You gotta love how the typical spokesperson has evolved over the years. Even the word has evolved from spokesman to spokesperson (gender neutral, thank you very much). Nowadays the successful spokeperson is no longer just an attractive face or a name in lights—it’s a person that embodies the brand. To ensure a perfect fit, the equities of the person’s brand must complement the equities of the product/service’s brand. So how does that happen?

A screening process or partnership evaluation is a great way to find a good match. Beyond budget and timing, there are five core components to consider: Brand Fit, Target Relevance, Awareness, Heat and Creative Potential. We could go into each of these deeper and craft a delicate ranking system, but remember, it’s Friday. Let’s keep it effortless and get into the fun stuff. With a simple “yay” or “nay,” let’s put the screens to the test by evaluating a couple of current partnerships.

Troy Polamalu and Head & Shoulders

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brand Fit: yay
Target Relevance: yay
Awareness: yay
Heat: yay
Creative Potential: yay
Success!

Patty Duke/George Takei and SocialSecurity.gov

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brand Fit: nay
Target Relevance: yay (maybe)
Awareness: nay
Heat: nay
Creative Potential: oh boy nay
Failure!

If a brand can’t find the perfect match in existence, well then, they can make one up! That way, the brand dictates the essence of the spokesperson (or puppet), ensuring that all essential brand characters line up for a successful fit!

Doug and Ford Focus

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brand Fit: yay
Target Relevance: yay
Awareness: yay
Heat: yay
Creative Potential: yay
Success!

Share your examples, whether they’re good, bad or just plain entertaining!

The video above is the latest installment in our Upshot Smartshot webinar series, and complements our recent Potty Posting that introduced the concept of marketers with Twitterphobia. This 15-minute episode goes a step further, assuaging marketers’ three biggest fears about the service:

• What should you say?
• What should you do?
• What should you make?

If you’ve missed any of our previous Smartshots, scoot on over to our YouTube playlist for the whole series. Of course, you wouldn’t have missed those if you’d just follow us on Twitter already, at twitter.com/upshotblog. Since you’ve now vanquished your Twitterphobia, you’ve got no excuse!

Following up on Monday’s clever YouTube tweak, we wanted to pass along a couple of other tricks and treats we’ve recently seen around the web.

The first is an iPad ad for the USA Network’s show “White Collar,” which is featured in the video above. What appears to be your basic banner ad quickly turns into a decoder that can be dragged around the screen, uncovering otherwise-invisible clues that are hidden on the webpage. Once all the clues are compiled, the user gets access to exclusive clips and content from the show. It’s further proof that Game On! can make any experience a bit more fun and unexpected – even web browsing.

While the “White Collar” campaign takes a bit of high-tech trickery, designers can achieve just as much impact by reimainging the way we get around the typical website. Friend-of-the-blog Jaclyn Gordyan pointed us to the Beercamp invite for the SXSW Interactive conference, which rethinks the idea of vertical scrolling and replaces it with zooming into the center of the page. It’s a bit tough to describe, but takes only an instant to grasp once you see it – head over to 2011.beercamp.com and scroll as you normally would. Even this simple tweak really imparts a sense of unexpected delight for the visitor, especially when compared with the hundreds of other party invites that are circulating as the conference approaches. (Of course, we’re not saying we don’t want to keep receiving those invites…)

Along the same lines, after watching your 10,000th kitten video on YouTube, perhaps the site doesn’t have the same level of engagement and novelty that it once did. Fortunately, experiments like the new music video from UK rapper The Streets are trying to instill a bit of interactivity back into the format. The clip below is the first minute of the music video, and offers a Choose Your Own Adventure-style menu at the end, allowing users to decide upon their own path through the new album, Computers and Blues. See? Building-in engagement doesn’t have to be so complicated – it just takes a bit of cleverness.

Since it’s Friday, and since we just filled your head with a TON of content in our 2011 Trends Smartshot webinar, we’ll stick with the shiny stuff for now.

Enjoy the video above, which equips skateboarders with the tools to go all Tron on a halfpipe (yes, with support from Disney).

While it certainly recalls Red Bull’s interactive projection snowboard ramp from a couple of months ago, the Tron execution takes a slightly different approach. While the Red Bull project used infrared cameras to track the riders’ movements, the Tron version provided each skater with an iPod Touch that featured a specially designed app, and used that device to measure how long each rider was in the air, where they were on the ramp, and the like. In other words, the resulting designs on the ramp were definitely Driven by Data. It’s a mesmerizing trend, ain’t it?

See you next week, assuming our offices aren’t torn asunder over this Bears-Packers game. Seriously, it’s getting tense ’round here.

D’oh! Apologies for the lag on updates over the past couple of days. We’re in the trenches with our 2011 trends in preparation for some client presentations, so we’re admittedly a bit short on time.

So, it’s only appropriate that we offer you a video from a couple of guys with plenty of time on their hands. It’s a stop-motion clip created with little more than a black sheet, a pile of coins, and a healthy nostalgia for old video games. (Okay, that’s not exactly true – watch ’til the end to see their technique.)

Enjoy the diversion, and we’ll be back shortly with our regularly scheduled awesomeness.

Welcome back, friends of The Awesome Blog! Hope you’re as rested and refreshed as we are, because we’ve got a big year ahead of us.

But, since you’re probably easing yourself back into the swing of things, we’ll go light today. After all, even a seemingly heady trend like Driven by Data can be oh so easy on the eyes. Like, for instance, the above image created by an engineering intern at Facebook, which visually depicts a large sample of Facebook friendships around the world. In our 2011 Trends Report, we encouraged brands to curate data in “useful, actionable, and life-enhancing formats.” The above image’s beautiful construction certainly qualifies as life-enhancing by anyone who takes it in (the small version doesn’t nearly do it justice – click here to see the full size version). Still, there’s more than aesthetics at play here, as this image also powerfully communicates Facebook’s significant footprint around the world. From a branding perspective, doesn’t this image give as much credence to Facebook’s influence as the statistics about their 500 million users? Moreover, don’t the particularly telling gaps in China and Russia say more than any spreadsheet ever could? Every brand has insightful data about their consumers, and frankly, raw data about Facebook’s user connections isn’t much more boring than the spreadsheets you’ve put together. The difference is in the presentation. If your brand has unique knowledge in a particular field, communicating that information in powerful, visually appealing ways can drastically differentiate your brand from the competition. (By the way, if you’re interested in the nitty gritty about how Paul Butler created the Facebook image , here’s the full explanation.)

But even if your brand doesn’t possess stats worth sharing, you can simply be the best at organizing other content that’s relevant to your consumer. After all, Google’s billions have largely come from steering their users to content rather than creating their own. So, it’s not much of a surprise to see them pull together the video shown below, which is an extension of their annual Zeitgeist project that determines the top stories of the year based on search volume. This video manages to present the data as more of a story, as opposed to their typical tables that really only appeal to a small segment of sociocultural trend geeks (like us). It’s a far more engaging experience for the typical consumer, as borne out by the almost 2 million folks that have viewed the video so far.

Post-holiday party, it’s probably not the right day to continue our in-depth discussion about location-based services and shopper marketing applications. Nah, it’s the kind of day where we need something a little more lighthearted.

Like, say, a retelling of Home Alone via Twitter by Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

Yup, it’s exactly what it sounds like, with the characters exchanging lines (and swinging paint cans). All of your favorites are there: Kevin, the Wet Bandits, Old Man Marley… heck, even the tarantula keeps you posted on his scamperings. (Thanks to Kelly von Ebers for the tip!)

Just the laugh we needed this morning. Have a nice weekend, and we’ll see you – fully recovered – on Monday.

When we’ve talked about telling the “story” of your brand, we’ve often found that online video provides a compelling medium for doing so, even if the topic isn’t inherently sexy. Case in point: consider the juxtaposition of these two videos that view the world through the eyes of Google Street View and Facebook.

Both are extremely compelling (and really well-done), but seeing them side-by-side is shorthand for how each company is generally perceived. Google (shown above) brings the entire world’s information to your fingertips, allowing explorations that would be unfathomable only a few years ago.

Then again, the Google video doesn’t focus much on people. For that, you’ll have to turn to Facebook (shown below), as you follow the trajectory of one user’s life. No site captures the essence of modern relationships quite like Facebook, and as the video shows, that includes the best and worst parts of living in public. (And just like in real life, there are a few cuss words, so don’t watch the video if a couple of f-bombs will ruin your day.)

Enjoy these videos for what they are, but when you’re done, ask yourself: if your brand’s worldview was portrayed in a video, what would it look like? Are you happy with the result?

[Update: Well, the original video got pulled because of a copyright violation for using the song "Paint it Black," so we'll have to use this music-less version instead. Kinda loses some of the impact, but you could always just sync up the song yourself, right?]

[Update #2: Since the Stones' label so rudely ruined the Facebook video above, we felt we owed you another piece of good content. Thanks to Jaclyn Gordyan, we've got a behind-the-curtain peek at the Google Street View video from the top of this post. Enjoy!]

Apparently, the auto companies heard our complaints. In the past couple of years, they’ve embarked on some of the most ambitious, innovative campaigns we’ve seen (perhaps you remember us raving about Ford’s Facebook-only Explorer launch?). Now it’s Mitsubishi’s turn to try something distinctly different. Their Live Drive effort features a rigged up a new Outlander Sport that can be controlled by users over the internet via their keyboards. As you can imagine, this is definitely not taking place on the aforementioned winding hillside road.

Participants get a few minutes to steer the Outlander around the real life course, and to watch how the vehicle responds across a series of live video streams (and you all know how fond we are of that particular technology). You might expect that the course consists of a DMV-like series of cones and three point turns, but fortunately, it looks like Mitsubishi was also paying attention to the rise of gaming in everyday life. They’ve implemented this literally, steering their virtual drivers toward various icons on the course. Each time the user picks up a new icon, another of the car’s features are revealed to the viewing public.

It sure seems like a fun campaign. And, considering that the queue of virtual drivers has been full since the event kicked off, it appears that it’s driving traffic (yup, pun intended). Still, it will be interesting to see if a campaign with such a concrete limit on the possible participants can still reach a widespread audience; after all, only one person can drive the vehicle at a given time. Perhaps, if the campaign’s a big success, they’ll bring it back for more than just a week. Either way, it’s a brave new effort in the staid old world of auto advertisements.

We thought we were doing you a service by tipping you off to the YouTube Show & Tell channel, which highlights the site’s best brand work and the creatives behind them. As it turns out, we were only scratching the surface.

YouTube also launched a channel called Play, which is a joint collaboration with the Guggenheim and HP that intends to recognize the most museum-worthy clips on YouTube. Last night, a panel selected their favorite 20 videos, which will now be displayed at Guggenheim museums around the world. If you’re looking for some inspiration, head over to the channel and click on the tab for the shortlist to see the contenders.

Then again, most people seeking high art in the streaming video world tend towards Vimeo, a site that caters more explicitly to high-end content. They had an awards festival of their own, and are now showing off the cream of their crop on the site, including the TRI▲NGLE video shown above. (By the way, any fans of the antics of comedian/musician/all-around-weirdo Reggie Watts should check out the coverage of the festival opening.)

We’ve said it again, and again, and… well, you get the idea. Online video, the sleeper of web 2.0 technologies, is coming into its own. Brands who still dismiss the medium as all skateboarding squirrels and kicks-to-the-groin are missing the big picture.