The US Superbowl is this Sunday. Advocacy groups can’t wait.

Last year, General Motors featured a suicidal robot in its 60 second 5 million dollar ad. The robot’s portrayal of mental health offended a loud percentage of viewers. This prompted the huge corporation to publicly apologise to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention for its distasteful machinations.

Snickers featured two masculine auto mechanics that shared a moment of physical intimacy over a candy bar. After realising their “mistake”, they attempted to out-compete each other in displays of stereotypical masculinity. They pulled out their chest hair. This insensitive portrayal of chauvinistic male pride offended the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group. Mars sincerely apologised only days after the ad aired.

Online viral videos–that is, user made or modified or just uploaded video content–generates huge audiences, and even its own content. Note the viral videos spiraling through the blogosphere for Nike. The brand showcased commercials featuring the hip hop basketball free stylings of streetball unknowns. Students, B-ball fans, and online netizens flocked to the YouTube and the search video sites to watch the show again and again. There were no famous celebs, no hulking (highly-paid) professional athletes. Just a bunch of kids and a ball in nicely woven montages that generated more wall-paper/screen-saver madness than ever before seen. People commented on and tried to copy the videos using their own computer equipment and inspired skills.

Ads today aren’t made for a small space of air time. Like the French ad art nouveau posters from the early 1900s, ads today are cultural icons. They are copied, modified and re-spun, carrying the Brand, Product, or Name along with them into the virtual homes, hearts, and minds of millions of online viewers. They elicit comment and commentary. Pundits mention the most memorable in news and spoofs, both on and offline. Marketeers can find themselves prolonging pain or profit through the creation of one noteworthy 30 second video spiel.

On the other end of the spectrum of the GM debacle, in the 2007 Superbowl spectators gave Nationwide insurance an extra 24 million dollars into unpaid media exposure, according to USA Today estimates. Nationwide featured the infamous Kevin Federline as a wannabe rapper working at a fast food restaurant. The National Restaurant Association trade group complained, but their bickering earned the general amusement of the public rather than supportive condemnation. What had been a short commercial in a long line-up of expensively packaged product teasers suddenly became a national sensation. Online, people posted the ad to their webpages. On YouTube, uploaded versions received over 600,000 views.

This year, family, female, and gay rights advocates are already stocking up on potato chips and broadband in anticipation of a new line up of expensive commercials. One isn’t exactly sure what to expect. Sure, the Superbowl is a family event, but advertisers know its not the acceptable ads that generate the additional free revenue. Advocate groups are equally aware that platforms for controversy are great marketing tools. As the two sides martial millions of spectators around the television, both may be hoping for a memorable post-season play-off.

The traditional corporate model places a high premium on sales. In fact, industry sectors sometimes complain that salesmen and women push systems and merchandise that haven’t been created yet. The favourite Dilbert commercial shows the hapless IT guy complaining to a sales guy, “you sold a system that won’t be invented for the next two years! What do you think that means?” The sales guy replies, “it means that I’m a fantastic salesman and you are a terrible engineer!”

Where this is the case, the company’s reputation is at risk. As competition heats up and the rush to force early systems adoption slows down, even monoliths like Microsoft begin to emphasise compatibility. This means that the sales guy that promises a product not yet on the market will be known as a hack rather than a hot-shot.

Salespeople (like politicians) are quickly becoming the menace of the marketing world when they promise products that don’t deliver. Online, the social media results of these transactions can unravel expensive and carefully planned marketing campaigns. Consumers go to the web to vet a potential purchase–this goes for individual shoppers as well as corporate customers. Complaints and compliments are out there online. They are accessible, accessed, and more and more used in assessing a potential purchase.

This is where marketers salvage the purchasing power that many over-enthusiastic salespersons spin out of control. Marketers collect the complaints and the compliments, pinpoint the issues, and repackage the relevant information where clients and customers can access it–without suffering the innate suspicion experienced by any person undergoing a sales routine. Marketers online have renewed power, if they have the technology and skill to access it.

Presidential candidates in the US race have spent a mere five percent of their campaign money online. Yet this five percent, “experts” argue, may prove to be the most effective money spent swaying undecided voters. Candidates can geo-politically target potential voters with information that is judged to be of immediate concern to the voter’s profile.

CNN reports that if a Democratic candidate discusses a penalising tax for SUV drivers on a morning TV show in Ohio, GeoVoter technology can identify all the SUV drivers in the area of the show’s broadcast. Within hours of the show’s production, a Republican campaign can send each of these drivers an email designed to pique the interest (and, it is assumed, the anxiety) of these potential voters.

The Internet is an amazingly well-informed “invisible hand” that marketeers and their companies (or candidates) are increasingly adept at manipulating. But does this really mean that they manipulate the market? I would argue that we haven’t quite come to that, and perhaps never will.

Internet use is increasing apace, and studies demonstrate that more and more people spend time surfing the web. (This is probably a byproduct of the fact that few jobs allow employees to leave their computer space during the course of the work day. Even the guy who runs my gym spends 60 percent of his work time at his desk. And I suspect he is not looking at the spreadsheets covering the expense of the gym equipment–at least not the whole time.)

Further studies (and there are always further studies) determine that most surfers are looking at content, not receiving or sending information. Being an avoider of email myself, I can identify with this. People are not paying a lot of attention to the arrows that the advertisers send to their inboxes. For most of us, it’s all we can do to peruse the email from the people we care about, much less the people that care about us (or our money/vote, etc.).

What’s a poor marketeer to do?

Target the content, not the consumer. Consumers look at content, consumers love content. They seek it out. They do not seek out emails, or sms, or targeted advertising. Quite the opposite in fact.

Know your consumer, your voter, okay. Know what they like to read, watch, and listen to online. Then put the add or the information there. Let people discover what they want to care about rather than tell them what their consumer/voter profile tells them they should care about. Anybody in the virtual world or the real world can report that profiling is far from popular these days, most especially by those that are profiled.

This is still targeted advertising. But it targets content, a far less threatening concept to most consumers. No one wants to be a target, especially for technologically guided SPAM designed to conform to your profile.

Consumers personally engage with content, they duck impersonal bullet points. The most effective marketeer is the one that engages in return.

Robin Wauters is running Plugg which is a one day conference here in Brussels looking at all things web 2.0, its on March 19th. They already have a great group of speakers. It will be good to catch up with Tom Raftery again who is building up quite a following for his talks on environmental issues and technology. There will also be a start up competition which companies need to enter before February 8th.

Brands that are Buzz-blessed reap earthly rewards.

Hannah Jones, the VP of Corporate Social Responsibility for Nike, refers to these “metatrends” impacting consumer behaviour. The environment, emerging markets in developing countries, and equality and concern for the well-being of our fellow man are not just traditional sentiments lingering from last season. Jones recognised these topics long ago (in online time) as some of the most significant metatrends to impact the future of consumer behaviour.

Buzz suggests she’s right; Brands, companies, and even public agencies are experiencing if not responding to the pressure of public concern. The Internet demands that this response not be cosmetic—limited to superficial revisions of a corporate veneer. Agencies, non-profits, and individuals online are anxious to attack any inconsistency in a company’s expression of concern and the behaviour of it (or its subsidiaries).

Remember what I said about transparency and packaging? This is one field in which the package is critical. Too many angry angels are poised like so many harpies ready to swoop down on any false claims of modesty. Coca Cola quits working with sugar can farms that exploit child labour, kids lose their jobs and the local economy dries up and the online orators start screaming about the evils of corporate capitalism.  Nike and Adidas can commiserate with Coke over these public policy fiascoes.  What’s a company to do?  Hire the kids back?  Fire the local government?  Charge consumers more for less in a time of general economic concern and chalk it up to charity? A company must engage.

In a world that is increasingly interconnected, social media offers corporations the unique ability to communicate with critics.  Sustainability is complicated, and the successful brand online listens and responds to its consumers and its critics.  Social media makes successful companies more aware than ever before of the costs and benefits of capitalism, and social media gives companies and brands the capacity to communicate these issues to their concerned customers and investors and, for the first time, to participate fully in the search for sustainable solutions.

Every marketeer needs a medium.

Social media is a vast and growing landscape.

It is so difficult to know all of social media, the abyss being so wide it is hard to see the bottom. Because of this marketeers need their W.H. Russell, their man in the trenches, up close and interviewing the parties most concerned with a particular industry in a certain market. Russell, the Irish Times reporter, wrote the interviews and the war stories that inspired one of Tennyson’s greatest poems. The words of which used a suicide charge to market the chivalry and sentiment of English valour to middle-class Victorians with immense success.

Russell wrote good stories, accurate stories because he went where few reporters had thought to go. He went to the hospitals and he interviewed the men. He traveled to the battlefields and took accounts from the common soldiers as well as the officers. Russell was the best kind of social analyst, specialised in knowledge of his audience and expertise of his media. Russell was the medium of the war machine that was the British army, and as a result of his analysis, politicians, physicians, scientists, industry experts, and poets were able to alter the way that their markets perceived war, and even society.

The role of any successful analyst is expertise. It is that expertise that enables a marketeer to craft the campaigns that are most effective. Politicians and industry experts today have a lot of information and (hopefully) sufficient wisdom to know that information of any kind requires analysis to be meaningful, to be effective. This role is something still carried out in the trenches, but not the trenches of the geographical landscape today so much as the infinite highways and byways of the net. Markets voice their concerns and audiences acquire a character through their social media.

Knowing where to look, what to measure and who to believe is the realm of the social media analyst. The best analysis makes the best pitch possible, and the best pitch can turn a terrible mistake into a call to arms.

Transparency is an Internet Buzz word these days. Any curious kid with access to a search engine can price shop, product compare, and peruse quailty reviews with a few clicks. All this leads some to believe the Internet has somehow empowered the consumer, putting them in charge of finding the best of whatever they want for the best price. Any lies will be routed by the power of the social media! All false promises will be exposed! The masses will not rest until their voices are heard! The truly democratic media has arrived.

But anyone who’s lived in a democracy knows it has very little to do with transparency. Transparency is a myth. Bias is ubiquitous. Just read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Decisions are frequently the result of a steady exposure to whatever cultural cocktail makes up your daily diet of sight, sound, taste and touch. You know what you know because somebody told it to you. Maybe not in words, but your ideas were communicated to you by your environment in some capacity. Blonde is beautiful. Tall is powerful. Red is tasty.

What does this mean? Consumers are culturally biased. They are not necessarily in control of what they think. Consumers believe what sounds right, and the facts, the multitude of facts found via the Internet, can usually agree with them, in sight and sound if not in words. Because as much as consumers online may value transparency, its the packaging that they buy.

Let me explain. One of the most ubiquitous biases in all attractive Western media these days is the athlete–the lean, sculpted, healthy body dedicated to the pursuit of sport. In the age of the sedentary office lifestyle, practicing sport is a passionate past-time that is reflected in any successful advertising campaign. Think of the popular Mazda6 campaign only two months ago. Acrobats flipping and flying around a sexy speeding car. As a product, a car may be far from aerobic (consumers can’t burn calories pressing a gas peddle). But the fastest selling cars in all the European markets are the “sportiest”.

A car can be efficient, economic, eco-friendly (another contradiction in cultural understanding) and rank high in consumer-reviewed online blogs, but it is the “sporty” vehicle that draws the consumer’s eye and subsequent word of mouth. Yes, we even describe it to each other in our cultural lexicon. The Fiat drives like a sports car. The Kia c’eed has a “sporty wagon” to carry all the buyer’s potential athletic equipment (rather than groceries).

Logically, consumers know that not since the Flintstones have cars required athletic stamina, but our subconscious is so inundated with the importance of sport that we will gravitate towards the illusion. Marketeers are quick to pick up on this, photographing and filming car ads the same way sports reporters and action films shoot matches or breathtaking stunts. Of course successful marketers use the social web to corroborate with consumers and then everyone should get what they want…