At ICE, I produced a web-series we called i-Live. Every month staff would submit videos and we’d build a website to profile the lives of the people who worked at ICE. So far, I’ve found these. Note the video quality is low. Streaming web video 12 years ago was a new thing.

Starring Doug Keeley, Chris Tait and Chris Sasaki

Enter Simons.ca. La Maison Simons established in old Quebec City about 20 years ago and now has a bunch of stores all over Quebec. Simons is comparable to The Bay but more boutique than departement store with a focus on affordable euro-style for men, women and kids. When I lived in Quebec City, Simons was one of my regulars. In January, it’s one place I could always get a great cashmere sweater for under $100.

Simons.ca recently launched their new eCommerce store and asked me to provide some feedback on the shopping experience.

What I liked:

• Free shipping to anywhere in Canada – yes!
• Free returns
• Great products, good selection
• Convenient quick view of products with nice high resolution photography; close up views and in context product images
• Product information is in context including sizing chart, coulors and care instructions
• Easy check out
• Fast delivery

Opportunities for engagement with Simons fans:

1. The ability to add comments and share products across social networks should be table-stakes these days, but Simons has not included it
2. Simons is known for great markdowns; sale prices are translated to web but they’re not easy to spot – suggest make sale items more obvious
3. Integrating social commerce for both trending products and for allowing friends and family to go in on gifts would be a sweet addition to the experience
4. Saving products you like is not an option in the cart; I’d love to check out with some items and save the rest for another shopping visit – even get a notification when my saved cart products go on sale

Overall great job from online experience to quick delivery. Now, to all you Canadian retailers out there: who’s next?

Linda Bomhof, is a sporty person who’d going to Rome for the weekend. She got a Nike Plus strap. Pim is traveling to Washington DC for a technology conference; he got an app for his iPad. Ame de Bok is going to build houses in Mexico… The result 100,000,000 impressions on Twitter and 100+ videos on YouTube.

Innovation = (calculated) Risk. What do you think?

Follow my twitter stream of the event here.

The quality of the sessions was high, many were insightful and interesting. This year, because of the combined event, I spent a bit more time attending the TV sessions which expanded my thinking on storytelling and the cross-over from the narrative we know to the branding of the narrative that will be more and more transparent and pervasive. Given the medias’ pandemonium on the demise of TV, branded content seems to be the destiny of both the red and the blue pills.

A few sessions really stood out for me. An interview with Ricky Gervais – if you have the chance to see this man speak don’t miss it. Matt Mason‘s presentation on media and piracy was an excellent framing of the issues related to piracy. His book The Pirate’s Dilemma is a recommended read and a great continuation of what Lawrence Lessig started.

Faris Yakob: Stuff That Doesn’t Work Yet was a treat. His talk, albeit a bit silly at start, drew me in by the way he framed and articulated the gravitas (love using that word) of the media moment we’re in. Yakob lead me to Henry Jenkins, MIT Professor, media scholar.

Henry Jenkins is the author of several books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. His point of view of today in media is insightful. He says:

On participatory culture: A world governed by participatory culture has the potential to be much more diverse in a world controlled by a small number of media producers. As average people develop the ability to tell their stories, we’re seeing different perspectives emerge. We’re seeing different groups gain representation, we’re seeing groups challenge the dominant media images that have been constructed for their lives. And the challenge for those of us caring about social justice issues is to make sure that these tools get into the hands of those people who have been the most oppressed and most dispossessed to get their stories out and get their stories into circulation.  As we expand who has the power to tell stories, we have the potential to tell stories that grab our imagination, to touch our hearts, that come not from entertainment infrastructure but from some average citizen who’s reality has never been depicted on the screen before. And I think that’s the real excitement of our present moment of media change.

Explaining the concept of convergence media: Every story, every brand, every image, every relationship plays itself out across a maximum amount of media channels. The information system is converged, it’s integrated. We carry pieces of media with us all through the system. And that’s being shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. In other words it’s shaped by the integration of the media industry so the same company may own interest in all media platforms and it’s shaped by teenagers wanting the media where they want it, how they want it, in the form they want it, when they want it. And they’re willing to take it illegally if it’s not available to them legally. Those two pressures are working together to create a much more integrated media sector than we’ve seen before.

For more on Henry Jenkins, check out the video below.

Thanks to Mark Greenspan, Amy Davies and the entire team at nextMEDIA and Banff 2010 for a great conference!

The film was directed by the collective H5, comprised of Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain. It depicts events in a branded Los Angeles populated by some 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and anthropomorphic mascots. The story follows two Bibendum (Michelin tire guys) as cops who chase a terrorist, Ronald McDonald. The film ends with a zoom out from Earth to explore the branded universe.

The film is funny, witty and takes every liberty with the brands it portrays. Remarkably not a single advertiser asked to have their logo removed from the film. Could the brands have simply ignored this would-be marginal French short film that no one would see? Or, once it won the Oscar was it too late to litigate? What ever the answer, it doesn’t matter.

As a marketing and advertising professional, the film, to me, articulates a paradigm shift in brand marketing. Marketers can no longer protect how their brands are portrayed.

The 2,5000 brands in Logorama, by hook or by crook,  have no choice but to accept the customers’ commentary on the historical and emotion investment they’ve made in the brands they love and hate. In our create-it-yourself, social-media-mashup-pop universe, brand marketers are no longer in control of their brands. For good or bad the customer has appropriated the brands which permeate public space and will do with them what they please. Consumers no longer accept a top down branded message without the ability to directly comment and interact. Go forward and engage accordingly.

You can preview the short on Logorama’s website or buy it for $2 from iTunes.

Highlights include:

• You can’t control Social Media, but you can have access to your customers directly in a real time conversation.

• The days of marketers pushing out their message is over.

• Now your brand is the sum of conversations about it.

• As a brand you can have a significant influence, but your customers have a very significant voice of changing your brand.

The Canadian government said today, Friday December 11, 2009 that it has approved a request from Egyptian-backed telecom Globalive Wireless Management Corp. to launch its WIND Mobile phone service in Canada.

This past summer I was contracted to work with the Trapeze team in the strategy and implementation of the WIND Mobile website. After many long months working on the eCommerce, eCare, social commerce, product marketing, merchandising website and Sharpoint implementation – I’m very happy to see all our work is not lost. Props must go to the talented and determined team at Trapeze ! Expect to see a lot more from Trapeze in 2010 and look for the new WIND Mobile website in the next few weeks. For more info on the CRTC ruling see http://delicious.com/marinamann/mobile. For more info on Trapeze’s work check out this Design Edge article . I’ll do more of a case study once the website goes live.