GAP CMO Seth Farbman, Unilever North America CEO Kees Kruythoff and Winston Eco-Strategies founder Andrew Winston could all be found at Urban Zen (Donna Karan’s nonprofit event space in NYC’s Meatpacking District) on Oct. 5, sipping on organic cocktails and grooving to the styles of DJ Eclectic. Also in attendance were numerous execs from Coca-Cola including, Lou Grill, director of business affairs; Celeste Botorff, VP of Living Well; Alain Robichaud, recycling president; and Damien Basset, KOR.

On a non-party, today the company introduced the Recyclebank Ecosystem, the coalition of brands working with Recyclebank to develop and execute rewards-driven green initiatives. Inaugural partners include Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, MillionTreesNYC, Preserve and UnCommon Goods.

For us who work in media and communications, especially online, this is second nature; anticipating change and accommodating innovation are facts of life.

We rarely stop to think about how innovation occurs. What produces paradigm shifts that change our environments at once and forever? If we analyze the intellectual leaps in humanity’s evolution, we will find that many of them are connected to exceptional persons whose names are etched in history:  Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, and our contemporaries Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

This confronts us with an important question: Is the lone genius or brilliant creator essential to promote change?

This was among the questions addressed recently at the IMS Executive Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. During the four-day conference, major Latin American media executives gathered to reflect on this and related subjects. A question present in every conference room was how to produce innovations that would add value to media marketing strategies. In this context, I heard an inspiring answer from Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca Cola’s Creative Vice President.

Mildenhall, a leader of probably the most important consumer product company in the world, made a statement that could not go unnoticed—that innovation is the responsibility of a group, not of just a few persons. He said that to generate change in patterns of thinking, you do not have to wait for a genius to deliver magic solutions. On the contrary, interdisciplinary teams are required that can attack issues from multiple perspectives and collectively produce novel solutions.

“It is really important that executives become aware of the need to continue their education, to stay curious, and to remain open to new things emerging in the industry,” Mildenhall emphasized during his lecture at Stanford.

But above all, he pointed out it is essential to share experiences among different regions in the world and be exposed to different ways of thinking and problem solving if we want to facilitate change and nurture creative perspectives.

In an era when online media invite us to take advantage of collaboration, and where the flow of information around the world is richer than ever before, encountering activities such as this one, promoted by IMS Corporate, is encouraging. Gathering agencies, brands, and publishers in the same place so that together they can contemplate pathways for innovation and creative change in the media market put Mildenhall’s words into action.

It is time for brands to break out of that box and create a third space for connecting with socially engaged consumers. The days of richly branded websites are waning, and Facebook fan pages are critical but transitional. We must recognize that consumer culture has shifted, and we should create a way to participate without losing our identity.

The Coke Experience

The challenge of adopting and exploiting cultural change is not new. In the early 1970s, Coca-Cola was facing the aftershocks of Woodstock and huge cultural shifts. In one of the great brand shifts, Coke (with McCann-Erickson),

“began to see a bottle of Coca-Cola as more than a drink. . . . [I] began to see the familiar words, ‘Let’s have a Coke,’ as . . . actually a subtle way of saying, ‘Let’s keep each other company for a little while.’ And [I] knew they were being said all over the world as [I] sat there in Ireland. So that was the basic idea: to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be—a liquid refresher—but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes.”

Coca-Cola didn’t follow the consumer around, instead the company decided to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Coca-Cola feeds a connection created by a shared experience.

Today, this giant of a brand has more than 34 million Facebook fans. But when we look at Coca-Cola’s Facebook page, it feels like the genie in Disney’s Aladdin, with its immense, universal power crammed into an “Itty-bitty living space.” One of the most carefully nurtured and curated brands of the 20th century is described with the same 20-pixel Lucida Grande font as Knock Out! Panties.

Big Impressions With Little Effort

The key to the next phase of social branding is sharing. Brands need to execute programs that allow socially networked consumers to tell stories using their brands.

In the social realm, the sharing of content is an incredibly vital means of establishing and maintaining connections. People want to tell their story to their friends through comments, posts, pictures and videos, and those shared bits of experience and advice keep relationships fresh. People want to do this in the quickest and easiest manner possible.

Facebook has cornered the market on quick and easy. Status updates, likes and shares are their stock and trade. Take a cute picture of your kid, post it. Have an interesting commentary on life, share it with your world. Read something you find funny or empathize with, punch the “like” button. Sharing is caring, and sharing through a social network has the fringe benefits of low barriers, excellent distribution and low clutter.

Instagram, Twitter and even Foursquare perpetuate this fundamental truth: We want to make an impression with as little work as possible. For example, with Instagram, I can take a mediocre picture then add a filter to make it interesting and maybe even surprisingly beautiful, before sharing my “art” with my network. Little work, lots of reward.

Most brands have elected to set up a “kiosk” in each of these sites. A Facebook fan page and a Twitter account are de rigeur, and a YouTube channel may even be in order. But the cost is that your brand is literally and symbolically below that of Facebook or Twitter. These are the rules by which anyone who wants to get into the game must abide.

In some cases this can have real brand implications. Even if we get past the clutter and generic experiences, we face the reality that advertiser-supported networks run ads, and they are not usually for your company. It’s not uncommon to see a Twitpic ad for a competitor run alongside a brand’s shared picture. Generic sharing sites may be convenient, but this brand is your brand.

Marketers can get quick, easy sharing with brand integrity by using web pages and networks together. The social graph can be harnessed for user participation and reach while still keeping the brand together. The trusty webpage can be liberated from the site and introduced to social networks.

Web pages are the basic unit of interactivity and consumption. Yes, they contain more than 140 characters, but this allows them to unify image, action and editorial in incredibly powerful ways. But perhaps most importantly, webpages can carry the production elements of branding. This is critical. A well-produced page can communicate visual, narrative and experiential components of your brand in ways that shares and posts simply cannot.

All you have to do is be willing to imagine pages that are shareable social experiences, not components of a site or steps in a funnel.

A Social Branded Page

The goal of a social page is simple: Embrace the power of pages to create interactive branded experiences, while not viewing the social page as just another necessary site element. It is the content that makes a page shareable, so clean the slate of every web page you’ve seen before today.

Forget about your site pages. They are not social. Expand your idea of what a Starbucks or Coca-Cola page should look like or how it should connect and be connected. Involve your consumers, your fans and your partners.

This means that you will create hundreds and even thousands of pages with user generated content, not just one site page with a Twitter feed tacked on. It will also mean pages created in tandem with partners. In each case, ask how the page helps your fans and followers share a story that is better with you in it. It’s a much more authentic and sharable way to include your brand as part of the conversation.

I’d like to teach the world to share, because its what we are built to do.

“As the recession has generally affected brands, there is very clear growth in the value of brands that have what you would call more basic, everyday products,” David Haigh, CEO of Brand Finance, told AdAge. “People are longing to rely on brands they can trust — brands that are good value for the money.”

Instead of flocking to brands like Starbucks and L’Oreal, they’re gravitating toward McDonald’s and WalMart. (WalMart just kicked Coca-Cola out of the highest-valued brand slot).

Brands are reacting by changing their marketing tactics as consumers’ priorities readjust to the shifting economic climate.

And as top brands see their value shrink, they’re less likely to pad out their ad budgets – even online. General Motors is reportedly slashing its digital budget after losing about $15 billion last quarter.

Joost professes to be nothing short of an effort to change the face of television media and bring the 25 year promise of multi media fusion together with free TV. In recent news Joost has launched Coca-Cola as a premiere widget where consumers can provide comments on video content and email them to their friends. What is different here is that they can do it with the help of a coke bottle called Coke Bubbles

“In creating Coke Bubbles, we wanted to give people a widget that would recreate the experience of chatting together with friends while watching TV– free from the constraints of time and space,” said Stafford Green, head of interactive marketing for the Coca-Cola European Union Group. “We are always striving to become enthusiastic investors in interactive community innovations, and creating the first commercial widget has been a fun, collaborative project for both The Coca-Cola Company and our friends at Joost.”

This may be one of the first and most innovative approaches to integrating products and advertising into video content online.  Coca-Cola signed on to sponsor Joost since it’s launch and will continue to work with the European team to launch next generation widgets.

It’s likely to be one of the most talked-about ad deals of the year. The company they are jockeying to sign up with is attracting 200,000 new users a day. Last week it was valued at $15 billion (£7.3 billion), though it has yet to make a profit.

Facebook is a three-and-a-half year old “social network” site that offers people a way of communicating with their friends online. So far, some 50m people have signed up to it. The company says it expects to break even this year.

Last week, Microsoft beat Google to buy a small stake in the firm, valuing it at $15 billion — more than twice as much as British Airways, a company that made a profit of $602m last year.

For some, the deal indicates a return of the “irrational exuberance” that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan identified in the mid-1990s — an exuberance that ended when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.

Facebook is the latest in a series of ever-bigger deals for a new generation of so-called web 2.0 companies.

Once again, internet start-ups with lots of buzz — but next-to-no profits — are being snapped up for huge sums by the world’s big media and technology firms.

For others, including Microsoft, the prices are not irrational but a concrete sign of the value of online advertising.

In recent years, internet advertising has soared as advertisers have shifted more and more of their spending from television, newspapers and other traditional media to a host of websites.

Online advertising is now a $16.5 billion business in America, according to Jupiter Research. Shoppers spend 10% of their money online. Compared with mature advertising markets such as TV (worth $74 billion in America), online advertising spending remains small, but it is growing by about 14% a year, and by 2011 it will be worth $32.1 billion.

Only a small slice of this goes to “social network” sites like Facebook and its larger rival MySpace (owned by Sunday Times parent News Corporation).

This year, according to eMarketer, $900m will be spent advertising on social-networking sites in America and $335m elsewhere. The growth of these sites is phenomenal. Facebook believes with Microsoft’s help it can reach 300m users worldwide in the next few years.

“It’s anybody’s guess how big Facebook will get,” said John Delaney, an analyst with the Ovum consultancy. “But 300m doesn’t sound completely ridiculous.”

Other sites with similar features to Facebook and MySpace have failed to take off — the British site Friendsreunited and America’s Friendster have both been left behind. But the success of Facebook and MySpace shows “there is a market for people to interact on the net in a similar way to the way they interact in real life”, said Delaney.

Advertisers, too, are increasingly enamored of the sites.

Carlton Cribb, the digital buying director at Zed Media, a London ad agency, said clients now see online sites as an intrinsic part of their advertising strategy.

“In the past couple of years there has been a major change from the clients’ perspective,” he said. “Online was kept very separate from the rest of the budget. Now online is another viable medium for reaching their audience — it’s part of the media mix.” A part of the mix that is growing swiftly.

Social networks collect a lot of personal data about their users. People share their taste in music, books, films, their political views as well as their location. All this information can potentially be turned into well-targeted ads. The danger is that users may turn against the “commercialization” of the sites.

When Google bought YouTube, the video-sharing website, Delaney said there was a lot of complaining from users, many of whom warned the company to stay away from Facebook.

“We heard the same sort of stuff when News Corp bought MySpace. People moan but they still use MySpace. It’s not the first site to put ads on its website. People understand that they get a lot of cool stuff for free on the internet because it carries ads,” he said.

But the internet is a two-way street, and advertisers now have to figure out how to reach an audience that has the power to talk back in a way that was denied them with more traditional forms of ads.

“That’s the promise and also the danger of social networks,” said Delaney. He points to the success of Arctic Monkeys, the indie rockers who built a following on MySpace.

“They were selling their brand. People will engage with you on a very deep level. The problem is that you are not in control of what is out there.”

Some advertisers have stopped using social-network sites, concerned that their ads will come up alongside unsuitable material put up by the sites’ users.

Cribb said these were problems to which the sites and advertisers were now finding solutions in what are still early days for a rapidly changing medium.

When Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg started the site it offered simple web pages for college students to list information about themselves and send messages to friends. Increasingly the site and its rivals offer an array of services, from e-mail to online photo galleries that have historically existed independently.

The aim is to make Facebook the first port of call for internet users in the way that many people now have Google as their home page.

It’s not a new strategy — AOL tried something similar and failed and Yahoo, which also courted Facebook, has a similar approach. But Facebook has the buzz and the momentum to more than rattle its rivals. As it adds new services, advertisers will be watching developments as closely as Facebook’s users, Google, MySpace and Yahoo.

Unlike the first internet boom, “big media” has in the main fought shy of paying huge prices for online firms. News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 for $649m and more than recouped its investment with an ad deal with Google worth $900m over three years.

For Microsoft the $240m investment is chump change. But it marks a significant evolution for the software giant as it increasingly moves its muscle online. Whether or not Facebook lives up to its $15 billion promise remains to be seen.

Dominic Rushe is a writer for the Times Online

Compliments of the Times Online

Among the various specific features, Passenger claims its new platform lets brands identify and collaborate with key customer segments, acquire a longitudinal view of customer attitudes and preferences, drive customer advocacy through ownership of ideas, analyze vital customer and competitive insight, and identify emerging market trends and discover new opportunities.

Andrew Leary, CEO and co-founder of Passenger, said in a statement, “At a time when consumers are actively avoiding marketing messages, brands can no longer afford to underestimate the voice of their customers. “In fact, Passenger is the direct result of market innovators voicing their need to engage and activate customers.”

Brands like Coca-Cola, ABC Television and Sara Lee are already using the on-demand software platform to help understand changing consumer behavior, market trends, and tastes. Consumers on the other hand get to have their opinions and voices heard with Passenger as well since company’s can refine marketing strategies before launch.

Company’s can also use Passenger for internal communication purposes.

“Inspiration,” the latest viral, depicts a character poised to paint a blank wall, but is at a loss in deciding what to paint. He takes a drink of Coke, which refreshes his taste buds and imagination, and viewers witness the wacky thought process that culminates in the artist painting a psychedelic Coke bottle on the wall. Happy with his work, he leaves the room and the “Coke Side of Life” message appears on the screen. The 30-second “Inspiration” in the Wieden + Kennedy, Amsterdam campaign is soundtracked by King Creosote’s song “Bootprints.”