This is such a miraculous occurrence that it hasn’t bothered most of us that all that substance is served up in the exact same style. Everybody’s Facebook page is basically identical. You can reskin your Twitter page but the type and the layout is what it is. YouTube is basically ugly, but it’s equally ugly for everyone.

But if Apple has taught us anything (sorry to bring up Apple, we strive to be the only blog that doesn’t mention them constantly but sometimes you just can’t fight it…) it’s that style really matters. Sometimes more than the substance.

For example this is the gorgeous, touch-screen magazine version of my Facebook news feed when seen on Flipboard on an iPad.

Essentially it is a beautifully designed magazine that is edited uniquely for me by my friends and family.

Or here is my Twitter feed as viewed through www.paper.li’s newspaper simulator.

Meanwhile, there are some beautiful interfaces being wrapped around plain old YouTube videos. YesYesYall does a slick job streaming music videos.

In short, I used to believe it was all about the picture. I’m starting to think the frame may matter nearly as much.

Since a search algorithm is the front door to everything for most of us, maybe the destination is completely irrelevant.

Clearly a guy who’s understood the temperature of the ‘tubes since the trucks have been running (and dumping), BeeEyeJee-BeeOhhEye is very much deserving of respect for not only his artistic prowess but also his new media marketing strategy.

But let me pick on him for a minute.

Exhibit A: Shine Blockas Offical Music Video

This video looks like it was shot on a Canon 5D (or the ilk). Big Boi has been doing that a lot, lately—super low budj productions—using the common man’s tools, yet still retaining that look and feel of many music videos that have dominated the last decade. This is a guy no stranger to six figure music video budgets grabbing no more than one…friend? And running around Atlanta at three in the morning. With around three-five K worth of camera gear (maybe less).

So that Shine Blockas video probably took about four hours to shoot. And it was edited the next day. Makes sense. Music profits are shrinking, labels and artists squabble over smaller and smaller pieces of the pie, many musicians take production and distribution into their own hands. And it’s hard not to notice Big Boi clearly wants his music heard more often than not—official release strategies be damned.

But I can’t help but notice the most interesting part of that video was where he’s walking around Walmart buying socks. Filmed on a cellphone (or the ilk).

Compare Big Boi’s video—and use of video in promoting his brand, to internet enigma Jay Electronica’s use of video.

Just Jay and Puff chilln’ in the studio. Even crappier camera than used in Big Boi’s Walmart footy. Clearly no regard for looking cool and polished. It feels like a peak behind the curtain.

So we have one artist is using democratized tools and democratized distribution to make the same content he did when it required big budgets and big TV. Another artist is using those same democratized tools and distribution to put out random bits of interesting content that feel fresh and exciting and are only now possible because big tools and bit TV are not needed.

So, your music video (or commercial) can live on the web. We can even make it more cheaply that you’re used to. But we can also do so much more. Even if it’s simple.

Does that sound familiar? Yes, I know I completely butchered it, but it might seem just a tad familiar. Your mind might have drifted to more masculine thoughts as you read the above few sentences, perhaps that charming Guiness World Records Champion who picked up that car, or an image of Sean Connery saying, “I must be dreaming,” (Goldfinger, 1964). OK, if your mind hasn’t recalled the following commercial, watch it. If your mind did remember this commercial, watch it again, just for the fun of it.

Isn’t that a great commercial? It has been watched over 11 million times on Youtube. That deserves a holy cow.

(Look, I’m an intern, how sophisticated do you expect my jokes to be? ) But my point is that the commercial is effective. It sticks in your mind. You love watching it. You could sit there all day and watch the commercial. You memorize the commercial (or at least, I did) and never forget it. That is effective, successful advertising.

Now, in an effort to duplicate that success, Old Spice has released a new commercial, with the same actor and same basic tone. Take a look.

Good, right? Sure, they did a fine job with this commercial. But something about doesn’t speak to me in the same way the first one does. Perhaps it’s the freshness of the humor, the smoothness of the first one, and even the overall simplicity of the the first commercial. But the second spot is definitely not as unbelievably awesome.

But a couple days ago, Old Spice made this debate all but irrelevant.

Their agency, Weiden Kennedy orchestrated a brilliant melding of traditional advertising and social media savvy and speed. They had their hunky spokesperson, Isaiah Mustafa, answer the Internet in real time. Responding to actual Tweets on Twitter or comments on Facebook, they wrote, filmed, edited and uploaded more than 180 over the course of two days.

If you go to the Old Spice Twitter page, you can see that this ambitious exercise took on a life of its own as they reacted to the reactions. This was genius on so many levels—from choosing whom to respond to (a careful mix celebrities, web influencers and regular folks) to writing consistently funny material, to resisting the temptation to map out a plan for it all, rather just letting the tides of the web taking it where it would go and reacting accordingly.

There are so many levels on which this is brilliant and they have been and will continue to be dissected and critiqued all over the blogosphere (as they planned). And if you didn’t experience it in real time, or don’t have a clear picture of how this worked and why it was awesome, you need spend some time digging into this because this is the future. And ummmmmm… it smells good.

Last month, the Federal Trade Commission released a video game designed to teach American tweens (ages 8-12) how to recognize and critically consume (not just downright ignore) the barrage of daily advertising tossed at their snotty faces. All of this happens through a customizable avatar (kitty mask? robot head?) between series of sequentially harder run and jump combinations that lead to info screens (and questions) about examples of real world ad placement.

In a unexpected twist owing to someones’ masters thesis on reverse psychology, later levels educated users about copywriting, stock photo selection, and consumer targeting via the “admosphere.” Seriously.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, how was the gameplay?
Pretty crappy. Controls are finicky. You don’t get to pick up any guns. Levels are entirely devoid of explosions. I tried kicking this thing once and it didn’t even move and then I got stuck behind some boxes and had to restart. So that sucked too.

Some have compared it to Pitfall or Mario but I was getting a more “Sonic meets the Esurance cartoons” vibe.

Storyline?
Back when I was addicted to cereal, I remember finding a CDROM in my Corn Chex box. It’s like the future was happening before my milk-tainted lips.

Some forward-thinking marketer had taken (popular at the time) Doom’s gaming engine and re-skinned it as Doom meets nurturing breakfast. I think you played as a piece of Corn Chex. Or you were a milk carton shooting Chex pieces from outerspace. I can’t remember.

The Admongo storyline is like that but a little better (though minus the bloodless cereal murdering). Advertising is split up into familiar theaters: outdoor, home, and in-store. To get to the next level, one must find each piece of advertising content and examine it.

Lessons include:
“A coupon is only a deal if it’s for something you need.”
“This ad is inserted into a newspaper, so it’s call an insert”

There’s also something about collecting coins and stomping on the heads of oscillating yellow-cat-things. The blue-cat-things are your friends, naturally; they wear glasses.

Graphics?
Better than Pitfall. Worse than if Pitfall came out for the XBox 360.

Sound?
Actually…the music was fantastic. The score was nothing short of enchanting, which was surprising. And they say the gubmen’t can’t done do nothin’ right.

Takeaway for Marketers?
American kids aged 8-12 are very susceptible to broad advertising claims and are extremely gullible when confronted with media that doesn’t look like advertising. Suckers.

In a stab toward the rising stars of our industry, the FTC is obviously trying to create a generation of cynical kids who won’t just trust everything they read on the internet. For instance:

“Ads on sties where you meet and chat with friends—like Ourface–often seem to be for things you like. Not an accident. They’re posted based on information you’ve told the site: your age, your gender, your hometown, your hobbies…”

A game like this will never be successful with that type of downer content.

But credit to the FTC for trying to help out our nation’s awful public schools. Lots of 4th grade teachers will now be able to update their Facebook profile in peace while giving the kids an excuse to goof-off in the computer lab.

To put it in junior high terms, Apple is the coolest girl in school and she’s throwing a party called the mobile internet and she didn’t even bother to invite flash. And, like oh my God, now they’re pulling each other’s hair in the cafeteria. Except millions of dollars and the future of your internet experience is at stake as opposed to Apple’s really great hair.

Now adobe has started running the weirdest banner campaign I’ve ever seen. Here’s some screenshots from wired.com.

Is anyone else not feeling the love here?

Having joined Nail earlier this year, Nothing was introduced to me casually across the conference room table during my interview. As in, “If you worked here, you’d be managing this” – a can of Nothing and a multi-media campaign around it. My heart leapt with joy. Eyes opened wide. Jaw dropped. Love at first sight. And all those other cliches of surprise and delight.

Nothing is an empty can. It’s also an unexpected way to achieve the objective set out to us by the Rhode Island Community Food Bank – to engage a younger audience and drive online donations. You might think that an assignment whose purpose was to drive on-line traffic would result in a hyper “Web 3.0″ approach centered around viral, geo-located, mobile, augmented-reality gaming or whatever the latest trendy web trend is. But it’s not. And it’s certainly not the typical guilt-them-into-a-donation with needy-kid imagery approach.

Instead, the heart of this campaign is entirely analog. A can. 19th century technology. Its profundity is that it gets you at the moment you are connecting with the sources of your own meals. This is a brand of non-food, sitting right next to the iced coffee server and the green beans.

Every can purchased puts ten pounds of nourishing food on your neighbors’ plates. Which makes this can more than a can. It’s an opportunity to do something. Proceeds support the Rhode Island Food Bank, so for now: Nothing is only available throughout our home state. Any marketeer who knows how hard it is to get shelf space for new products – even for existing national brands – will appreciate the efforts it took to get 130 retail locations throughout Rhode Island to participate. I half expect to find it on eBay any minute now.

In the TV commercials, people who think they are participating in a taste-test are confronted with an empty plate. The first time I saw the rough edits I made the mistake of watching 14 or so in a row. Although it was emotionally overwhelming to see so many people’s empathetic and teary responses, it also made me really happy. It made me happy to think that there were so many people willing to bring this idea to life, and it made me really happy to be working at an agency that’s willing to apply its creative and business skills for the common good.

How powerful is that collective intelligence? Well, here’s a video of a slime mold “solving” a maze. Apparently more efficiently than the lab’s graduate students.

Not practical enough for you? How about if we let the slime design Tokyo’s rail system? (Scientists placed food in spots on the map where the cities were and let mold grow into the most efficient way to link them.)

Now imagine if the networked organisms actually had, you know, brains? And high-speed internet connections? This century is going to be fun…

Known as the ’social graph’, it’s the map they’ve made of your real-world relationships: friends, colleagues, bitter enemies, people you once made eye contact with in your high school cafeteria. The social graph is who you’re connected to, how you’re connected, how often you connect with them, etc. It’s what facebook is leveraging—along with other demographic data, like your age, where you went to school—in order to sell highly targeted space to people who want to sell you stuff.

Typical social graph

So when you think of what ‘the social graph’ represents—that it’s really just a chart of your real-world relationships—it’s kind of a remarkably simple idea. Facebook is a mapping service for friendship and acquaintance; people with whom you have some real world connection, however insignificant. Pretty simple.

But when I think of my friends and Facebook acquaintances, they include a lot of people I met because of what could ultimately be described as chance circumstance. The people I went to school with, who I happened to be in class with, people who happen to live in my neighborhood, or who happen to work where I work, or share my interests, go to shows I’ve gone to—although most of us chose to be where we are, there is undeniably a high level of chance involved in meeting anyone. Except on Facebook, where—for most people, anyway—you know everyone. (In fact, the idea of someone you don’t know friending you is creepy to most people.)

Yet some of the sites that are getting a ton of media attention these days are designed to connect you to strangers: ChatRoulette, Twitter, FourSquare (in a way). Is it ennui? As our personal “social graphs” have matured is the thrill gone? Is the end in sight for Facebook?

Hell no. These services are connecting people to total strangers in more extreme, intimate ways; connecting you live via video chat in ChatRoulette, or in real life, like (I guess) with FourSquare, or in a kind of Internet-wide campfire chat, like Twitter.

They may be entertaining. They may be valuable. But they will never replace your Social Graph (they may add a person or two to it). But Facebook (lets face it, MySpace, Orkut, Buzz, etc. are fading in relevance as FB corners the market) is becoming the Internet of things you really care about within the Internet that has grown beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend. These chance connections that define our lives are being indexed and archived and processed. And, for better or worse, its value to marketers is growing exponentially.

Facebook is going to win.