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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Xeni Jardin, co-editor of BoingBoing.net, was offering a review of the iPad when she set the bar for any technology company aiming to succeed in either the business or the consumer market.  She said:

“When the operating system gets out of the way, when the experience of a computing device is so seamless that you’re not aware of the operating system, all you’re aware of is the information or the experience or the enrichment that you’re after…that’s when you know you have really sweet design.”  She called that moment “magic.”

She may have been channeling Arthur C. Clarke, whose famous laws included this one: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Or she may have merely been channeling the frustration of consumers and business people alike who have grappled with voice mail or gotten lost in an interactive voice response menu or lost hours of work to a system crash.

Five years ago, the Gartner Group, a technology industry research firm, said that the next 10 years would be dominated by a handful of trends that included the “Consumerization of IT.”  More than predicting the rise of smartphones and wireless, remote access, the trend was painted as a danger for companies who resisted.

“As perceptive CIOs seek to transform their rigid, legacy-ridden infrastructures into agile, efficient, service-driven delivery mechanisms, they must adopt a pragmatic approach to managing the risk of consumer IT while embracing the benefits,” said Steve Prentice, vice president and research director at Gartner. “Otherwise, the CIOs risk being sidelined as the ‘enemy’ by their constituencies.”

Now that the smartphone has become ubitquitous (and been given netbook and iPad siblings), now that wireless, remote access has become the Mobile Web and settting aside the question of “who saw what when,” it is clear the market has moved in this direction.

IBM no longer sells software, hardware and services that can be mixed-and-matched, it promotes a smarter planet.  Cisco is not content to sell routers, it now enables a human network.  Even Oracle, born as smart but homely database software, is now complete.

Each in their own way is trying to create magic — letting the audience see the rabbit without worrying about the size of the hat. Companies that can will be rewarded.  Those that can’t will either get bought at a good price by those who can or fall away.

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In a recent bit on Internet censorship by Richard Waters and Joseph Menn in the Financial Times, the easy belief that “China is just being China” gave way to a more complex view of the relationship between national interest and a nation’s laws when it comes to new technology.  Here is how they put it:

“In popular consciousness, the Internet still promises a borderless world, a place where the free flow of information threatens artificial barriers erected by nation states. But the web is fast being carved up by national laws and regulations, whether aimed at suppressing opinion, tackling pornography or identity theft, as countries around the world learn the techniques of control. Far from being a universal medium, the world wide web is becoming balkanised – as users are now learning.”

Just ask David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, who along with two other executives, was found guilty in an Italian court for violating — on the Internet — that specific country’s privacy laws.

There are about 200 countries seeking to protect their borders, culture and economies.  At a time when the Internet (and complementary digital technologies) is shrinking the globe to the effective size of a marble, making those borders less meaningful, something will have to give.  It will not be easy or pretty.  And it will turn not on the rule of law or the size of a market, but on the will of the people who live there.

There was a time when the drinking age in New York was 18 and 21 in New Jersey.  The will of the Garden State’s oldest teenagers to test the limits of each state’s laws was abetted by a mile-and-a-half stretch of the approaches and span of the Goethals Bridge linking Elizabeth, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.  That bridge, like the Internet, exposed unacceptable market differences.

It probably played a small role in triggering a debate that ultimately equalized the drinking age at 18 (the era’s military draft was a bit bigger reason).  But once the conversation began, other voices (and research) were drawn in.  They came to understand the value of a single age of consent but found social reason to raise it to 21.  It was a noisy debate, involving government and lobbyists, students and teachers, parents and social activists.  But it mostly involved people who saw how life needed to change because the world had gotten too small to accommodate certain differences.

The Internet will cause such change at a pace, width and depth we cannot now measure.  China will not be transformed tomorrow, but look at how different the country has become in the last 20 years.  It has gone from a boogeyman to a banker (and still a bit of a boogeyman).

But just like the Goethals, the Internet is a bridge that, once built, leads us to cross it.  And once crossed we are changed.

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Last year, after closing the doors on a technology start-up I had pushed up the hill for two years, I decided to return to communications consulting.  After many years of casual counsel to “start your own thing,” I did.

On April 1, 2009 (no joke) I launched Credible Context (www.crediblecontext.com), a consultancy devoted to helping companies market their products, services, even themselves by tapping into the persuasive power of their own stories.

I am grateful for the support my initiative has gotten from the world in general (my ideas have been given space in the NY Times, PRWeek, CircleID and other venues relevant to the profession) but it is the willingness of a handful of people to become clients that has made a year begun in anxiety, end in confidence.

Clarity, customer value and context will continue to be the hallmarks of success in the coming year.  Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

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