This is the question posed by Digital Family Reunion (DFR). jungle [8] has taken on the task of bringing the molecular level into a unified visual field. It began with Creative Director Lainie Liberti giving the visual interpretation of what a tech holiday party would want to stir in the consciousness of its attendees.

You will not find images of dreaded Christmas sweaters from grandma nor will this party leave you cringing from the onslaught of lackluster, forced, and drunken conversations about office politics and gossip. The goal of DFR is to synthesize 1.0 + 2.0 and create a platform for collaboration, discussion, and innovation for our communities, while of course, having a great time in the company of like-minded individuals.

One look at the website and invite for DFR and you will know this is not your typical holiday party. As with all things jungle [8] takes on, causes run the gamut of our affections. We aim to unite, to create, to empower, and leave in our wake a trail of limitless possibility.

On a cellular lever, we are molecular energy working in brilliant formation. The visual depiction created by jungle [8] for DFR is a flow of energy created by the visible light spectrum. Each of us vibrates on different energy levels, and we merge to create a community reflective of our unified energy. Out of this energy field, bursts of solar power emanate indicative of our social selves, active, powerful and radiant.

The task of translating this image into a live installation rests on the design concept of jungle [8]’s graphic designer Tuan Vutran. With creative genius beginning a steady knock on the door of perception, the installation takes on an earthy form. A week from today, at 8:15 PM, DFR will begin a yearly tradition known as the Business Card Installation Ritual.

Tuan is piecing together the Business Card Installation one Styrofoam ball at a time. Like planets, connected through clear, plastic umbilical cordlike tubes, reflecting prisms of rainbow light, the balls will appear to take flight with wings made from 2000 business cards from the original dot commers. The molecular representation symbolizes all of our talents fusing to herald a new year, a year of collaboration, change, and interconnectedness.

All in attendance for DFR will be asked to add their business cards to the Card Installation and become immortalized in a tangible reflection of our ever changing molecular bonds.

Be sure to see: Magnifying Connections: creating an installation, episode 1

from Patrick Davis Partners, the six priorities for the post-agency market:

1. Find your voice.
2. Engage with the semantic marketplace.
3. Return to humanist marketing.
4. Live the renaissance.
5. Champion social agenda marketing.
6. Build brand integrity.

And if I were to add a seventh priority, it would be to simply cultivate each of the previous six.  Finding, engaging, returning, living, championing, and building are wonderful starting points, ideas to help shift a brand in the right direction, but without cultivation, care, attention, and sustainability ideas can and will die.  So, hold true to the future of a more honest, more conscious, more open environment for us all.  Cultivate that ideal.  We can make it prosper.

Barack Obama has changed the entire scope of not only how an election is run, but who is running the election.  Barack Obama is contemporarily one of, if not the most recognizable brand worldwide and has one of the most fervent followings domestically.  Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, “[The Obama Campaign] made sure the message machine was providing the message where people were already assembled. They’ve turned themselves into a media organization.”  And Brand: Obama, as a media giant and community, is extensive and pervasive.  So, what of the community if, say, Obama is elected President?  Can the President have such a community of followers?  Will he? Will his face continue to be emblazened on t-shirts, hats, sweaters, sneakers, dish towels, contact lenses?  In a word: no.

The Commander and Chief is, by necessity, a secretive and walled-off position.  And after an election, especially an election of such length and venom, all parties concerned are bound to have a much-required drop-off.  But Brand: Obama is most likely going to see its demise come November 4th IF Obama is the victor.  However, much like Al Gore in 2000, with a loss (please! don’t let it be a loss) Brand: Obama could be leveraged to an even greater extent in the interest of worldwide change.  Sadly, such a large community, in my opinion, can only see growth if the reason for the community in the first place fails.  Bizarre.

This is where the newly launched website Causecast.org steps in. Causecast is an educated, savvy idealist’s playground. Imagine Myspace, YouTube, and CNN with a splash of celebrity advocacy. Causecast is a cause based social networking website committed to providing video feeds, world and local news, and the pairing of 30 non-profit organizations with you. Time to meet your world conscious community.

Creating a profile on Causecast is very similar to Myspace or Facebook, complete with pictures, quotes, and friends. The most important difference being that if you are watching a celebrity on Causecast, it is because they are involved with a social movement ranging from clean water to financial literacy.

The first person to greet you is Jenny McCarthy and this time she’s not introducing videos on MTV. She is talking to us about finding out her son was diagnosed with autism in 2005 and beginning her research into finding out not only about the condition itself, but ways to go about regressing it. What she found was Generation Rescue, one of the many organizations on Causecast.org. Generation Rescue is an international movement of scientists, physicians and parent-volunteers researching the causes and treatments for autism and mentoring thousands of families in recovering their children from autism.

There are 30 organizations to reach out to every humanistic endeavor. Join Global Angeles to offer children around the world a way out of poverty and into schools. Learn how the Diamond Empowerment Fund is raising money for education for children where diamonds are being exported from Africa. Watch the telling documentaries of the lives of refugees and displaced people as presented by the I Live Here Foundation.

Should time not permit for hands on volunteer work, Causecast will take your loose change because “change is in your pocket”. It’s that simple sometimes, right at your fingertips rests the ability to change the world one dollar, one person, and one charity at a time. There is an option to donate anywhere from $5 to $500 or more to your favorite charity. No excuses anymore for your good deed of the day, week, or year having gone undone.

Help and change gather momentum through repetition and a supportive community. Choose the organizations that speak to you, and you in turn will be heard on a world wide level through your posts, you videos, your pictures, but most importantly, through the simple act of becoming involved.

The tribal life style is “hard-wired” into our evolutionary mindset.  That’s how we survived, procreated, and defended ourselves against bigger, badder, and more lethal predators.  It’s all about numbers and safety.  As the comedy crack team over at, well, Cracked put it, “The more stress we feel, the more we feel love and attachment to those who look and sound the same as us, and the more we feel hatred to those who don’t.“  We become more and more insular when threatened by greater and greater amounts of unfamiliarity.  Then, that meant physical defense and survival, now, well, it’s more about the preservation of ourselves and the mental — you know, with our bigger brains and all.

So, with this pre-wired, predetermined drive to compile ourselves into the familiar and the safe, what better industry is there to take advantage of us than those in advertising.  It’s us versus them, where them is anything that disagrees with us.  Whether it’s politics or platform shoes, the arrangement of ourselves by safety is an important and all together easy strategy.  This, fellow tribe-mates, is the essential, founding ingredient in brand loyalty.  Whether it’s the Mac versus PC hullabaloo, and no matter what tribe you happen to be a part of, you’ve been nurtured by your allegiance and taught to hate the enemy.  Sure, the “I’m a Mac” ads are innocent enough, but they’re meant to make those who watch them associate the PC with everything you’re supposed to find unappealing.  Even if we are, we never want to think of ourselves as stuffy, unyeidling, and static.  We’re all hip, cool, on the bleeding edge.  I’m a Mac!  From the flip side, the new “I’m a PC” stereotype ad is meant to fortify that you there, you using the PC, aren’t a stereotype!  We’re all different, see!  We do cool things, too!  Mac, you fool, you’re just being a bratty snark.  See?  It doesn’t matter which side you’re on, the goal of each brand is to do exactly what they’re accusing the other guy of doing — remain static.  It’s just that they want you, tribesman, to remain static with us and continue to garner hatred for them.

The tribe mentality is pervasive.  And it’s lasting because, honestly, it works.  It works for sports teams and their fans.  Video game consoles.  Sneakers.  Fish sticks.  Movie theatres.  Politics.  Oh, politics.  Attack ads this election season are rolled each commercial break because they present us with information that, inevitably, will push us into further alliance with our party of choice.  They make us feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and no matter our personal morals or how wrong we may feel individually about the negative process our tribe mentality couldn’t care any less.  We humans didn’t raise to the level of being able to single-handedly destroy an entire planet by not surviving and adapting.  And we sure didn’t survive based on our scrawny bodies alone.  Strength in familiarity.  Strength in numbers.  And the fear of being ostracized from that very group of strength.

Every company is pandering to their consumers through their brand.  That’s just common sense.  But what power we consumers lack as an individual in a tribe, we must make up for as that individual synthesizing one’s own information.  When does that happen?  Hardly ever.  So, it looks like it’ll be us versus them for a while longer.  Evolution is a hefty animal to shake loose!

Not sure if you’ve heard, but, well — we’ve got quite the tumult crashing through our economy at the moment.  It’s already ravaged Lehman Brothers, Bank of America has purchased Merrill Lynch, and AIG has been bailed out by (whom else!) us!  Oh, you didn’t know?  You there, American citizen, own a bit of AIG Insurance now.  Lucky us.  It only cost the federal government $85 billion — chump change.  But did it calm the ailing market?  No.  No it didn’t.  And if the Fed can wrangle up $85 billion and it barely makes a dent, well, what hope do we have?  Let’s just say we are holding on to our money with a lot more constraint.  Sadly, though, some important issues are being forgotten.  The sustainability of our planet through the help of “going green” is one of those issues.

Although the importance of environmental protection has not completely left the market, it certainly has dwindled as of late.  When presented with the choice to buy green products versus the often less expensive, but less environmentally friendly alternative, most are beginning to choose the latter.  What hasn’t stopped, though, is the public outcry for the greening of businesses and their products.  Although we don’t want to help the process by paying for the greening — we still want it to be green, damnit.  It’s like condemning the fatal outbreaks of malaria in Africa, but refusing to send over a few mosquito nets.  Just.. doesn’t.. make.. sense!

Or does it?  Let’s take a look at this from a psychological and anthropological point of view.  First, to define what “going green” truly is, at its core.  Right now, at this very moment, going green is a luxury.  Buying organic, buying environmentally sound products, owning a hybrid, powering your non-hybrid vehicle with vegetable oil, outfitting your home with photovoltaic panels — it isn’t necessary in the sense of stringent and absolute survival.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs displays a visual pyramid of the different steps and stages of survival.  At the bottom, denoting the most important, are those needs that are absolutely essential.  Breathing, food, water, sleep, we need those.  Up a level is our personal security, shelter, security of health and resources.  Still further is love and belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization.  Well, where would “going green” fit on this continuum?  It is certainly not physiological.  It might be argued that it’s safety, but with the strictest of definitions, it isn’t.  Love and belonging? In the global sense, perhaps, but probably not.  I would place “going green” in the esteem category, doing something in order to garner a sense of respect for one’s self, others, and better one’s self.  Four levels removed from absolute survival, three from safety.  Psychologically, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to be worrying about our esteem when our financial security, our personal safety, is being threatened.

Anthropologically, the greatest acheivements have always occurred during periods with the least unrest.  The golden ages of society can be seen in ancient Greece’s own golden age, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment.  These eras were cultivators of art, literature, philosophy, architecture, and science.  Why?  Because when you are well fed, your thirst is quenched, your job and finances are steady, a roof hangs over your head and a bed underneath your body, you are well respected and proud of yourself, there isn’t a whole lot else to do but give back.  Create.  Develop.  The current economic downturn is simply preventing this type of enlightenment.  And luxuries, no matter how important or selfless, fall victim to the deep rooted instincts of survival.  Going green simply doesn’t make sense right now.  Anthropologically speaking, that is.

So, I guess not going green right now does make sense.  But it sure isn’t stopping the fervor with which we want to witness change, no matter how little we actually participate.  That, too, is just human nature.  As much as we will deny responsibility when faced with it in a large, unaccountable group, we will also be the first to accept praise as part of that large group — no matter how little we actually had to do with the success.  Why else would so many people go to root on their favorite baseball, football, soccer, basketball, hockey team?  Why do the Olympic Games capture our hearts and minds every four years?  Each one allows us to assimilate ourselves into a group and triumpth with them.

So, even if we’re not individually going green right now, should all of our ecological ailments be solved tomorrow, you better bet that we’ll all be there toting the line of success shouting proudly that it was us that made it happen.  Typical humans.

How much are you willing to pay for bottled water? How’s $480 for a case of Limited Edition Crimson Red sound? Much in the same way that celebs like Mary-Kate Olsen helped turn a Starbucks coffee cup into a must-have accessory, luxury bottled water has become something of a status symbol, with many individuals paying quite a lot more than your typical $1.50 for bottled water. Think of the stereotypical “bling” that rappers wear around their necks, or the association of Escalades with the rich and famous: the jewelery and cars are less about the product, per se, than the image that these individuals are buying along with it. And for some, that image of luxury and the I’ll-pay-this-much-for-water-just-because-I-can messaging can come at a hefty price: at $20 per bottle, the aptly named Bling H20 (a luxury brand of bottled water endemic to the celebrity scene) wins the prize for “world’s most expensive bottled water.” Its website plays up the image of extravagance and class, with on-site reviews hailing the products as “sipping pure prestige.”

Side-rant: you gotta give Bling H20′s for feeble their attempts at green marketing. Check out their $40 Go Green edition. Anyone want to take guesses as to geographic location of Bling H20′s headquarters? I’ll give you three guesses, but I’m pretty sure you’re only going to need one: Dandridge, Tennessee. Really, the fact that the United States of the Self-Absorbed is home to such a colossal symbol of self-indulgence in the face of world poverty and hunger shouldn’t come as a surprise. We are, after all, a country that touts professional socialite Paris Hilton as newsworthy, a country that cares more about Britney than bombs: can it be any plainer why the rest of the world hates us???

The real solution? Good, old-fashioned, all-American tap! Sure, you might forfeit the sleek packaging, but the price is sweet: at an average $.001 per one-day’s supply of water (about 100x the cost of bottled water), I’d take tap over unnecessary wastefulness and gratuitous indulgence any day.

Invest in a water purification filter and take the money you would have spent on bottled water and spend it on a worthier cause than your own image. We’re all about personal branding but really – this is excessive!

And for those of just have this inexplicable, inexorable need to purchase overly priced bottled water, here’s a cause worthy of spending $20/bottle: Charity Water. 100% of the proceeds go towards funding freshwater construction projects in Ethiopia, Uganda, Central African Republic and Malawi. One case will provide enough clean water for 24 people for 15 years. So go there and purchase $480 cases of water to your heart’s content!

Corporate America and the nonprofit community are merging Together for the greater good – and what cause could be more worthy than combating climate change?

Together is the most progressive effort yet by businesses to directly link their environmental campaigns to the products and services they put out. The site pairs ideas on how to fight climate change with products by brands like Dell, Target, and Timberland (to name a few). One tip encourages consumers to use reusable shopping bags over disposable plastic bags alongside a picture of a trendy-looking, brightly colored shopping tote from Target – and even helpfully provides a link to Target’s online shopping site.

And while it’s easy to dismiss these efforts as just another PR campaign to drum up sales, maybe a glass-half-full mentality would be more appropriate here. Running a business is always going to be about the bottom line, to a certain extent, but if Together is any indication, corporate sustainability is here to stay – and not just as good PR. Companies are looking to think seriously about how sustainability fits into their long-term profits. Particularly now, in the context of an economic recession, these types of efforts are promising when cutting back on the “unnecessary” to save money is usually the self-preservationist tactic of businesses facing economic turmoil. And yet as Dinah McLeod argues, “Running your business in a sustainable way can be a key driver when it comes to attaining goals – not just when times are tough, but actually because they are tough.”

This new enlightened perspective on sustainability is in line with a recent Eye For Transport report showing that the “corporate mindset around environmental initiatives is changing, and the need to invest in innovative products and new technologies is growing.” Maybe they’re starting to realize that part of that bottom line is making sure companies even have consumers to pitch sales to in 50 years (business might be a bit slow-going when half the globe is underwater from melted glaciers). And they’re starting to realize this isn’t something that individuals or NGOs can do alone.

What’s one to do in the fight against the Big Bad Corporation? According to Carrotmob, the answer is not in more boycotts, petitions, or even legislation, but rather to create incentives (“carrots” – get it?) for corporations to be more eco-friendly. And that’s by hitting ‘em where it hurts – right in the pocket.

According to their site, “Carrotmob organizes consumers to make purchases that give financial rewards to those companies who agree to make environmentally friendly choices.” So how does it work? Step 1: Carrotmob identifies an “opportunity for improving corporate behavior” (from a harmful chemical commonly used by soap companies to an energy-wasteful means of production); Step 2. Carrotmob approaches several competing companies (all of whom are guilty of committing an environmental no-no) with a proposal: in a “bidding war” for the support of Carrotmob consumers ensues, Carrotmob will award its stamp of eco-friendly consumer approval to the company most willing to go that extra mile in making environmentally-sustainable business choices. Step 3: Carrotmob encourages its networks to purchase products/services from the winning company.

In a nutshell, Carrotmob makes it in the company’s best interest to not merely be just environmentally responsible for PR reasons, but because doing so is the most profitable course of action: the company that wins the Carrotmob seal of approval wins the support of its network and the consumer power it represents. Corporations who do not currently practice sustainability face the threat of declining profits as Carrotmob consumers eschew the guilty corporation’s products/services in favor of the more environmentally-friendly choice. Sounds good theoretically, but Carrotmob’s impact will only be as great as the size of the network it creates: the more people who jump on board, the greater its consumer clout/influence. Only then will its support have a very real impact on market sales – and therefore, a real impact on corporate business practices. Check out their website and get involved in a Carrotmob campaign near you!

Spent a moment today exploring my bookmarks, when I stumbled upon this article from from FrogDesign, published last October. The article is called Change Agency and Transformologies
Understanding the power of design to facilitate positive change in the end-user. That title sums it up nicely. Really, isn’t marketing, advertising simply visual communication, a way of transmitting a message through visual clues? Marketers want to sell things and branders want to create a relationship, but in essence, it’s about communicating an ideas.

The “change agency” perspective of design adapts the idea that messages should be aspirational, products should have a positive effect, scare tactics pushed aside. From the article :

Personal transformation occurs through an alteration of thought and behavior. But facilitating change that endures beyond the moment of direct user-product interaction requires some knowledge of human motivation – in order to effect ongoing change in a user’s actions, we must also shape her values and beliefs. The rational model of persuasion can be a useful framework for understanding how design might assert its influence in the fulfillment of users’ aspirations.

The article defines a simple method of understanding beliefs and motivations:

Beliefs
(What I understand as fact. What I know.)
+

Values/Motives
(What I judge as good/bad. What I want. My self interest.)
=
Attitudes
(What I like and dislike.)

Behavior
(What I do. How I do it. What I say. How I say it.)

The article offers advice to designers by following these basic principles:
1. Shift focus, focus on the positive
2. Take baby steps towards the users positive transformation
3. Connect with your audience’s alter-ego by focusing on what they are capable of achieving
4. Don’t objectify!! (THIS IS A GREAT ONE!!)
5. Create community support around transformation
6. Prepare for obstacles and make moving through them OK
7. Send in the experts!

The article acknowledges that these strategies are easily adapted for brands whose goal is to improve health and fitness. Those brands have the intrinsic connection to transformation and can presume a level of personal aspiration. However, these same “principles of change” can be applied and adapted to any other marketing or branding challenge.

Great article! I urge you to read it, bookmark it, and apply it!