That is, in my opinion, a good thing. The more brands can live in a real-time reality, the more relevant they can be—and that is, of course, the proverbial Holy Grail of marketing (well, when it’s tied to revenue, at least).

But here’s a secret: real-time is a cultural shift, not a tactic, or an add-on, or budget line.

Yes, it’s simple in principle—speak, act, and interact in absolute (or near) tandem with the rest of the world: your customers, your audience, the news, culture at large.

But in practice, it means changing how we operate as marketers.

It means letting go of relying exclusively on three, six, twelve, eighteen-month media planning cycles and leaving room for the unexpected—for buying media based on what’s trending, what insights emerge, what new challenge publishers suddenly pop up that offer you access to a three-times more targeted audience for one third the price.

It means turning your brand into a newsroom and creating enough volume of content to find out what your audience sees as relevant.

It means putting legal in the same room as creative and cutting down your approval cycle from three days to three minutes (an impossible task for some, I know, but I make the point for dramatic emphasis).

Real-time is a revolution, no doubt, but revolutions are never tactics.

They’re transformations.

Relevance, of course, is relative. It’s a moving target. What is hip, as the inimitably funky Tower of Power would ask, depends upon—wait for it—the zeitgeist of whomever it is you’re trying to reach.

Relevance is also, to bastardize that indelible MacLuhnian maxim, the medium. I, for example, barely watch TV, in the literal sense—nearly all content I consume or engage with comes through my portable devices, namely my iPhone and MacBook. And I use them all the time.

If you—the brand, the publisher, or perhaps the brand-as-publisher—fail to develop and execute a strategy for the platforms I use, then you lose relevance in my eyes. Not because I don’t like you, but because I literally don’t see you.

Relevance is a Worldview, Not a Strategy

It might be easy to think that, in our always-on world, simply extending your existing creative to mobile and social channels is the answer to your potentially pending irrelevance.

But let me be clear: this isn’t merely a channel question. Sure, distributing and optimizing for mobile and social (Make the site responsive! Tweet! Add a check-in! Kittehs! Kittehs!) is good, but it’s not enough. In fact, today, it’s just the cost of entry.

Relevance, instead, is a question of worldview.

A worldview is, to patently overgeneralize, how you see the world. It’s the way you value and judge the relative worth of things, events, people, ideas. X is good, Y is bad. A is true, B is false.

In 1491, the world was flat. Before Copernicus, the Earth was the center of the solar system. Before Descartes, the mind, and therefore the human capacity to reason, wasn’t separate from a supernatural God. All oversimplified. All worldviews.

Similarly, before television, advertisers could happily choose between two marketing channels, spoon-feed consumers what values they should believe, and create cozy relationships with their agencies. Television added a third option, and started to speed up the pace of cultural change. It added complexity. Real-time became more… real.

And then, the internet. Oh, the internet. 1.0 wasn’t actually that horrible: to punch a monkey was, at first, an acceptable act (I even remember enjoying it about two decades ago).

But then, the screeching and clicking of 56K crashed into Moore’s predictable but breathtakingly true principle of technological progress, quickly finding us sharing our own America’s Funniest Home Videos on some two-syllabic site these two kids started and publishing our most intimate thoughts and activities and secrets to the digital world on some platform this Harvard guy developed.

And then everything changed.

Today, with the growing adoption of mobile and social, 2.0 is being disrupted in the same way the social web disrupted 1.0 and TV disrupted radio and print.

On the outside, the shift is a bit subtle. It all looks the same. iPhones are still iPhones, Facebook is still Facebook, apps are still apps. But don’t let the cover be your judge of historical import.

The combination of computing power, network speeds, widespread adoption of smartphones, mainstream embrace of social networking, and proliferation of instant-publishing platforms is redefining what it means to engage an audience.

And it’s nothing short of revolutionary.

Real-Time is (Another) Revolution

Hell, I know I just wrote about a revolution, but, well, these are revolutionary times.

And real-time is, without question, a revolution. Revolutions are entire shifts in perspective, in worldview: things were one way, now they’re another. The earth was flat, now it’s not (except in Mr. Friedman’s figurative sense).

So, the first step to redefining relevance is to admit that real-time requires a rewiring.

Real-time demands you look beyond the surface of things, to appreciate that feats like Facebook reaching its billionth user aren’t just numerical wonders but signals of deeper sociocultural shifts occurring.

In other words, you need to examine your worldview, the way you see society, and start reorienting yourself toward the reality that life, information, and ideas are moving with far more rapidity than any at previous point in history.

It may all seem just too overwhelming. But some examples lead the way. Let us explore.

Relatively Real-Time Examples of Real-Time

To show you that real-time is within your reach, allow me to provide you with some concrete inspiration.

One of my favorite recent examples is that of Virgin Mobile and BuzzFeed. The two formed a partnership roughly three months ago to give the brand its own channel, called Virgin Mobile Live.

Since then, the Virgin team has been experimenting with different forms of viral content, often relating to the news of the week or season—or, the general timbre of the time. Virgin Mobile CMO Ron Faris and BuzzFeed Jonah Peretti founder had an excellent dialogue at the most recent Digitas NewFront that’s well worth watching.

Virgin Mobile has capitalized on the site’s social-sharing power, as well as the edginess of the brand that Sir Richard Branson has been defining for decades, to publish timely (and sometimes timeless) content, all designed with one intention: to be shared in real-time.

Take, for example, 20 Publicly Shamed Animal Twitpics, which went live just as pet shaming, or the art of assigning blame to woeful-looking animals, was taking off. The post been shared and liked over 12,100 times on Facebook. (In fact, a friend of mine, an accomplished comedian, independently sent the link to about 20 of our close friends, with the subject line, “…you just need to go to this website…”).

Virgin’s pet-shaming post is an example of what is commonly referred to as trendjacking. Among categories of real-time, though, trendjacking isn’t the only popular practice: capitalizing on the news is, too—or what author David Meerman Scott calls newsjacking.

While associating your brand with the news of the moment isn’t anything, well, new, the way brands are doing it in 2012 certainly is. Take JetBlue’s Election Protection, a sweepstakes that offers 2,012 round-trip tickets (or 1,006 seats) to contestants whose presidential candidate loses.

Speaking personally, I can verify that, perhaps like every election, but with seemingly more emotion this time around, my friends and colleagues have uttered the “I’m leaving the country if…” mantra with growing frequency as November 4 approaches. For the cost of a minute portion of their yearly ticket sales volume, JetBlue seized the zeitgeist and captured national attention.

Okay. Obviously JetBlue had planned this thing. But what about truly spontaneous real-time newsjacking?

Look no further than Tide’s brand marketing team, who, earlier this year, noticed that, during a Daytona 500 crash that resulted in nearly 200 gallons of jet fuel (speaking of jets) leaking on to the track, the cleanup crew happened to be using Tide—a coincidence, not an intentional product placement.

In response, they issued a press release that added jet fuel to the list of stains Tide can clean and created this commercial. The press responded in droves.

Here’s What to Do Next

By now, I’m guessing (hoping) that I’ve convinced you of the importance of real-time, as both a strategy and philosophy.

If I have, then allow me offer a practical, if briefly explicated, course of action.

Take one or two particularly savvy employees. Dedicate them, even part-time, as the Zeitgeist Czars. Get a platform like Radian6 or Cision. Or follow David Meerman Scott’s lead and use free services like TweetDeck, Google News, and Google Alerts. Track brand-related trends, mentions, and news in real-time.

(If you don’t want to do it internally, work with an agency that “gets it.”)

Then, start experimenting. If you’re sponsoring a concert, set up a special “fans-only” microsite and send a tweet directing your followers to exclusive content. Talk to Jonah over at BuzzFeed about setting up a brand channel. Post an image to Facebook in response to a major social and political trend, like Oreo did with its rainbow cookie.

The possibilities, as you can see, are endless. What isn’t endless, though, is the time you have to get on board and start publishing stuff that matters to your audience now and now and, yes, now.

You will fail. But that’s okay. After a while, just like Virgin Mobile did, you’ll start to realize that you’re entering a new world.

And I’m willing to wager that it’s a world you’ll grow to like, maybe even love, pretty darn quickly–especially as you start to see your customer engagement rates soar through the roof.

Perhaps the best person to express the summarizing sentiment of the Creative Revolution is Bill Bernach, legendary creative director and the man largely responsible for its spawning, who said: “Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.” Not satisfied with advertising simply attempting to persuade consumers to buy products with the written word, Bernach demanded his writers collaborate closely with art directors, the goal of which was to produce art that sold—a decidedly monumental break with the current establishment.

At first, as happens with most convention-breaking ideas, Bernbach’s novel move was met with suspicion and distaste. Indeed, fans of today’s arguably most iconic period drama, Mad Men, may be smiling: Bernbach, and, in particular, his now historic Volkswagen “Think Small” campaign, were the bane of Don Draper’s existence. In a well-known scene, Draper, creative director of the show’s fictional agency, Sterling Cooper, was looking at Bernbach’s most recent VW genius—the “Lemon” ad—and frowning.

It’s not hard to see why the establishment hated Bernbach’s artistic understatedness: during a post-war, pro-American era, when most advertising focused on the biggerness and betterness of Detroit’s Holy Horsepower, Bernbach took a car—a small, unassuming car; a car that was produced in a Nazi factory—and highlighted its quirkiness, its simplicity, its German precision.

The VW campaign worked, with flying colors: due almost exclusively to the campaign, VW sales exploded to nearly 500,000 in a single year. How did Bernbach do it? He put two legends-in-the-making, copywriter Julian Koenig and art director Helmut Krone, in a room and let them create art that sold. Much to Draper, Sterling, and Cooper’s fictional dismay, the poetic fusion of art and copy could sell. The art director-copywriter dyad stuck, and became the foundational composition of all modern advertising teams.

But Wait, There’s More (Revolution)

Bernbach’s vision was sweeping and disruptive, but it wasn’t the first of its scope in advertising’s history. As I’ve written about before here, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, is largely considered the founder of Public Relations (after all, he coined the term). He also, however, arguably popularized what became the underlying insight that drives all marketing and advertising today: people buy based more on emotion than they do reason. His connection to Freud, then, should be obvious.

Psychoanalysis opened human beings to that dangerous and unruly place called the unconscious, a reckless zone full of animalistic desires, impure motives, and competing drives. We human beings are not polite, rational creatures; we’re ravenous beasts. We’re driven by lust for power, competition, status, and, above all else, sex. Bernays was on to Freud’s philosophy and perhaps the first to exploit it.

Until Bernays, nearly all advertising focused on the features of the products they were intended to sell. After Bernays, they focused on the psychology of the individuals and collectives they were attempting to persuade. Products weren’t just products any more—they were ideas, lifestyles, markers of social status and values. Cigarettes were symbols of women’s liberation. Bacon and eggs were what true Americans had for breakfast. Dixie cups were must-haves for the sanitary life.

Bernays, and, by extension, Freud, had a dominant, and defining, influence on the future of all marketing, advertising, and communications. That’s why I’m calling the emergence and rapid adoption of their ideas the “Psychological Revolution”. Principles that we take for granted today—stress the benefits, not the features; people buy with emotion and justify with logic—were born out of their revolutionary, if often misapplied and (in this author’s opinion) only partially true insights.

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

Many look down on both revolutions with scorn: the Psychological Revolution led to mass manipulation, and the Creative Revolution elevated marketing and advertising to such a high point of abstraction, one so disconnected from reality, that all accountability was lost. Neither sentiment is untrue. But both miss the point.

Without psychological insight into the human condition, all marketing would simply, and blandly, present us with the latest whiz-bam features. It would never leave us in tears, or inspire greatness, or make us laugh. And without the Creative Revolution, we would seldom equate branding with beauty (cf. Apple), visually arresting art with powerfully persuasive prose. Life would be, in essence, far more vanilla, and certainly garnished only with the minimum flair.

Taking into account all of their misapplications and extreme manifestations, the Psychological and Creative Revolutions have, I would argue, done us well. But, as we learn in biology class, all living things evolve, and so the old must eventually give rise to the new. And today, I believe a new, and significant, revolution is upon us.

Introducing the Purpose Revolution

Over the past two decades, and especially as my generation, the Millennials, have matured, the notion of “purpose” has, with increasing volume, ascended into the center of cultural conversation, getting noisier and more dominant with each passing year. So central is purpose to such a large segment of my generation’s identity that I believe its ascension into the mainstream represents a third revolution in advertising, marketing, and communications.

The Purpose Revolution is, at its core, comprised of a few premises: on a more universal level, we humans know that we come most alive when we’re in touch with a higher purpose, a raison d’être, a transcendent mission. From a generational perspective, an increasing number of Millennials—according to a recent BCG-Barkley study, more than those in previous generations—want to contribute to a better world. This demographic, the “Hip-ennials,” as BCG and Barkley name them, are also the most wired and active online. (Full disclosure: I fall into this category, so I’m biased, although I would ask to be quickly slapped in the face if I were to ascribe said title to myself in public.)

So, the calculus goes something like this: the largest psychographic of the largest generation in history, which is also the segment most active on the largest communications platform in history, holds as its core identity that of changemaker and purpose-finder. That alone shouldn’t come as a surprise: by now, most brands know that loads and loads of Millennials want to change the world. But here is where, in my opinion, most brands get it wrong: they assume that “cause” or “purpose” correlates almost exclusively with “charity” or “philanthropy.” It’s an understandable, but limited, interpretation of the trend.

As we’ll see in the next section, purpose far transcends the modern-day tried-and-true CSR tactics: sponsoring a benefit concert, creating 30-second spots around the latest community initiative, developing a microsite to give money away to charities. All of these tactics are well and good, but purpose goes deeper: it’s about DNA, blueprints, cultural scaffolding.

The Two Brands You Wish Were Yours Have Purpose At Their Core

Consider Nike. According to the BCG-Barkley study, it’s the most loved brand among Millennials. Is that because many of its coolest celebrity-athletes don the Swoosh? Of course it is. But it’s also because of advertising like this, and initiatives like this, and ideas like Mr. Wieden’s indelible ”Just Do It” slogan.

Nike wins because they capture all of the zeitgeist—design, packaging, celebrity, and, increasingly, purpose. The brand has innovative (and, many would say, far superior) “CSR” initiatives, like The Girl Effect. But The Girl Effect works precisely because purpose is built into its invisible brand scaffolding, its culture, in the first place. It’s not a slapped-on afterthought; it’s “another cool thing” that Nike is doing.

Consider Apple, too, which needs no qualification as a desirable brand. Apple, notably, rarely (never?) pursues high-profile PR campaigns declaring to the world its magnanimous commitment to community service. Purpose is simply baked in to the very design of the Apple experience itself, from Jobs’s affinity for Zen-inspired design to the intrinsic philosophy of “Think Different,” exemplified in ads like its 1984 Superbowl spot and its ubiquitous quotation of Mr. Kerouac’s love letter to the “crazy ones.” This is all to say: the entire philosophical underpinning of what Apple is and does contains a transcendent purpose at its core.

So many brands today are trying to understand how to reach the Hip-ennials, the savviest, most active, most loyal consumers of my generation. They would do well to look at the examples of Nike and Apple, both examples of what I call “Big Purpose”: an overarching, totalizing, all-consuming sense of mission that defines everything the company does. Neither brand has a perfect track record of social responsibility. But both express ideas far bigger than any one mistake or victory. And as long as they respond to the former with aggressive transparency and unwavering sticktoitiveness, they will, by design, continue to engender loyalty and passion among their audience.

Big Purpose is not a focus group, a day of service, a check. It’s all of those things, but it’s also much, well, bigger than that. Big Purpose is an authentic vision of what’s possible, and the audacity to follow it through. Nike sees greatness in all human beings. Apple sees simplicity and beauty in all things. These are big, revolutionary ideas, ideas that can help shape a better, more connected society.

It’s Bigger Than ROI

Ultimately, the Purpose Revolution is not about advertising or marketing. It is about the world we want to live in as human beings—and how committed we are to creating it. In 1989, more than three decades after he helped usher in the Creative Revolution, Bernbach said, “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.” Although Bernbach inspired the Creative Revolution, the merger of art and copy hasn’t always been used for the highest aims. Perhaps he was beholding the emerging bastardization of his own creation.

Indeed, plenty of the industry’s most creative advertising today is, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuating the vulgarization of society, speaking more to the animalistic desires Freud discovered and Bernays exploited than the higher levels Bernbach identified. And it can work: consider Axe’s rise to fame, built largely on the brains of creatives who have found myriad ways to tell the story of college dudes (and now women) getting laid with the spray of a can. In the end, brands that vulgarize may continue to reap profitable rewards.

I’m not here to predict the ultimate defeat of vice or the inevitable and absolute victory of virtue in our society (although I’m rooting for the latter). I’m only making the case that, for those of us who want to create brands that lift and don’t lower—that raise and don’t reduce—we should know that the most populous segment of the largest generation in history wants to follow our lead.

The Purpose Revolution is real. It’s just a matter of whether you want to join it or not. You can still make plenty of money on the outskirts. But you may not sleep as well at night.

I’d say so. The brands-as-publishers conversation is, to me, an important one: it marks a shift from brands merely trying to convince consumers that they’re worthy of their patronage to actually investing in improving people’s lives. In that world, brands become utilities, or platforms, if you will, for a better future. And, in the process, consumers fall in love with those brands, or so the theory of “reciprocal altruism”—give unto others, and others will give unto you—goes. And initiatives like American Express’s Open Forum are proving it to be true.

But I want to introduce, or, perhaps more accurately, highlight, another important trend that I think deserves our equal consideration and attention: brands as patrons of the arts, and not just publishers. If brand marketing is about awareness, engagement, and affinity—and most brand marketers would agree that it is—then there’s perhaps no better vehicle than the arts to create deeper a connection with your audience.

This Isn’t Your Grandpa’s Patronage

Now, I’m not talking about the tried-and-true concert sponsorship, or the 30-second spot featuring a hip band or artist, or the “free-backstage-pass-for-your-buddies” type of marketing. Those are buys—they’re templates—not disruptive ideas. When I use the term “brands as patrons,” I mean brands entering into the creative process and marrying their technologies, ideas, or mission with the edge of an artist’s own potential.

Take, for example, the recent partnership between Microsoft IE9 and British band the xx (pictured above). Instead of the xx simply releasing their album via social channels, or following the Radiohead “pay what you want” model, they emailed their latest album, Coexist, to a single fan—and then watched, and visualized, how it spread using Microsoft technology.

That means eyeballs for Microsoft, and the pursuit of innovation for the xx. But more than that, it engenders creativity in brainstorming new models for content distribution as a whole; it associates the Internet Explorer brand—long dead in my (and many other digital natives’) web book—with a younger audience, and—dig this—makes the brand cooler; and it demonstrates that new kinds of partnerships are possible between brands and artists.

Others Are at the Brands-as-Patrons Party, Too

the xx/Microsoft partnership isn’t the only one. Consider The Creators Project, a joint initiative between Intel and VICE Media. Videos, articles, and real-world parties engage leading-edge artists using bleeding-edge technologies with young audiences around the world. In the process, Intel learns how some of today’s most creative people are applying technology to their crafts, and, once again, captures cool in the eyes of its desired beholders.

The last one I’ll leave you with is yet another partnership between Microsoft (go Balmer) and a prominent artist: this time, Jay-Z. Working with agency Droga5, Microsoft executed one of the coolest campaigns of all time (of all time). Rather than describe it here, though, I’ll implore you to simply watch Droga5’s case study of the campaign (hint: it involves placing passages of Jay-Z’s then-upcoming book, Decoded, in both conspicuous and hard-to-find places around the world and creating a geo-locational game that brings millions of fans together in an online community centered around Bing and earns billions of impressions and impresses the hell out of celebrities and newscasters alike—but hey, I said I wouldn’t describe the campaign here, so watch the video, k?).

As the entire world of marketing, advertising, and PR becomes upended, questioned, and disrupted by the minute, brands finding ways to not just champion or sponsor the arts, but deeply enter into co-creative partnerships with artists and labels, seems to be an obvious, and powerful, opportunity for media innovators looking to stand out, capture the zeitgeist, and secure that ever-elusive Holy Grail of Cool.

What this 26-year-old former press agent then did was nothing less than genius: he advised Wilson to create a political and social imperative to “make the world safe for democracy,” rather than simply articulate the list of strategically rational arguments for a decision that would inevitably cost America untold lives and expense.

Sure, the acts of Germany torpedoing a British ship with American citizens on board in 1915 and then submitting a memo that expressed its intention to help Mexico annex and reclaim several southern U.S. states in early 1917 all helped to stoke the public’s ire, but still, that potent line rang true—and deep—in the hearts of a polity that had been previously reluctant to abandon a peacetime economy.

Indeed, more than eight decades later, in my ninth-grade social studies class, I still remember reading the phrase “make the world safe for democracy.” My history professor, a strongly left-leaning thinker himself, didn’t say—or know—that that iconic phrase had been invented by the “Godfather of Spin” Edward Bernays, who also coined the term “public relations” and, among other things, made bacon popular for breakfast, milk a health drink, and cigarette-smoking acceptable for women.

Reclaiming the Power of Propaganda

Bernays was a categorically controversial person. He even wrote a book called Propanganda (PDF)—and no, there was no tinge of irony to his choice of title. In fact, it was only after the term “propaganda” fell out of fashion in the wake of World War I that he changed his profession’s name to “public relations.” His Hamiltonian, aristocratic views toward “controlling” democracy—which many would consider a contradiction in and of itself—would find little support, and likely incite rage, in our present-day age of transparency and world-flattening. No wonder so many consumers hate PR of all shapes and sizes.

But I think that many of my colleagues responsible for distributing “public information” miss a key point: Bernays, for all of his draconian, Big-Brotherish views, was actually shaping culture. He was determining the values and attitudes of the public. He was telling stories—9 out of 10 dentists recommend our floss, for example—that convinced people of his clients’ legitimacy.

Not all of his claims were true. Many were sneaky, some downright deplorable. I’m the last to call for a return to opaque, morally questionable communications practices.

But what if the fundamental spirit of Bernays—to use the power of media to influence culture in (what he considered at the time to be) a positive direction—were reclaimed by those who valued transparency, integrity, equity, social innovation, creativity, and many other universally good qualities?

From Press Releases to Purposeful Propaganda

I fear too many of my colleagues simply translate their clients’ or brands’ existing value propositions into press releases, tweets, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, and blog posts, without deeply considering the broader cultural context in which they’re occurring—and then deciding to influence it.

We’re all creating propaganda, which Merriam-Webster simply defines as “the spreading of ideas, facts, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring a cause, an institution, or a person.” Take out “rumor,” and think about things worth “injuring”—school bullying, negative self-esteem among girls, global inequality—and it’s pretty clear that our fear of propaganda comes more from its historical examples of abuse than its actual meaning or purpose.

I think we need a new kind of “purposeful propaganda.” That means that we’re not simply creating press releases or developing social media strategies based on our core value propositions. Instead, we’re thinking about the broader cultural context—the zeitgeist—in which our value propositions exists, and then we’re doing something big to influence people in the direction of the cause we’ve chosen.

Torching the Tyranny of Timidity  

Consider the Torches of Freedom, a campaign Bernays devised to help his client, the American Tobacco Company, expand its market to women, whom had previously been largely ignored by cigarette-makers, given that they didn’t know how to “smoke properly” and that smoking wasn’t ladylike in the first place. Bernays, who was also Freud’s nephew, consulted psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, the first major translator of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory into English.

Brill remarked that “More women now do the same work as men do. Many women bear no children; those who do bear have fewer children. Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become the torches of freedom.” So, of course, Bernays hired a group of women to light up their “torches of freedom”—that is, their Lucky Strike cigarettes—during the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929. The press fell all over it, and even feminist Ruth Hale encouraged women to join in the parade and “Fight another sex taboo!”

What did Bernays do, and why did it make history? He tapped into the zeitgeist—women’s liberation—and created a campaign that influenced cultural values and attitudes that were preventing his client from realizing its mission. Now, that mission happened to be smoking, and many would refer to Bernays’s alignment with women’s lib as more “exploitation” than “transformation.”

But, again, to merely critique the campaign on grounds of social equality would be to miss the fundamental point: people are moved by big ideas, big stories, big causes. And in our fear, or, perhaps more accurately, lack of awareness of the power of big ideas, we often reduce the context of our media campaigns to that of a slightly oversized pea. The truth is, people believe in causes like “making the world safe for democracy.” They’ll go to war for something like that.

Then question I pose to you, then, is: are you creating, as philosopher William James so beautifully put it, the “moral equivalent of war” for your cause, your brand, your client? Or are you simply distributing another press release?

For a site that normally bashes Mitt and praises Moyers, I wasn’t expecting to see an endorsement of my industry—partial as it was. After all, we’re those evil people who manipulate the masses for fun and profit, right?

Well, not when we create things that move people. Things that have depth, emotion, meaning, and purpose.

Or, as I like to call it—especially when I’m brainstorming early in the morning on two cups of coffee—depthvertising (and yes, I looked it up: it’s officially the most awkward word in history). But watch the video below by Nike and its storied agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and tell me you’re not inspired.

(Original)

Most brands would kill to get featured on a site as editorially choosy and progressive as Upworthy. Neither Nike nor Wieden+Kennedy paid for the placement. They just took an idea with purpose and captured it so powerfully that a normally advertising-cynical editor decided to, with tears in her eyes, publish their artistic fruits to the world.

That’s the power of depthvertising. Awkward word, powerful notion.

Have you ever heard of Marxism? Or Liberalism? How about Kantian Idealism?

What do they all have in common?

They’re memes, of course.

Huh?

“I thought memes were pictures of cute cats, or Twitter expressions like ‘#firstworldproblems,’ or Facebook photos like the gay Oreo cookie,” you say.

And you would be right—well, sort of.

Memes were first coined, as many of us of meme-trackers know, by Richard Dawkins, Chief Atheist of the Nonbeliever Society. He used the term to describe how, like genes, products of the mind, of society—things like ideas, beliefs, values, social conventions—pass down from person to person, generation to generation, invisibly, far below our conscious awareness.

And, so, mental entities in culture that became “mind viruses”—movie quotes, songs, celebrity gaffes—became known as “memes,” because they spread from mind to mind, without each individual necessarily knowing that they are creating a whole new cultural pattern that scales across an entire population—just like genes.

But looking only at each meme without lifting our sights up to examine broader sociocultural patterns is like that guy who quotes from The Big Lebowski but has never actually seen it: he can laugh at a line like, “Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude—at least it’s an ethos,” but he’ll never understand the full context of Walter’s idiosyncratic combination of sensitive intelligence and uncontrollable man-rage, or that he was actually delivering an erudite commentary on nihilism as, ironically, a tried-and-true, First-Amendment-obsessed patriot.

That’s the difference between micro-memes—single ideas—and meta­-memes—entire ways of seeing the world, humanity, and our place in the cosmos. Meta-memes are discernable collections of ideas that scale across populations and define the very basis of our shared values, beliefs, preferences, and attitudes.

The marketers, leaders, idealists, and big-picture thinkers who get the relationship between mico-memes and meta-memes—and can successfully execute media campaigns that fuse the two—are the ones who, in this blogger’s opinion, will win.

And that’s what Zeitgeist.is will be about: how to capture the cultural moment, or “spirit of the times” (the literal translation of “zeitgeist”), and associate your brand with what your constituents, consumers, and customers are really thinking—and care—about, in ways that are at once entertaining, profound, and abundant with purpose.

We’ll look at trending micro-memes and emerging meta-memes, the relationship between meaning and marketing, how media shapes the future of humanity, and whatever else may come across my contempladar (yes, that’s “contemplative” and “radar” combined, and, yes, it’s now officially a new word). I invite you to join the ride as we all surf the edge of the ever-moving target that is cultural change and evolution.