Recently Mountain Dew’s Green Label Sound elevated brand/band pairing with the release of “When Fish Ride Bicycles,” a new full-length from Chicago hip-hop group the Cool Kids. What’s different than other brands playing in this space? Unlike Starbucks Hear Music—which is essentially a music publishing house and not necessarily a full-blown label—Green Label Sound is behaving like the real-deal: signing artists, handling distribution, PR, partnerships (read: iTunes) paid media, etc.

What can Green Label offer that traditional labels can’t? The better way to ask that question is to put it in reverse. With the state of the music industry going through its biggest shift in well, ever, record labels have become less effective at helping artists distribute their work, build fan followings, and evolve. Marketing is a major component of artist success, and Green Label relies on Cornerstone, a NY/LA based promotions agency to help run the label. By tapping into this agency resource, and genuinely committing to the artists they bring on board (imagine the bad PR if a brand-backed label treated artists poorly) Green Label Sound gives other labels a run for their money—especially considering their primary focus likely isn’t money—by promoting artists who in turn elevate the brand’s street cred.

In other words, it’s a perfect manifestation of our Brand Patronage trend for 2011. While consumer brands have played in nearly every area of media for nearly a century, I suspect we’re at the dawn of many deciding to go beyond sponsorships and carve out dedicated business units to support the creation, distribution and marketing of entertainment: whether that’s music, games, movies, apps, or books. Undoubtedly they’ll be no shortage of artists and agencies waiting to sign-up to help.

Well, this kind of blows my old Super Nintendo soccer game out of the water.

Check out the trailer above for I AM PLAYR, a game that’s currently in development, but slated for a beta release this year.

There’s a lot happening here, but we’ll try to give you the gist. The game is a first person narrative of a football player (the soccer kind) who’s just getting started, and has to face numerous challenges on and off the field. While you develop your skill set and compete in matches, you’re also tasked with managing your teammates, your social life, and… well… your more “intimate” fans.

While that’s certainly an interesting storyline, it’s also only the first chapter. As players navigate their character through the game, they compete against a global audience of other players to see who can develop the top-ranked star. Moreover, the game takes a page from alternate-reality gaming (you remember our coverage of ARGs, right?) and lets the elements of the game seep into the player’s everyday lives. Characters from the game communicate with the player by text and video, radio broadcasts cover the happenings from around the league, and even the tabloids are (reportedly) willing to dedicate headlines to the events that transpire within the game.

Admit it. You’re impressed.

While we could keep raving about how cool this will be, we do need to bring this back to marketing, right? Easy enough. It’s not especially surprising to see Nike jump all over this opportunity, snagging a principal sponsorship that will see them integrated into the storyline and game experience. And, while the game itself is free to play, players will have numerous opportunities to purchase (branded) virtual products that will improve their performance. (Considering the nightlife angle, it will be interesting to see just how risque those partnerships get.)

But, even if this particular game isn’t an appropriate fit for your brand, there are many lessons to be learned from this ambitious project. While there’s a literal connection to our Game On! trend, the more compelling angle is seeing how the creators have brought Life in the OOC to life. Thanks to the game’s multi-platform media integration, and the fact that competitions on the virtual field feed into the leaderboard against other human competitors, there is no clear line where the game ends and the player’s “real life” begins. Even though your average marketing campaign isn’t quite this fun (okay, it’s a LOT less fun), it should still be this seamlessly integrated across a variety of touchpoints. Notice that the creators aren’t hand-wringing over whether they need a mobile strategy or an above-the-line component or an online element. Instead, they’re pulling together an arsenal (yeah, pun intended) of high-tech and low-tech touchpoints to communicate a common story, and letting the players (i.e. the consumers) decide which formats work best for themselves.

I AM PLAYR, I am impressed. (For anyone who wants to read more, head this way.)

If you’ve caught yourself yelling phrases like “Get off my lawn!” or “Turn down that infernal racket,” it might be time for a quick refresher on today’s youth. A step in the right direction: spend ten minutes watching “We All Want to Be Young,” a video from the Brazilian research company BOX1824 (shown above).

While much of the content isn’t all that eye-opening in particular, to see it drawn together in the aggregate does paint a pretty comprehensive picture about the “global youth” who are going to rule the world someday. And yes, it does include a reference to the Double Rainbow video, so you know it’s worth your time.

Interestingly, one of the themes of the video (starting around the 5 minute mark) is that today’s youth feel anxiety precisely because they are connected to the entire world and because of the massive amount of information these connections generate. Having called this out in our Driven by Data trend, we’re not entirely surprised to hear about the need for data curation. However, it’s interesting to consider this as a trend that disproportionately affects Millennials. It’s easy to assume that the generations that most need data curation are far older than Millennials, but those populations probably tend to keep this overwhelming amount of data at arm’s length. It’s not a source of anxiety, per se, because it’s not a central problem in their lives.

But for the younger Millennials? Yeah, this dilemma hits them right between the eyes, and it’s something that can’t be ignored by marketers. So, we’ll go ahead and integrate this point into our trend, concluding that data curation matters for everyone, but is especially crucial for the up-and-coming Millennial generation. If that generation is a significant part of your brand’s target, what can you do to help mitigate this situation?

In the six months since we first covered Facebook’s social plugins and instant personalization features, over two million sites have implemented these services. It’s safe to say that Facebook’s little experiment is going well. But while the Like button has been a boon for marketers in the online world, there’s still some pervasive cynicism about what this technology means in the offline world.

Oh, wait, we see the problem: skeptics still think there’s a boundary between the online and offline worlds! Apparently someone needs to hop on the 405 and get themselves to The OOC, where Online-Offline Convergence is everywhere. (Y’know, this is the kind of thing that should really be a trend for 2011, dontcha think?) Generally, this trend has been driven by the explosive growth of smartphone ownership, since this is clearly the best tool for using online information to augment our offline lives. But we need not get so fancy.

Consider the Coca-Cola Village shown above. (Thanks to Adam Stipanuk for the tip!) The “village” is an annual 3-day pop-up amusement park in Israel, which provides teens with outdoor activities ranging from basketball courts to swimming pools. Those settings aren’t particularly conducive to lugging a phone around, so Coke provided the attendees with RFID-chipped wristbands that were linked to their individual Facebook accounts. If the kids wanted to let their friends know where they were headed, they simply touched their bracelet to the thumbs-up sign to “Like” that particular attraction, which would be automatically registered on Facebook (and viewable on kiosks around the Village). The same strategy allowed the teens to tag themselves in photos that were being taken by the park’s staff, so their memories would be preserved and shared after the event. The result: 35,000 (!) posts. You think Coke “liked” those results?

This brilliant execution seems almost borne out of necessity; i.e. how do you get teens to share their Village experience on Facebook if the environment is not conducive to smartphones? Their solution was to make the most important elements of the teens’ Facebook experience (namely, photo tagging and sharing what they’re doing) as seamless as possible via the RFID bracelet. Event marketers, take note!

Likewise, when a new IKEA opened in the Swedish town of Malmo, the retailer wanted to use social media to spread the word. But rather than using an intrusive means of interaction, the store tried to assimilate itself into the activities that Facebook users were already doing. So, the store manager uploaded a handful of photos featuring rooms filled with IKEA products, and made a simple offer: the first person to tag themselves as the featured items would win those items (see the video below). Predictably, it set off a social media frenzy, but also managed to spread these shots through the taggers’ own networks, ultimately spreading the word about the new store opening.

“Like” it or not, the Facebooks of the world are no longer confined solely to the online space, and brick-and-mortar retailers ignore them at their own peril. The next year (and beyond) will present significant challenges to retailers as they fend off an all-out assault from non-traditional competitors on the (mobile) web. Focusing on the smartphone is clearly an important part of this strategy, but these examples show that some of the most innovative responses circumvent the phone altogether.

Since we’ve been adamant about the often-neglected marketing potential of online videos (both the streaming and pre-recorded kinds), we’re glad to see marketers pushing the limits of what this medium can offer.

We’re also glad (and a bit shocked) that a marketer finally figured out how to deliver a compelling ad via Chatroulette. Lionsgate’s campaign for The Last Exorcism took to the service with a fool-proof way to capture the attention of young men: a girl teasing them with the prospect of a little, um… “show and tell.” Unfortunately for the guys, she’s also got a little issue with… well, you’ll see in the clip above. (Thanks to Mary van de Walle for the tip!)

Trivial Pursuit is in the middle of a much bigger undertaking over at Youtube, as part of a campaign for their new version of the game in which you bet against your peers. For most of us, our peers don’t include big-name celebrities. Heck our peers don’t even include barely-qualifying-as-celebrities like the Numa Numa guy or the Chocolate Rain dude. Well, Trivial Pursuit is working on the latter (but you keep working on tracking down those A-Listers champ!) via their branded Youtube channel. The channel is topped with an interactive display ad that allows visitors to play a round of Trivial Pursuit, rack up some tokens, and then bet those tokens on whether a random Youtube star (such as the parents of “Charlie bit my finger” or the “world’s worst ninja”) can answer the question correctly. If you bet correctly, your chips go to “the people.” If you fail, the chips go to Youtube.

Still with us? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Look, we commend the folks behind the Trivial Pursuit campaign for doing something unique – this certainly cuts through the clutter on Youtube. We do wish it wasn’t so darn complicated, though. Or, maybe the payoff could’ve been better; for instance, betting correctly enters you in a sweepstakes to win a copy of the new game. Or, maybe it could’ve been more personalized via Facebook Connect, so you could bet against your friends rather than betting on behalf of whoever “the people” are. There’s definitely a good idea buried in there somewhere – the execution just needs to be tightened up a bit.

But, as the web increasingly moves onto mobile devices, we’d expect these numbers to start shifting back to the young adult males that we stereotypically associate with the web, right?

Actually, no. Mobile social network usage actually shows a greater gender gap than overall internet usage, with women comprising 55% of the population. A recent post from Brian Solis dug through numbers from Nielsen and Comscore – feel free to scroll through all the info here.

And, when we break down these users by age, we’re not just talking about a bunch of Twilight fans. Sure, they’re a hefty piece of the pie (and that pie is pictured below), but everyone up to the 54 year-old crowd is pretty well represented on mobile social networks. (But before you run off claiming that most mobile social network users are middle aged, note that the bigger chunks in the pie chart actually represent larger age groups – i.e. 10 year and 20 year intervals – than the 7 year interval covering 18-24 year olds. It’s a misleading graph, I’ll admit.)

Just a friendly remind that yes, “your” target is on social networks, and if he or she isn’t accessing them via a mobile device, you can expect that to happen soon.

Okay, we’ll admit there were some benefits. Just let me get wipe this barbecue sauce off my chin, and we’ll get started.

We obviously have a TON of content to sift through, process, and share with you fine folks. But, before taking deeper dives in our subsequent posts, let’s set the stage with one of the least sexy, but most useful, panels: Nielsen’s David Gill and his boatload of mobile media stats (which we’ll share in greater depth by request). Let’s take a look at the heavy hitters from his presentation.

Looking for the “killer app” on smartphones? It’s the mobile web, silly. 90% of iPhone & Android users use it, while 2/3 of them use apps. And, as the mobile web speeds up (possibly this year), many of the tasks formerly completed via apps will be more efficiently handled through the mobile web. Gee, someone should formulate a trend about this. They could even call it After the App!

If you are creating apps, you do have that pesky little platform issue. Is the iPhone app store worth the hassle? Sure. Do we need to acknowledge Google’s ever-growing and far-reaching Android platform? Uh-huh. Do we need to get ourselves on the Blackberry? Well, that’s a bit more complicated. Nielsen data shows that about 70% of Blackberry users don’t download apps. And, here’s why: a significant number of Blackberry users get their phones through their companies, and the IT departments (smartly) have the phones on lockdown. Maybe you can make the case that you need the Druglord Wars app to do your job, but for most folks, it’s a longshot. So, if you’re planning to target business consumers, focusing on their mobile web experience is a much safer bet. Gee, someone should come up with a trend about that, too. They could even call it After the App!

Finally, Gill reminds us that when users are texting, this physically moves their phone from their ear to their eye, and puts the handset in front them. Seems like an obvious point, but have we thought through the implications of this for heavy texters? In other words, is an audible app still relevant to a user who’s interacting with their so-called phone in a primarily visual sense? Ok, we didn’t have a trend predicting that one, but it’s crucial to remember the importance of the visual and tactile user experience on the mobile platform. In fact, we’ll get a little “touchy” with our next SXSWi dispatch. Stay tuned.