Debit and credit cards are so last year. Checks have all but crossed the line into social taboo. And cash is basically, like, archaic.

Ugh, it’s like retailers don’t even want our money.

But wait! A few days ago, a Pew study found that 65% of surveyed tech critics and stakeholders believe mobile payments will replace cash and credit by 2020.

Even though mobile payment is still in its infancy, it seems like everyone is hopeful about its future, especially when it comes to improving the process with updated technologies.

Unfortunately, good citizens, we have cynics among us – those who worry about things like security, standardization, and the cost of new gadgets.

But fear not. We wouldn’t want you stranded in the Dark Ages of outdated currency. With this handy guide, follow us into the realm of information so you, too, can help welcome this brave new, digital-financial world.

What Is This Sorcery?

Put down the torches and pitchforks, townspeople. Brands that you already know and love have signed on to create promising mobile wallet apps, using these new technologies:

NFC, or Near-Field Communications, allows you to pay simply by waving your mobile phone at an NFC receptor at the register.  RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, is like NFC but can be used at a longer range. And 2D barcodes can even be scanned at the register from a customer’s phone to charge a pre-paid account.

Rather than producing your credit card at every purchase, mobile wallet apps store your financial data and use these technologies to pull it for you automatically, at the point of purchase.

The Google Wallet app, which uses NFC, currently only works with Citi Mastercard and the Google prepaid card, but it does sync with your Google Offers and hopes to soon hold all card types.

Acceptance is liberation. (credit: fullissue.com)

Like Google Wallet, ISIS, a joint venture of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, will also use NFC and will hold credit cards, loyalty cards, and promotions.

PayPal also plans to release its PayPal Wallet app soon. Unlike Google Wallet, it won’t use NFC but will let you change your payment method up to 7 days after you pay.

These apps will soon be able to hold multiple card/account numbers and allow you to choose which account you’d like to charge when you wave your phone at the receptor. They will also have the ability to store coupons, receipts, and past purchase information to facilitate discounts and returns easily.

However, as mentioned earlier, there are dissenters. They wonder if it could be easy for someone to access your bank accounts just by waving their phone near yours (no.) They don’t want to have to buy NFC-enabled phones (they’ll change their minds). And they complain about the lack of standardization in mobile payment technologies (ok, that might be a good point).

How Can Marketers Conjur This Black Magic?

What the dissenters don’t see is that evolving mobile payment platforms are prime real estate for marketers!

Imagine the ease of distributing targeted promotions! Using NFC, mobile wallet apps can already track a consumer’s location and purchase history, allowing brands to send her coupons for the store she’s browsing in or updates on items she frequently purchases.

Think of the social media integration! What if a check-in immediately rewarded her with a coupon loaded to her mobile wallet, and her purchase was discounted automatically at the register? And if she allows Facebook to post which coupons she was receiving, not only would it encourage more check-ins, but it would encourage her friends to adopt the app, too.

Plus, there’s potential to move into other forms of media – MasterCard’s QkR app can pull purchasing information from just about anywhere, including QR codes, TV signals, and the Xbox Kinect. Praise technology of the future!

Say NO to the tyranny of physical currency! Demand your NFC-enabled smartphone today!

(credit: venturebeat.com)

The opportunities of mobile payment are looking promising. While the technologies and full capabilities of the apps are still to be cemented, brands are sure to see significant benefits when the rough edges are smoothed out regarding standardizations and security misperceptions. But, once mobile payment technology is ready for the mainstream, brands can use it to inspire action and usher in the glorious age of mobile finance!

Gender Bender, an examination of shifting gender based demographics and dynamics, featured in our Ten Trends for 2012 report, builds on a theme we’ve been following and writing about over the past few years. Namely, that with women’s educational ascendancy and growing economic power we’re now witnessing one of the most dramatic cultural upheavals in this country’s history.

In her new book, The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, best selling writer and Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy presents a fascinating perspective on what she calls the Big Shift. Drawing on many of the same sources we’ve cited in our own observations about these changes, Mundy outlines a broad variety of current indicators which speak to what’s in store for our culture as women wield greater influence in the workplace and the marketplace. For instance, fifty-seven percent of undergraduates are now female, and women earn the majority of doctorates and master’s degrees, leading some experts to predict that in the next two decades, medicine and law will be dominated by women. Already, according to a 2009 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey, in 4 out of 10 working couples, wives out-earned their husbands — essentially doubling this figure in just two decades. Mundy does note that women have not quite shattered the glass ceiling given that they still face a wage gap; women working full time earn a median wage that is eighty-one percent of what men make. Still, when we look at single women in their twenties in major metro areas, women are already out-earning their male twenty-something peers. Look out!

As we’ve noted before, many marketers continue to either ignore or misinterpret what these changes mean for today’s household dynamics. One of the Mundy’s most important observations centers on how increasing income parity is redefining relationships and changing younger Americans’ notions of masculinity and parenting. With so much evidence pointing to a more egalitarian approach to raising children, a sophisticated marketer like Kimberly-Clark recently sparked what Advertising Age called a poop storm of controversy when outraged fathers launched an online attack on a Huggies campaign which portrayed fathers as clueless and inept. At Internet speed, one outraged Pennsylvania father started a petition entitled “We’re Dads, Huggies. Not Dummies.” Armed with his own powerful demographic stat, Routly pointed out that according to the most recent U.S. census, one in three fathers acts as his family’s primary child caregiver. Lesson learned, Kimberly-Clark quickly apologized and retooled the campaign.

A broad spectrum of cultural norms will be reshaped as gender roles shift and evolve. And smart marketing will reflect these changes without distorting or misinterpreting what they mean for both men and women. Yet the road to enlightenment can be a winding one, so while we expect to see more intelligent depictions of involved fathers like those in P&G’s new Vicks campaign, we may also have to witness a few more poop storms.

Recently hitting 10 million unique monthly views faster than any standalone site in US history, Pinterest is becoming too big to ignore, especially for brands and marketers. Curious about what this site is and how to utilize it? Check out our new Potty Posting, which takes a look at how brands can use this site to “pinspire” consumer action.

The Ego to Her Id

Do you often find yourself planning a hypothetical wedding, decorating a hypothetical house, or building a hypothetical shoe closet out of items you probably can’t afford?

If so, you might have a Pinterest problem.

At least you’re not alone. Apologies in advance to anyone who’s already familiar with it, but Pinterest is a social media site for users to gather, organize and share things they find on the Internet in a visually-stimulating, digital scrapbook. With over 11 million unique monthly visitors in January and referral traffic equaling that of Google and Twitter, it’s gaining a lot of attention.

“NOOOOOOO!” you exclaim in a fit of rage. “I can’t keep track of all these stupid social networks anymore! What makes this one different?!” Geez, calm down.  Have some pins to help you relax.

A user’s Pinterest boards, or categories in which she “pins” items, are filled with inspirational quotes, entertainment ideas, parenting tips, recipes, decorating palettes, and everything else she can relate to. Even if the user doesn’t have the time, money, or energy to achieve or own all of the cool things she pins, she can still customize her scrapbook so that it becomes a visual representation of her ideal self, or what she would do if she could. Essentially, Pinterest is the organizing, rational helper to her passionate, impulsive instincts – the ego to her id.

In this way, Pinterest is the perfect platform for brands to connect with users. Whether they realize it or not, brands and marketers have been tapping in to the id and ego for decades, convincing consumers to satisfy their impulses by rationalizing those choices for them. That’s why brands have really started taking notice of this new platform. Some active brands on Pinterest, like Chobani yogurt and Gap clothing, post photos of recipe ideas and clothing combos (respectively) to allow users to save the brand as a “maybe someday” wish, without the immediate commitment to buy.

And when these brands trigger her lustful impulse to pin their attractive or delicious products, she shares it with the entire Pinterest community (there are no privacy settings on boards yet), and it guarantees that she’ll recognize it and be more likely to purchase it when she sees it in real life. Plus, on Pinterest, brand content doesn’t come in the form of a sponsored story or a traditional ad – it’s mostly re-pins from other users, which is, essentially, a recommendation of that brand by other community members. This recommendation is invaluable, because every marketer knows that people trust friends and virtual strangers more than advertising.

There’s only one problem: brands have to make it seem like they’re not selling anything. This is easy when it’s other users re-pinning a brand’s content, but with the ability for brands to create their own profiles and boards, the directness of the brand’s self-promotion could make users wary. A user’s boards are really personal – they’re an open exhibition of her philosophies, goals, dreams, and lifestyle. This puts brands at a disadvantage: a Pinterest user is not going to respond very well to impersonal ads and marketing messages taking advantage of the personal information she shares on her boards and cluttering up her ideal-self-collage.

This makes it necessary for brands to use Pinterest’s platform, and the nature of a user’s impulsive id, to do the marketing for them. On Pinterest, images take center stage, so brands should focus on eye-catching photos of their products to encourage re-pinning. Descriptions should be kept short and sweet, with just enough information to warrant a click. An important but often overlooked rule of thumb is to make sure pins are added to the right boards; if a brand offers a great product for a user browsing a “Midnight Snack” board, it’ll be a perfect match.

In addition, since Pinterest doesn’t have an established revenue plan, brands can leverage this user-driven community for creative advertising. For example, Corona could host a “Pin Your Beach” contest based on its “Find Your Beach” campaign, in which users pin images of their perfect getaway and win prizes. Her re-pinning the image, and the next user re-pinning it from her, will ensure a degree of separation that still brings a brand’s image to a user’s board, but without the directness of something that could be considered an advertisement.

The opportunities Pinterest offers brands is enormous, and by getting savvy to the platform and inspiring action in re-pinning, a brand can target a user’s impulsive instincts and ensure its place on her ideal-self-collage.

Meet Pinterest, a social media site for users to gather, organize and share things they find on the internet in a visually-stimulating, digital scrapbook. There are all sorts of things on Pinterest, but the savvy user knows that most of it can be found in categories like decorations, crafts, food, and wedding planning. That’s not too surprising, considering that as of last month, 80% of Pinterest users were women, most between 25 and 34.

People use Pinterest to “pin” things around the web that they identify with, but since so much of it is too expensive for the everyday user to buy, a user’s Pinterest board represents what she would buy, what she would craft, and what she would cook, if she had the time and the means. Essentially, a user’s Pinterest board is a visual representation of her ideal self.

So, how can your brand leverage this site for your romantic Valentine’s Day campaign? Check out your target’s board! She’s already been pinning tablescapes, yummy recipes, baking ideas, and dresses, so you have plenty of information to get to know her personally. Is she pinning in a certain trend, like recipes that include chocolate or cheese? Has she been “liking” pins about fruity cocktails or hot toddies? Has she been re-pinning posts about beauty treatments?

With this information in mind, recognize your brand’s most romantic asset and how couples can use it together. Can your ingredients be used in a homemade dish that even culinary novices can master? Pin it! Does your brand offer an aroma-therapy candle or night-time bubble bath? Pin it! Does your brand’s liquor make the sweetest, more share-able cocktails? Pin it! Yoplait pins delicious dessert recipes featuring its yogurt, and HGTV even has its own Valentine’s Day board full of crafts and other visually loveable items to get your romantic wheels turning.

Remember: for best results, tag your pins correctly, and keep them short, sweet, and eye-catching. By using this great new site to get familiar with your target, your brand can make her Valentine’s Day that much sweeter.

Here’s their exact copy for the search:

Think you are the Next BIG Thing?

Calling curvy ladies everywhere! Our best-selling Disco Pant (and around 10 other sexy styles) are now available in size XL, for those of us who need a little extra wiggle room where it counts. We’re looking for fresh faces (and curvaceous bods) to fill these babies out. If you think you’ve got what it takes to be the next XLent model, send us photos of you and your junk to back it up.

Just send us two recent photographs of yourself, one that clearly shows your face and one of your body. We’ll select a winner to be flown out to our Los Angeles headquarters to star in your own bootylicious photoshoot. Runners up will win an enviable assortment of our favorite new styles in XL!

Show us what you’re workin’ with!

As a copywriter and as a woman, there are just so many things wrong with the wording of this campaign, including but not limited to the fact that not once do they use a positive or real adjective to describe plus-sized women. As one irate blogger says, it’s just “jokey, made up words like ‘junk’ and ‘XLent.’ Nothing that denotes attractiveness without a crude reference to size.”

Essentially, it was hard for me to take this campaign seriously, and apparently, I’m not the only one.

To Nancy Upton, a Dallas-based blogger, the contest was one big fat insult. “The puns, the insulting, giggly tones, and the over-used euphemisms for fat that were scattered throughout the campaign’s solicitation began to crystallize an opinion in my mind. How offensive the campaign was,” Upton wrote in a post on the Daily Beast. To Upton, “The company was co-opting the mantra of plus-size empowerment and glazing it with its unmistakable brand of female objectification.”

And not only did her words strike a chord with American Apparel’s Creative Director, Iris Alonza, so did the spoof photos she submitted to the contest. Upton teamed up with friend Shannon Skloss to take modeling pictures of her devouring fried chicken in a pool, soaking in a bath of ranch dressing, smearing an entire pie on her face and body, and other satirical situations.

Photo credit: Shannon Skloss

See Upton’s full submission here.

The irony here is that Nancy Upton won the contest, at least in popularity, but she won’t be modeling for the company anytime soon. The brand hasn’t announced their official winner, but in a scathing response to Upton, Alonza wrote:

“Oh—and regarding winning the contest, while you were clearly the popular choice, we have decided to award the prizes to other contestants that we feel truly exemplify the idea of beauty inside and out, and whom we will be proud to have representing our company.”

What she meant to say was, “We decided to pick a winner who already likes our brand in hopes that she will just sit there on her ‘full-sized fanny’ and look pretty, er…I mean, XLent.”

So what can we learn from all this not-so-XLent publicity that the “Next BIG Thing” campaign has garnered for American Apparel? To put it simply, tone is everything. And for a company who’s built their brand with what some have labeled as misogynist advertising, they probably should have steered clear of their “Hey, girl, we get you!” tone, especially for a target that’s been purposely excluded up until now.

*Made-up statistic pulled out of thin air to add some color to this post
**American Apparel (AA) threatened to file bankruptcy this year. With the belts of so many Americans loosening, maybe AA decided it was time to expand…literally.

Who’s Talking?

Someone needs to spread the message. Called connectors, accelerators and influencers, they have deep and wide social networks and pass along information they care about to others. The key is to tap into the right people for your specific product or service. Here are three types of “go-to” people:

Enthusiast. The stereotypical brand advocate who serves as a passionate brand ambassador.
Local Expert. The know-all about a specific category—car or gadget nut, knows about new restaurants or TV shows.
Jack-of-All-Interest. An interesting know-a-lot vs. an annoying know-it-all.

What Are They Talking About?

First of all, forget everything you learned about traditional brand management. If this process starts by trying to convert a well-crafted brand statement into a word-of-mouth campaign, it won’t be successful. The product or service must be looked at through a different lens.

It’s not what you want to say about your product or service, but what consumers find talkable about it. Finding the relevance in a product or service is crucial. If it’s relevant, the more likely it will be deemed worth sharing. Once something is worth sharing, it has value. High-involvement categories tend to increase information value. The collision of talkability and relevancy becomes the social currency in the message.

Dig deep to understand the consumer. Think about what people like to talk about, why they like to talk, and how an actual conversation might transpire. Remember the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray? It’s quite appropriate when creating word-of-mouth messages.

When developing word-of-mouth messages directed toward men, think in terms of Guysmanship. Male word-of-mouth triggers tend to be competitive, fact-based and opinionated. Men talk to “show that they know” or “be first.” Look at ESPN or read the sports page—facts and opinions are expressed in sound bites.

For women, it’s all about Fempathy. Female triggers are more empathetic or deal with community building and emotional outreach. They talk “to help” and “to be heard.” And far from sound bites, their conversations are centered on shared experiences and expressed as complete stories. It’s Oprah and Lifetime and their stories of women facing their challenges, from the life-changing to the day-to-day.

So Get to It.

Find the right people to spread the word. Craft the right message that’s talkable and relevant. Activate it using the tactics most appropriate for the topic. There’s a world of technological options; be sure to find the tools that will best seed or spark the conversation. And remember, the true magic lies in the social currency of the idea—it’s what keeps the idea moving to others.

• Our #1 hit of 2010 was our celebration of the innovative marketing efforts of… a car company? An American car company?? Yep, Ford has Facebook all figured out, especially with their live launch of their 2011 Explorer. No other marketer demonstrated such a nuanced approach to engaging with consumers via Facebook. It’s the perfect case study for seamlessly applying all the features that Facebook has to offer, and giving consumers what they actually want from a brand on social media. (It’s also one of the reasons we wholeheartedly agree with Ad Age naming Ford marketer of the year for 2010.)
• Part of the impetus for naming Cause with Effect as a 2011 trend came from watching the shifts in cause marketing over the course of 2010. Pepsi Refresh was clearly the game changer in this category, but we put Levi’s “Ready to Work” campaign under the microscope because it really drove home the depth-over-breadth approach that we expect to become a bigger focus in 2011. Likewise, one of the few bright spots that came out of the Haitian disaster was discovering that enormous sums of charitable money could be generated by aggregating millions of small (mobile) donations. If only this breast cancer awareness gag could have tapped that tactic!
• Anyone could’ve told you that food trucks are poised to upend the restaurant world in 2011, but readers were enthusiastic about our coverage of non-food applications for the food truck fad.
• It’s not everyday that our readers get jazzed about billboards, but these outdoor spectacles changed that perception pretty quickly. Likewise, we think this might be the only time a conversation about sustainable packaging has ever been so damn sexy.

Head this way for Part 2!

Since yesterday’s augmented reality update was such a hit, that seems like the best place to start. You may remember us calling out Ben & Jerry’s in our Smartshot webinar on QR codes. At the time, we argued that the brand’s Target-exclusive flavors had missed an opportunity to provide more information about the charitable component to the shopper marketing program. We’d suggested that a QR code on the lid could have delivered that content effectively, which is true. Of course, bringing those programs to life through 3D augmented reality animations works, too. The video below shows how the brand’s iPhone app interacts with a variety of Ben & Jerry’s containers, and without the need for an AR marker. Consider our criticisms vanquished!

You may also remember us struggling a bit with the “I Like It On…” Facebook meme that, ostensibly, was intended to raise Breast Cancer awareness. Our critique focused on the fact that there wasn’t much of a payoff: no one used the campaign to raise money for research, and the in-on-the-joke approach made it difficult for outsiders to learn more about the issue. Fortunately, a campaign from Abraxis Bioscience (pictured at the top of the post) got the balance right. Abraxis created a site called sharethelittlethings.com, where women were encouraged to post stories about their own (or their loved ones’) breast cancer survival. The submissions (which could be posted to Facebook and Twitter, t00) ranged from encouragement to actionable advice, providing a legitimate emotional and practical impact for visitors. Better yet, Abraxis donated $1 to breast cancer research for every post, ensuring that this effort has a long-term impact, even after the campaign ends. Maybe it’s not quite as fun as the “I Like It On” joke, but at the end of the day, Abraxis’ approach sure seems to a more effective approach to cause marketing.

(Say, that sounds like a trend worth watching in 2011, doesn’t it? We bet that if you follow the Awesome Blog on Twitter, you’d be the first to find out!)

“I like it on the kitchen chair…”

“I like it on the kitchen stool…”

Man, my Facebook friends like “it” on a lot of furniture.

There’s a decent chance that these inexplicable statements have popped up on your Facebook feed over the course of the week. If you’re a girl, you’re probably snickering because you’re in on the joke. If you’re a guy, you’re probably just confused.

Ok fellas, here’s what’s happening: the “it” is not exactly what you think it is. It’s a handbag, and your female friends are telling you where they like to put “it.” In the process, they’ve conspired to get you all worked up about “it,” knowing that once you started investigating the strange (and titillating) trend, you’d realize that this was all a viral stunt to get guys thinking about Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Whoa, that took an unexpected turn, didn’t it?

Yes, score another one for the ladies. Much like the bra color meme from a few months ago, they’ve managed to pull a fast one on the Facebook boys. It speaks to the viral power of a niche network, in which a shared secret among an intentionally exclusive group has generated an enormous amount of online conversations (as evidenced by the one million Google hits for the phrase). And, clearly, there’s a lesson to be learned here for the potential of viral cause marketing, since the mysterious nature of this conversation has driven participation through the roof. And of course, the payoff for breast cancer awareness has been…

Um, what has the payoff been? That part isn’t as clear.

And we’re not just saying that because this particular author happens to be a guy. (In fact, I happen to think most of the Rethink Breast Cancer work is exceptionally clever, and does drive breast cancer conversations – and donations! – among both men and women.) But, when the person finally makes the connection between “I like it on…” and breast cancer, where is the follow up? Where is a breast cancer nonprofit – or, one of the hundreds of brands on the breast cancer bandwagon – to jump in and, say, donate X cents for every “I like it on…” comment on Facebook? Or, why aren’t any of those one million Google queries pointing to something like, say, a cause-related celebrity video from Funny or Die? Or, why isn’t someone at least trying to aggregate these conversations in an interesting manner?

Without any of those outcomes, this Facebook meme seems like a dead end. It drives an enormous amount of curiosity among men, and creates a massive in-on-the-joke conversation for women. Those seem like two fantastic opportunities to make a legitimate impact in the fight against breast cancer, even if the creator of the meme didn’t have a particular goal other than generating a bit of conversation.

But then again, maybe you think your humble narrator is just jealous that he wasn’t in on the joke? Are we being hypocritical, since this meme did lead us to create a blog post speaking about breast cancer awareness? Are we just being a bunch of buzzkilling crankypants who should just relax and enjoy a fun little Facebook joke? We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this phenomenon in the comments below.

Calm down, calm down – that rated-G title was just too easy to pass up.

More importantly, lets look at the coup that these FCUKing guys have pulled off on YouTube. (Ok, ok, we won’t drive that joke into the ground.) Normally, the annotated links that are overlaid on videos can only link to other content on YouTube, in order to keep the spamming to a minimum. But, as you can see in the video above, by officially partnering with YouTube, FCUK got special privileges that allow viewers to buy the clothing featured in the video just by clicking on the items.

While that’s certainly the most attention-grabbing detail of this video, FCUK’s YouTube channel in general does a great job maximizing the potential of this social media platform (visit it here). As we’ve argued on multiple occasions, we think it’s a huge oversight for brands to ignore online videos in pursuit of the next tech-du-jour. It’s hard to think of another medium that allows you to deliver more engaging content than shareable, short videos.

Case in point: rather than using their videos to make blatant sales pitches, each FCUK clip is themed around a particular fashion solution, from “sparkling at a wedding” to “shining on a night out.” (Your humble narrator will now describe himself as “glowing” in his pair of worn out jeans and a striped t-shirt that’s too big for him.) We like the fact that the brand is connecting to its consumers on a deeper emotional level, offering helpful recommendations while recognizing the greater role that clothing plays in their shoppers’ lives. And, with over 160,000 views on their channel, it sure seems like their consumers are making the… connection.

Just one question: when did the skinny-Zach-Galifianakis look become chic?