The air was filled with digital innovation once again at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas where everybody-who’s-anybody-digital gathers every year to share insights, celebrate breakthroughs and scout out the next Twitter and Foursquare (both of which launched in previous SouthBys).

At SouthBy itself, over 15,000 hip young inventors, pioneers and visionaries teemed and thronged through over 300 dazzling presentations and panels.

Everywhere we went, digital luminaries and celebrities of all kinds were making appearances.  “Did you hear? Al Gore’s going to be talking with Sean Parker!”  “American Express is giving away Jay Z tickets!”  “Is it true Billy Corgan dissed social media?”  The list went on, including Rainn Wilson, Anthony Bourdain, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Amber Case and Jimmy Fallon.

There was considerable buzz about two new platforms:

• Pingram which combines Pinterest’s boards and Instagram’s photo-taking.
• Highlight, an ambient social app that lets you find out about shared interests with people who are passing you by.

As we got our “monkey minds” quieted down and back to the business at hand of collecting as many new nuggets of insight and wisdom as we could, a number of big themes emerged: 

Old-world organizations can’t make new-world marketing.

In a culture in which the crowd-funding pioneer Kickstarter is well on its way to becoming more powerful than the the National Endowment for the Arts, and in which “geek art” may well become the dominant art form of our times, whither branding?

Visionaries and experts alike agreed: ad agencies have to learn how to be more like tech start ups and reduce the number of organizational layers they accumulated during the heydays of mass media.

Clients have to learn that it’s often more expensive to study an opportunity than it is to make a prototype and proceed to a test.

Agencies and clients, big and small, have to learn the new rules of authenticity.  Everything you do has to be able to be fully transparent and authentic.  You can’t, like the cast of Mad Men, simply declare that your product delivers “whiter whites.”  Puffery withers and dies in the vigilant world of social media - you must replace it with full-on and compelling truth.

And we all have to learn the art of letting go.  All you can do now is come to the conversation with a strong purpose, a clear and original point of view and an interesting source of provocation.  The community you are engaging will take your best ideas and turn them into memes of their own.  If you’re not ready for that, well then, you’re not ready for the age of participation.

In a culture of digital divas, women aren’t a “market segment.”

Modern marketers have to learn new ways of transcending clichés.  “Shrink it and pink it” aren’t going to cut it anymore.  Of course, product categories in which something functionally relevant can be offered specifically to women, like Gillette’s hugely successful Venus razor, will always be full of opportunities for gender-explicit branding and design.

But remember that Tetris was designed by a couple of twenty-something “dudes” and it has since been taken over by women who account for over 90% of its player base.  Always be prepared for such surprises and learn from them.  

If you want to appeal to women in an implicit way, try doing this: solve real problems that people have and don’t obsess about gender.  When Apple was preparing to launch the iPad, they took a lot of flak that the name sounded like a feminine hygiene product.  What did they do?  They ignored it and sailed on.

Pay attention to design.  If there is one thing that separates women and men, it’s that women appreciate excellence in design more than men do.  Make superior design part of your brand strategy and you’ll carry the day.  FemGen, a female-centric brand development consultancy, keeps showcasing new products they’ve helped develop that just look very well-conceived but your first thought when you see them is not, “Oh, that’s for women.”

In a world of 24/7 connectedness, event marketing needs to tap into FOMO.

FOMO: Fear of Missing Out.  The truth is that our constant exposure to social media gives us the ganwing sense that someone we know is right now having more fun or doing something more interesting than we are.

This is a huge opportunity if you’re trying to cook up something distinctive for your event marketing.  Make it a priceless experience.  Engineer it so that is can be shared via social media, including the most powerful medium of all: word of mouth.

Build social currency into your experiential marketing.  “Oh my God, you won’t believe what happened!”

There’s great power in contrarian thinking.

Most of your competitors are obsessed with headcounts: how many fans do they have?  How many likes?  Try thinking beyond the obvious.  You’ll already have a point of strategic difference.

How about if you’re strategically unlikeable?  In a world of everything striving to get and more and more likes, there’s a really energy in having an idea of want you want to achieve and just going about it, regardless of whether every one likes it or not.  Think Apple whose posture says, “we have a cool new product that costs $400.00 and if you don’t like it, we don’t really care.”

Try being obsolete.  Lomo film cameras are huge with creative class all over the world precisely because they are obsolete.  Therefore they are distinctive and anything but mass.  And Lomo cares about their users and fosters community content.

Don’t be afraid of being weird, negative and obscure.  In a culture of bland “likes,” it’s hotter than ever and attracts that most valuable of equities: social currency.

Everything is getting faster, easier and more powerful - but that may not be all good.

Liquid interfaces, AI in everyday appliances, ambient recognition, lighter and lighter, more and more powerful devices - it’s all coming - and faster than you think.  But, as some of the more thoughtful participants observed, maybe it’s not all good and maybe you can profit by some contrarian thinking of your own.  Maybe you don’t want to build a whole social strategy around Facebook - knowing it’s just a matter of time before it goes the way of Friendster.  Maybe you don’t want to prostrate yourself before your fans but ask them to do more for you.  Maybe you want to be more private, more mysterious, less ubiquitous.

So what do we do?

There’s never been a more exciting time to be in marketing -everything is up for grabs and the some of the best advice we heard at this year’s SouthBy was just as powerful for brands at it was for each of personally.  We’ll take that as a very good sign.  Here’s the advice:

• harness yourself to a powerful higher-order purpose
• be transparent
• be yourself
• tell great stories
• show up for the conversation
• just try stuff
• keep asking if you have the right models
• sift your data through inspired models

People in marketing routinely talk about “iconic” brands and “iconoclastic” personalities. I’m sure Richard Branson has at least once been referred to as “iconically iconoclastic.”

But what does it really mean to be iconic and iconoclastic?  Ikenei in Greek means to “look like.”  An icon is a likeness.  

The oldest monastery in the world also has one of the oldest icons, the Pantocrater, Lord of All.  Icons were made by monks as aids to personal prayer and as worship. When we say “iconoclastic” we are using a word whose origins date back 1,200 years ago in a movement in the Byzantine Empire which sought to stamp out the use of icons.  Their contention: “graven images,” forbidden in the Ten Commandments, fixate our imaginations on the visible and tangible and thereby make God smaller.  The movement gained considerable ground and it nearly triumphed – paralleling the emergence of Islam’s ban of secular religious art. The consequences of its triumph would have considerably diminished the vivid richness of the world we live in today.

But the doctrine of the Incarnation ultimately prevailed in favor of icons.  Orthodoxy declared Jesus to be both God and Man and, from this idea issued forth a sense that the world around us is not a lesser, coarser experience of the divine.  Everything that comes to us through the senses is intrinsically good and it is only by our will that it can be made bad.  Our minds were made to understand the world.  To explore the world in the confidence that it is ultimately knowable and understandable is therefore an act of faith.  There is no division between Faith and Reason.  If the world appears irrational, it is because we do not yet understand it.  This sense of life ultimately gave birth to the first universities and to the sometimes fitful starts of open, rational and free scientific inquiry.

Concurrent with this, the development of iconography, an ancient art form still alive throughout the Christian world, represented a desire to create images that would help us draw nearer to invisible presence of God in our lives.  Traditionally, icons are painted by gifted monks in monasteries.  Icons are created one at a time as image-prayers, not just ordinary art.  Their hieratic values, their balance of sumptuous color and austere poses are intended to capture the emotion of the soul at its most awake.

To the didactic and contemplative mission of iconography came the lush grandeur of Renaissance realism, perspective landscapes and a myriad of pealing decorative elements such as those on display in Botticelli’s Magnificat.

But we enter the full height of the Renaissance in the staggering polymathic genius of Leonardo for whom painting was in fact just one of many fields of ceaseless, roving labor.  His scattered and few precious paintings, many left undone, continue to haunt us with their superhuman genius leaving traces of its exhausting quest of the impossible.

The National Gallery in London has put together a once-in-a-lifetime collection of Leonardo’s sketches, drawings and paintings that is attracting record crowds with ticketed entrance times required to regulate the crush of visitors - with many tickets selling in illegal online auctions. 

As you visit the collection, an amazing discovery looms large. Leonardo believed that painting sacred mysteries could itself bring the divine into the world, creating a faithful reverberation of the mystery of the Incarnation.  Two paintings in particular are as awe-inspiring and ineffable as Mozart’s Requiem.

The Salvator Mundi was inspired by the legend of Veronica’s Veil, the legendary cloth that bore the miraculous imprint of Christ’s face as he staggered on the Via Dolorosa to his Passion. In the Salvator Mundi, Christ’s face is painted in a kind of holy, liminal mist as though he were emerging from, and returning back into, another dimension.  He holds in his hand a rock crystal globe – an object of such purity and perfection that the high Middle Ages saw this as mysteriously endowed with divine luminance.  The painting plunges us into the divine presence.  It is not “about” its subject matter.  It is in it.  To stand in front of it with unblinking eyes is a powerful experience.

The exhibit also includes two different paintings of the same subject: Virgin of the Rocks.  For the first time in history, both paintings are on view in the same room and it is fascinating to see the genius of Leonardo in its restless exploration.  The paintings were commissioned by the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception.  Mary was conceived as the perfect woman pre-ordained in human history and emerging from the mysterious depths of the original creation of the Universe.  Leonardo decided to show that.  His backgrounds immediately reminded me of sci-fi artists’ conceptions of alien worlds or the Earth in its primeval years.  To stand in front of the painting is to contemplate the opening of a wormhole in time back to origins of the cosmos.

No other painter would again mix theology and metaphysics with this peculiar genius to produce such unforgettable images – imprints of the most challenging mysteries of the unfolding Western imagination.

So what does this mean for those of us spending their adult years trying to help brands become culturally iconic?  Raise your sights.  Become passionate about your subject matter.  Never give up questing.  Do not mistake simplicity of expression for superficiality of thinking.  

Grazie per questa ispirazione Caro Maestro.