But I’m curious if DirecTV really thinks they’ll be able to create a sustained viral social media campaign with the spots main character, Gregor the Oligarc—or if they’re just being half-hearted about it. So far, Gregor’s Twitter account has 7 followers, and he’s featured on a rather mediocre Facebook page. Not a promising start.

Maybe they could have Gregor give opulent shout-outs to his seven followers on YouTube…

In the immortal words of Roy Neary, “Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important.”

So my question is, what does it mean? How do you think an application like this will shape the future of media and how it’s consumed? Or will it at all?

One thing I know, it makes me want an iPad even more.

I have a confession to make. I was a big Trekker (Trekkie is the derogatory version outsiders use) when I was in High School. What can I say? I was 5′ 5″, 125 pounds, and had a face that looked like a pepperoni pizza. Being a sci-fi nerd was the hand I was dealt. My big show was Star Trek: The Next Generaion. Every week, my best bud, Landon, and I would get together to watch the latest episode. We even went to a Star Trek convention together (our excuse was we did it because Marina Sirtis was going to be there, and we had a mad crush on her).

Even a casual observer of the the show would know that the worst enemy ever to populate the Star Trek universe is the Borg. The Borg were a highly advanced, seemingly unstoppable race of cyborgs dead set on assimilating all organic life into the Borg collective cyborg conscious. Horrible, right?

Apparently not so much. When I was in High School, I didn’t have an email, cell phone, Internet connection, or even a computer. It was only 15 years ago (give or take). The Borg seemed like a horrible fate. But times have changed. And surprisingly, the melding of humans and technology is used to promote products. It’s become a benefit to have your electronic devices become appendage-like, and many of us can’t remember a life without them.

There are a couple ads I’ve seen recently that intrigued me because they ask the consumer to imagine a live where technology is becomes a part of humanity—in one case literally. I wonder if this is a fad, or if we’re really prepared to embrace a future where technology becomes part of our DNA. The philosophical implications of that are for another blog. For now, check out the commercials below, one for Droid and one for HP.

[Photo by Dunechaser]

Here are some of the other ads in the campaign.

I like these spots for Commonwealth Bank found over at adFreak.com. I appreciate how they tout their services while not taking themselves too seriously. I especially love the whimsy of the grants ad. It reminds me sightly of what a bank ad would look like if Wes Anderson made one. Or I could just watch the American Express ad he did…

This morning I saw this ad over at adsoftheworld.com, and I was delighted. If you’ve read my posts here, you know I love ads that speak volumes with minimal words—or no words at all. This ad does it perfectly. Being a “night owl” myself, I connected with it instantly.

Then I read the comments.

Seems this ad was a pretty deliberate rip-off of a threadless.com shirt.

Needless to say, the piece is starting to get flamed pretty badly in the comments section as scores of designers call out the agency, JWT Mumbai, India. And the fact that the agency is from India is interesting because post-Internet, an agency in India stealing a t-shirt idea from the US would probably go unnoticed. But now it’s becoming increasingly harder to get away with plagiarism.

But at the same time, in today’s Internet “share this” culture, the lines between plagiarism and sharing becomes increasingly blurred—or intentionally ignored. On one hand, companies and individuals want their work to spread virally across millions of blogs and social networks. On the other hand, millions of people mistake this shared work as the original creation of the person sharing—especially when no attribution is given or it’s hidden in small print. It’s a double edged sword of exposure and anonymity.

The proliferation of plagiarism on the Internet has resulted in a handful of systems and software that troll the web for stolen ideas and work. But as Michael Schrage writes for the Harvard Business Blog, “Plagiarize Your Way to Productivity and Profit“, organizations may want to rethink using these systems and software as a means to crack down on plagiarism. Maybe we should be rethinking attribution:

There’s another spin that can be put on the software and systems for plagiarism detection and intellectual property protection. Right now, the dominant effort is to deter, or catch, a thief. I think smart organizations — organizations that care about information sharing, knowledge management, and creative collaboration — should see all this as infrastructure for creating new cultures of attribution. These technologies should be more than high-tech tools to track cheaters; they should be mechanisms for showing how organizations share ideas.

If you’re Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, IBM, or McKinsey, you’ve got millions of documents, PowerPoints, presentations, speeches, and spreadsheets swirling through your enterprise. If you’re Siemens, Merck, Sony, or Toyota, you want your best people to be aware of the ideas and intellectual property they’re creating throughout the firm. Instead of using Turnitin/iThenticate systems to identify plagiarists, you want to use it to see where the expressions of ideas and insights overlap and intersect. Even if people are borrowing PowerPoint slides or promotional paragraphs as part of their patent applications or sales pitches, you want them to know — and you want the firm’s leadership to know — what’s being borrowed and what expressions are being diffused inside the organization and out.

In other words, technologies like this can dissolve once-meaningful distinctions between “plagiarism” and “attribution” because they create transparency about the creation and distribution of ideas. Automating the attribution process gives more people greater confidence that they won’t be “ripped off” by potentially “credit- grabbing” colleagues. Conversely, good/great organizational “artists” can feel more confident “borrowing/stealing” from colleagues and counterparts because they know they’ll be “caught.”

The beauty of systems like this is their win/win potential. Creative people can get credit and attribution; people who use the creative expression of others to enhance a product or a service, or close a deal, also get acknowledged. The organization has turned “plagiarism” from a furtive crime into a transparent engine of attributed productivity.

It’s true that in the post-print society we’re moving beyond the don’t reproduce without written permission clauses. But plagiarism is still a huge problem because at its heart, plagiarism most often is the attempt to profit from another person’s work by passing it off as your own—not a means of highlighting someone else’s work because you appreciate it.

In a world where we blur the lines between plagiarism and sharing by rethinking attribution, do we really solve the problem—or do we just let the plagiarists win?

In their latest slideshow they give some more startling statistics about Social Media Usage—and the unparalleled growth in its usage.

For all the data, my favorite part is the simple reminder of the Rules of Social Media:

#1 – Listen
#2 – Engage
#3 – Be Real
#4 – Be Respectful
#5 – Have Fun

Not sure who made the rules. But I like them. Enjoy the show.

Basically Old Spice is schooling you and every company on how to really use social media. As James Archer, owner of Forty Agency, said on Twitter: “[Old Spice] has my brand allegiance forever.” I’m sure he’s not the only one who feels this way. It’s not often a major corporation interacts with their customers in such a surprising and personal way. That’s the power of social media. Show you’re listening. Interact. It’s not a soapbox no matter how much you want it to be.

While I personally didn’t get a thank you video, some strange things are afoot. Last week I posted the new single-shot commercial by Old Spice, and mentioned that the campaign “made me want to smell like my dad and grow a kick-ass mustache.” One week later, Old Spice came out with this spot featuring…a mustache. Stalkers. I’ll look forward to my thank you video for the mustache idea.

Here are some of my favorite thank you spots, including a fulfilled request to propose to a guy’s girlfriend for him.

These print ads for TVN do that pitch perfectly.