fast-growing, talented and battle-hardened user experience department, all of whom have embraced agile methodologies and have extensive experience on real sites and real communities. Designers who love to iterate. Even the client service gang is in on the mix, acting as your Scrum-certfied product owner, translating your business decisions into concrete tasks for the team. UX people who understand that it’s not just about usability but emotion and marketing and users becoming wed to your site. And marketing people who haven’t gotten jaded because they know they have a stake in the actual product they’re marketing, and knowing that if their genius marketing idea is that oh-so-common idea of make the product better that they could actually make it happen.

I don’t think we’re 100% there yet: bringing Noah on board was a key element in reinforcing the strategy and planning angle of it. And we’re taking agile development into places that it was never really intended to go: who, for the love of god, has ever actually attempted agile branding? But I do believe that we’re on to something, and I think our clients are pretty into it as well. I can’t wait until this fall when we start having things to show to put our money where our mouth is on this front. But I definitely believe in it. And I have faith enough that I’m talking about it now. Because, really, it’s all I talk about anymore. ;)

(oh, and it’s not just for startups. We work this way with tech companies offering new products. With consumer product companies wanting to extend their brand onto the web in a truly connecting way via branded utilities, communities or content. But this metaphor is a good time so I’m gonna roll with it).

I see so many sites being launched that are awesome technological demos. They have pretty solid PR too (and, as an aside, it’s almost an embarrassment for the ad world that the PR world seems to have figured out this whole internet thing more quickly than them). They get their awesome product and they do some awesome PR and they get a mention on Tech Crunch and they get a nice spike in traffic the first week and then… What? Things stall. Why don’t they do any marketing then? Why doesn’t Dopplr market? Why doesn’t Vimeo? Who doesn’t Hulu? That’s a really interesting one. Basically they all seem to be hoping that the launch push will take hold and and turn into a Twitter-like network effect. And if it doesn’t? Well, they seem to toss it out and move on. Fair enough, I suppose. If you’re looking to score an online hit no matter what the content or product. But if you’re invested in a certain topic – be it your future as an orchid expert or your brand’s very reason to exist in the 21st century – you need to succeed this time, in this field. So, if you’re in it for the long haul, why not market?

I believe our brains, bruised from the web 1.0 world and embracing of the web 2.0’s ethos of fail “fast, fail cheap” have caused us to develop a few subconscious mores and taboos. Why don’t more startups market anymore? Partially because the people behind the startup are not committed to its success – they can move on if it fails. But I believe it’s also because of all the profligate spending during the Web 1.0 world, and because Web 2.0 is about staying cheap to achieve rapid profitability. Fair enough. But Web 2.0 brought other trends to bear along with staying cheap. Viral marketing. Word of Mouth. Gimmicky little games. The tactics have changed, but marketing can still work. Marketing can still drive traffic to your site. And if your site is good enough, that traffic can expand exponentially.

Web 2.0 showed us something else, too: user experience is marketing. Your feature set is marketing. Think Google maps. Why did it win? Because of an amazing new feature set (ie., AJAX). The lines are blurring a bit. It gets tricky. It can be argued that Google Maps won because it was a superior product offering, simple as that. Facebook could say the same. I would absolutely agree with that. But I would also say that this implies that a unique, improved user interface can drive traffic far beyond just the individuals who discover it. When people are pleasantly surprised by an amazing product on the web, they tell their friends about it. Marketing. And, once you’ve got this superior product, driving traffic to it using other marketing tactics – viral marketing, advergaming, etc – just like you do with your PR can be a huge advantage. It doesn’t have to be a super bowl ad. It doesn’t even have to be an online media buy. But marketing is a tool to be used here, especially when it’s done in perfect synchronicity to the dev and the UX, and you don’t have ‘the marketing guys’ sitting in the corner not grasping your product. When you have marketing peeps who were there every step of the way. Who are as invested as you are in the product’s success.

The M&Ms Campaign spearheaded by BBDO continues to impress. The latest iteration I particularly like are the celebrity print ads. Bobby Flay, Indiana Jones, Kyle Busch. I hope they continue because it can become the next big iconic print campaign, like the milk mustache or Absolut Vodka.

A good sign is the latest iteration by Latinworks, Austin TX (good friends of mine Manny Flores, Alex Ruelas are the founders) featuring Wilmer Valderrama and discussed in the NYT. Ok, I wish it was someone with a bit more street cred like Carlos Santana but hey, it’s gotta start somewhere.

All of this is exciting, of course, because we were there at the beginning. We created becomeanmm with BBDO back in early 2007 and users started creating their own celebrity M&Ms, like The Donald to the left. Awesome.