Forbes took a look at what has become a controversial Nike ad featuring Tiger Woods and the voice of his late father.

Here is how they set it up:  “Golf superstar Tiger Woods has fielded tough questions about his extra-marital affairs. Now the disgraced athlete faces them from his late father, Earl, whose voice-over is used in an unusual new Nike commercial.”

From a marketing perspective, the ad does more than create controversy and the complementary public debate.  It moves the story forward from where it is to where Nike and Woods want it to be — on golf and the stuff one needs to buy to play the game.  I said as much in the article:

“‘The emotional content, Masters’ timing, black-and-white treatment, Tiger’s silent gaze and his late father’s prescient voice-over creates context that demands viewer attention. It has gotten people talking about what comes next. Nike deserves a lot of credit for the concept and convincing Tiger to just do it,’ said John Berard, CEO of communications consultancy Credible Context in San Francisco.”

I might not want to have Mr. Woods over the house for dinner, but I can appreciate the campaign to reconstruct his brand.

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A report today from Information Week supposes that Microsoft will introduce its own slate-type tablet computer.  The key bit in the story had nothing to do with the quality of the product, but the lack of enthusiasm it has so far engendered.  “Microsoft has not officially confirmed the (New York) Times’ report, and investors largely shrugged at the news. Microsoft shares were up .16%, to $31.01, in early trading Wednesday on the NASDAQ.”

True, this is the company’s second bite at the tablet apple (pun intended) and so naturally would not create the “shock of the new.” But it is more likely a response rooted deeply in the minds of consumers who more comfortably categorize Microsoft within the four software walls of Office, than among untethered consumer-focused devices.  It is a matter of context.

We make sense of a noisy world by applying context created at the point we first encounter a company or product and is then reinforced by performance.  This makes it really hard to expand or pivot a company’s reputation.  If Apple is a design company, what isn’t it?  If Dell is a manufacturing company, what isn’t it?  If Microsoft is a desktop software company, what isn’t it?

Google, with its introduction of the Nexus One “smartphone” has demonstrated one way to break away.  Afterall, if Google is an advertising-driven search service, what isn’t it?  It is not so much advertising-driven as it is advertising-disruptive.  It has taken the market’s acknowledgment  of these qualities — shaking up the stodgy for the benefit of consumers — to add new services (like gMail), buy other companies (like YouTube) and enter new markets in need of disruption (like mobile phones).   Microsoft has no such market permission.

It can get it, though.  The early reports on its new operating system suggest the kind of exceptional performance in a core business that is required for acceptance in adjacent ones.  This is what helps the success of the company’s market leading Xbox game console.  Think of it as a desktop for the home.

Increasing market demand for wireless devices will earn Microsoft a second look for its software-driven smartphones and tablets.  Turning consideration into market leadership will depend on the company’s ability to reveal how it has been looking out for our interests all along.

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MediaPost “Online Spin” columnist and President of Social Vibe Joe Marchese had this to say about the bright year ahead for mobile marketing:

“This is it.  2010 will be the year mobile marketing begins to realize the promise marketers have imagined for so long.  What’s different in 2010?  The phones are smarter, the networks are faster, an open development ecosystem is leading to faster innovation, and specialty mobile agencies have built up a solid knowledge base of what works.”

He is right that the tools for making mobile marketing real are in mass production.  You can count me as voting in favor of mobile in 2010, but the platform’s capabilities will shine a light on features that could be a drag on marketing — privacy and permission.  Just because someone downloaded an app doesn’t mean they knew all it did and weeks or months down the road they will likely remember even less.  Just look at the recent Sears settlement.

And being aware that our devices know where we are is not the same as permission to tell people.  I mean, we grant Google the right to read our email, but getting an ad tied too tightly to the conversation we are having at the moment can be creepy.  The reign of “notice and choice” has given online consumers little of either.  Advertisers are looking at notice in context and choice at the point of real decision.

Even the most zealous pro-mobile-advocates appreciate the concern/problem/speed bump.

A MobileMarketer column looking at the major trends for mobile in 2010 adds this to the list of those you have heard before:

“Mobile will be called to task on privacy in 2010. Reputable mobile ad networks will follow guidelines set by industry trade associations and standard bodies.  Offering opt-out capabilities to protect personal identification information will be an imperative and will propel the roll-out of more contextual and behavioral consumer ad targeting via mobile.”

Opt-in and opt-out, though, are so desktop.  There is a chance, though, in 2010 for this last hurdle to be cleared is new ways.  Our “persistent contact” with our smart phones, the speed of their browsers and advertisers use of short codes and 2-D barcodes stand to remake privacy and permission in real-time.

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Apple’s plans for bringing iTunes to the Web was big news, but it was a simple, apositive phrase, late in the story in the Wall Street Journal, that carried greater import.   In talking about how Apple will give users access to their accounts via any web browser, the Journal said, “That approach, known in technology circles as cloud computing, could…”

In technology circles? It is easy to think that the ubiquity of technology — smart phones, GPS devices, payment fobs, Fast Passes and the rest — has not only made it a part of our lives, but also a part of our vernacular.  Not so.  Companies promoting products and services to the market need to heard and understood.

The burden is even greater for technologies that don’t make an obvious impression.  The iPhone is a complex and powerful computer, but it is so darn cute and easy to use.  That’s easy to get and accrues to Apple’s benefit.  Nearly 20 years ago, computer chip maker Intel was able to break out of the box with its significant “Intel inside” branding and advertising campaign.

But multi-million-dollar ad campaigns don’t have the same effect today and customer skepticism undercuts “because I said so.”  So what is a technology company to do?

For one, they should use the language of the market they seek to serve and not fall back on the jargon of their own.     A column by a CEO from a deep technology company in Fortune makes the point.

When Neustar’s Jeff Ganek links his company’s deep technology of network hub directory services to edge services like Web browsing, texting and keeping the same phone number when you leave AT&T for Verizon in a fit of pique, he goes a long way in speaking the market’s language.

It is a good model for others.

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When Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, uttered his famous, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” assessment of a popular spot, it was merely an ironic twist.  These days, it may be read as an epitaph for any business — retail, entertainment or travel — that needs people to get up and go.  More than a bad economy, more than changing fashion and more than the TSA, the reason we are staying put is technology.  It is delivering on the experience without the inconvenience.

That retail space is going begging is no new story.  The 10 percent drop in air travel in the United States is also well-documented.   But when the NFL reports that the opening game of the season played by a team in the last Super Bowl is not sold out and so may be blacked out, well, that is news.

Long viewed as the most popular sport in America, the NFL has sown the seeds of its in-stadium problems by aggressively courting new technologies that make the in-home experience different to the point of betting better.  After all, in high def, with DVR pause and playback, the action is more real — and controllable — from the couch than the loge level.  In fact, this beat is continuing with the emergence of 3-D.

But more than just planting the seeds, the NFL has fertilized and watered them by making the trip to and from its stadia difficult and time-consuming, its ticket prices expensive and its arenas unruly.  If CDs and movies are better bought online, and shoes no longer need to be tried on before purchasing, then it should come as no surprise that football fans feel better bar-be-que’ing at home than tailgating in the parking lot.

Sports have become software for our domestic entertainment hardware.  The die was cast 35 years ago when Ted Turner, anxious to turn his Atlanta UHF television channel in the nation’s first satellite-delivered superstation, bought the Atlanta Braves so he could broadcast every one of their games nationwide.  It wasn’t a deal driven by the sport, but by the hardware — the television — and the advertising it could sell.

The trend will continue.  So too will NFL black-outs (a policy adopted, in the first place, to get people to go the the game).  But if site-based businesses can’t make going different enough to be better than staying home, another of Yogi’s phrases might apply, “It gets late early out there.”

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The economy in the U.S. is getting better for all of us but not for each of us.

That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the upturn of the stock markets and signs of life in housing even as jobs continue to be lost.  This is called a “jobless recovery,” where, according to Forbes, “…companies can increase production by investing in new technologies, and thus delay re-hiring people.”  Real change may not come for “several years.”

The odd coupling of good-and-bad news has had an effect on consumer spending.  Whether described as down or up, it is clearly lower and slower than we have come to measure as normal.  It is natural for consumers to use a sharper pencil on expenses in the face of economic uncertainty.

But how should whole industries respond to a similar threat?

In recent weeks, we have seen reports from media companies — newspapers, magazine, broadcast and even online properties — that advertising revenues are off, way off.  With their sharper pencils, many have still found a profit.  It is axiomatic, though, that you can’t persistently cut your way to profitability.

As recently reported, “Gannett swung back to profitability in the second quarter, probably attributable, in part, to savings from numerous furloughs and layoffs nationwide.  Still, the plunging ad revenues suggest there is scant hope of a near-term recovery for Gannett — or the newspaper business in general.”

It is ironic that at a time when newspapers are read by fewer people, people and newspapers face such a similar circumstance.  With news that the Federal Reserve thinks unemployment will top 10 percent and that national advertisers, like Macy’s, have cut their spend in half, we may wind up with even more alike the less we have in common.

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Word came recently of the apparent death of Phorm, a UK-based consortium of ISPs seeking to deliver over their networks behavioral targeted — or BT — advertising.  In a mild bit of irony, reports of the death of BT came in the form of an announcement by BT — British Telecom.  Last week, the giant telco backed out of its intention to launch the technology.

Phorm is following not so much function but NebuAd, another company seeking to offer BT to networks.  NebuAd closed its doors it May.  The move came after Congress began an inquiry into the technology, spurred on by consumer advocates who successfully argued that the technology was being rolled out without consumer consent and in violation of their privacy.

The Center for Democracy and Technology told Congress: “In recent years, however, massive growth in data processing power has spurred the development of new ‘deep packet inspection’ (DPI) technologies thatpotentially allow Internet service providers (ISPs) and other intermediaries to analyze all of the Internet traffic of millions of users simultaneously. The use of DPI technology, though still in somewhat limited deployment, raises profound questions about the future of privacy, openness, and innovation online.”

That specter, not any measureable reality, became the tsunami that overwhelmed NebuAd and Phorm.

What could they have done?  And, in light of the investment media and other companies are making, spending as much as $22 million per year,  to address privacy concerns (read: liability), how can you prevent what ought to be a competitive edge — that commitment to privacy — from turning into a market problem?

One answer may be in the fact that BT and other intrusive technologies are seen only as being to the advantage of the advertiser.  Strategically, companies instead need to create and communicate value for consumers.  Tactically, this might be a rebate, a lower cost of service, more control or advertising that is so relevant, it becomes content.

Ad Age’s Bob Garfield said in his 2007 market-changing Chaos Scenario 2.0, “people don’t like ads, but they crave content.”  While BT is one way to deliver more relevant advertising, without engaging consumers in the Phormula (bad pun, I know) such technologies, and the companies who deploy them, may get no further than Capitol Hill or Brussels or wherever legislators act on behalf of their constituents.

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