know | Future

Coca Cola has always been an innovator in advertising and this wonderfully postmodern ad based on the Grand Theft Auto series of console games notorious for its violence and general mayhem. It also helps to raise the irony meter that the latest incarnation, San Andreas, caused a firestorm of controversy when secret x-rated levels embedded in the game came to light.

When I was growing up in the late sixties/early seventies, the term generation gap was always front and center as the country was roiled by what seemed at times to be an incipient civil war across generational lines. The fact that we no longer hear the term bandied about on the press does not mean however that generational schisms have disappeared. Peer just for a minute into the world of a teenager, and you will see them floating in a technology bubble that would have been inconceivable to those of us old enough to have lived through Watergate. Between the cell phones, texting, pervasive access to the Internet and an ever expanding market for video games, you will also find a category of entertainment with the unwieldy moniker of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, MMORPG’s for short. They represent the most socially disruptive technology to have gained a solid foothold in the new millennium, they are already creating a vast generational gap, and they are going to impact your business directly.

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Back in the golden days when the desktop was everything and networks were just beginning to make it out into the real world, Guy Kawasaki, then a hot shot marketer, embodied the term technical evangelist in the guise of Macintosh evangelist. This distinction between marketer (cool/tired) and evangelist (hot/wired) has been one of the central organizing principles at Apple. Even though they are a technology/computer company they really behave as a consumer goods company on meth. Mac is one of the only brands in the world that has transcended to become a cult but there is no reason that other companies can’t apply some of the lessons learned from Apple to their own marketing endeavors. (more…)