Wow. Tough to say you really care about user privacy when you’re handing really private data over to advertisers. As an advertiser? I don’t even want this kind of information.

The Journal found that Facebook went farther than most in sharing identifiable data, by sending the username of the person clicking the ad as well as the username of the profile they were viewing at the time. This news could hardly come at a worse time for Facebook, a company that currently faces a privacy backlash potent enough to make the cover of Time Magazine this month.

This is a message from the immediate future for small to medium-sized businesses, too. Big companies are recognizing the power of their own sites and the agility they have in creating content they control, and they’re spending money accordingly. The same can be true for smaller players.

“Technology is enabling companies to communicate in ever more sophisticated ways directly with their customers, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer ways for users to multiply the effect of corporate messages.

Chuck Richard, lead analyst at information advisory and research firm Outsell, says companies now spend more than half their online marketing budgets on their own sites. ‘It’s been 50 percent or more for the last three years,’ he says.”

Thus the heart of the matter: The ads are not intended to sell Windows: They’re ads to sell The Windows Brand. Think of it as The Soul of Windows. If, by the end of this campaign, we only think of Microsoft as the company with the weird ads, then Microsoft will have saved Windows’ soul.

Well said.

Wonder what the strategy is there?

One of my favorite podcasts is WebbAlert, a technology news show hosted by Morgan Webb, highlighting daily tech news and social media memes. It’s daily, no more than about six minutes per episode, and Webb does a good job of covering the geek news I need with a ripe sarcasm I crave.

For the last few weeks, WebbAlert has had a compelling new sponsor: DeVry University. It’s a perfect match — while I know very little about the place, I know they have technical and gaming programs that fit the market of the show. But more important than that, it shows that the adult education industry is dipping its toes into some more progressive waters.

Don’t get me wrong here: this is not an issue of conservative advertising values. It’s an issue of ignorance. The new education marketplace that so many laud as leading a new era of access is not so daring when it comes to ad space. They count even more than many sectors on consistent and dramatic lead flow.

With podcast popularity apparently growing as fast as it is, likely precipitated by the ongoing WGA strike and the dearth of traditional media that results, more and more people are turning to the net for their entertainment and their news. It shows a cool savvy that some lucky DeVry marketing manager pushed this initiative through.

Slightly related, I got an email from a good friend who just started working for DeVry:

Started at Devry this week, feels like foreign lands. When I asked when my matrix starts I was told “Take your time, learn the culture here…we don’t want to shove you out there before you “get it”.” I thought they were screwing with me.

If you’ve ever seen the enrollment rooms at Phoenix, you know just how funny that is.

My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar bills for Christmas and brought it over for dinner a few weeks back. We were both schooled handily when we tried to make a Klingon Bird of Prey out of a greenback.

Today we stumbled on this feature in the Apple.com Science section, promoting the creative things you can do with a Mac. Robert Lang uses traditional materials — and his giant 30″ Cinema Display — to make some of the most incredible origami I’ve ever seen.It serves to remind me of two things. First, I’m really lousy at making small folds. I can serviceably fold letters into envelopes. I can fold cardboard into piles for recycling. And the extent of my ability to fold money ends at folding it in half, into my wallet. But what Lang can do with paper is the rough equivalent of folding space.He uses Mathematica to get it all done. He builds simulations that extrapolate the folds and show him how the finished piece will look based on the sim. And he does these things commercially.

Lang can design and fold some projects in an hour. More complicated patterns take months. “When I have a commercial job, of course,” he adds, “I work on it until the schedule says I have to deliver. I can guarantee that I can produce something in a couple of days that’s going to meet the needs and expectations of the client.”

This story gets to the heart of my mission as a storyteller: that people are motivated to buy through images evocative of use and success thanks to it. And Apple has built on this concept magnificently over the last five years, using the website to deliver some of the most compelling use tales in mass marketing computer marketing. What most companies deliver in the unapproachable white paper, Apple delivers through a sound investment in corporate media.What stories can your products and services tell?

I joined and was handed the contract. We’d spend a boatload with this agency specing out this contract that no one in the department really knew what to do with, so they passed it off to the only guy who had any skin in the game.

I had a huge problem with the arrangement, and I have the same problem now that it’s evolved and reared it’s head from Microsoft and Cisco. Valleywag has a good summary. Here’s a snitch:

Break

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

The evolution is fairly obvious — in this case, these lassoed bloggers are shilling, and making it clear that they’re shilling, for an advertiser. On the surface, that should be the end of the discussion if you hang your hat on the “Truth in Advertising” mantra. Nick Chase tries to paint this issue with spit and polish in the Valleywag comment thread.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Duh.

Then why do I still have such a problem with this mess? In my own situation, I tried to make this work. The first proposed change was to use our own stable of bloggers — current students of Axia college who might happen to have had blogs at the time. We couldn’t find enough of them, and the ones we did find couldn’t blog for beans.

Then we thought about having the agency stable of bloggers go back to school with Axia to legitimize their shill. Of course, they wanted to be paid hourly for their time in school, their time studying, their time writing papers, their time thinking about school, and so on.

As you can imagine, the whole pitch was suddenly loosing its luster. I cancelled the program.

I cancelled it because the methods did not meet the objectives of the program. The pitch was all about creating a discussion with our prospective students. But no matter how you spin it, there’s no way to create a legitimate, authentic discussion when that discussion starts from the voices of those who are not students, are not experienced, are not authentic.

Commenter Filament nails it far more eloquently than I ever did:

This is only “conversational” in the sense that a chat with Tony Snow about Bush’s record is a conversation: only technically. What you’re doing is creating the false appearance of conversation to make money.

This whole mess smacks of a key learning that so many companies are failing to learn. Companies formerly accustomed to building relationships through the brute force of advertising dollars don’t know how to translate their wares into anything more transparent than tin foil. You can’t blame Microsoft for giving it a shot. They’re not architected to know any better.

It’s harder, as with all things, to do it right. It’s harder to actually build an army of flag-waving maniacs sreaming from the rooftops about your organization. Leaders have to shake the trees, clear out old-media thinking and build the army the right way, from the beginning. Otherwise, you’re building a Potemkin Village, and your conversation is nothing more than vapor.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.