When we’re taking a breaks from the salt mines of naming, we often cruise the latest posts on Vimeo - an international repository of short clips by animators and videographers ( http://vimeo.com/ ).

The interesting thing about Vimeo is that much of the best visual imagination springs from places our clients never consider for creative sourcing.

If you’re in tv production, Vimeo is already in your bookmarks file.  As a marketer, it may not be.

If you’re charged with promoting cars or electronics on tv or internet, have a look at Pipe Plant, ( http://vimeo.com/29841219 ), a 3-minute clip by Russian videographer Sasha Aleksandrov that could radically alter how you see what your viewers see.

When most adults see a teenager with earbuds in her ears, we assume she’s bopping to a band with a name like Pink War Machine or Artichoke Not Be.

A chance conversation with a high school counselor offered a different view.  Students turn out to be regular listeners to literary audiobooks, particularly “secondary writings of authors they encounter in English lit. classes.”

After a midterm book report on Moby Dick, a kid might download Typee from the iTunes Store.  After The Great Gatsby, maybe Tender Is The Night. Not for class credit, just for entertainment or enlightenment.

Why doesn’t she buy or borrow a print copy or an e-book?  Because she has to sit to read, but she can listen on-the-go.  Other than pale, pudgy videogame addicts, American teens run, walk, ride and otherwise move around a lot.

The gender of our subject noun of isn’t arbitrary.  Our counselor friend sees iPod literature is mostly “a girl thing” in high school, but believes it becomes more gender-balanced in college.

Is there a useful marketing insight somewhere in this?  We think so.

In our experience, more than a few advertising and marketing people see the teen audience as brain-dead zombies who require a loud noise and flash of light to get them to notice the dancing acne medicine package on the screen.  If you watch a reel of teen-focused ads, this “Hey dummy!” tone often comes through.  We think a lot of the kids are smart enough to be offended.  Smarter than the marketers perhaps…

The weekly trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology puts out an annual “double issue” in July focused on the future of aviation and space industries.

This year’s article on the future of civil aviation includes the observation: “A hundred million people spend more time in the virtual world than in the real world.”

A hundred million? That’s better than one out of 70 of the 6.8 billion humans on the planet at the end of 2010.  Deduct the 4.3 billion too young, old, poor, or rural for internet access and that 100 million who spent more waking hours in virtual space than temporal space comprises one out of every 25 people in the planet: World Internet Access.

Not just any one out of 25. These netizens reside in wealthier nations and tend to be better educated than the national average.  In other words, these teens to thirty-somethings are many of the managers, technologists, educators and bureaucrats of today and the next few years.

AvWeek’s article discusses the future of air travelers.  Netizens who are comfortable viewing each other, chatting, and reviewing documents online are far less likely to travel from New York to Jakarta for a business meeting.  The tipping point at which Business Class slides beneath the waves is already in sight.  The future is EasyJet (leisure travel) rather than Air France.

It affects more than travel patterns. Living in the virtual world revolutionizes consumer behavior.  The same week Borders went bankrupt, Amazon announced 50% quarterly profit growth.

We can’t find any quotable stats, but in wired markets like Europe, North America, Australia, and Europe we’d bet that the majority of this year’s new businesses will be internet ventures.

What does all this mean for marketers?  Those of us who don’t radically alter what we sell and how we sell it are looking at a tipping point of our own.

Condos being built In North American cities today average about 600 square feet.  In some places, the average new-build unit is closer 500 square feet.  Few industry analysts expect this trend to reverse in the foreseeable future.

What’s going on (and how does it affect marketers)?

Young couples are crowding into cities. The young are mobile, and suburban housing tracts have become unattractive dead zones.  Competition for urban digs has raised the price of a square foot of condo.  But it’s more than price.  They simply don’t need the space.

Bookshelves? Magazine racks?  Replaced by an e-book reader.

CD/DVD storage?  Digital files live in a laptop, pad, smart phone, or “the cloud”.

Television?  That flat screen is just a moving picture on the wall. With network tv circling the drain of irrelevance and cable tv looking as tired as wired phone service ten years ago, the tv set as a dedicated appliance will probably disappear altogether.

Clothes?  With the demise of specialized office attire, closets can be smaller.

Foodstuffs? Cooking from scratch has been zapped by microwaves and take-home meals, so food storage and kitchen appliance needs shrink.

Downstairs from that 600 square foot condo you’ll find a garage with one parking space for every two or three or four units.  This dramatic reversal of the traditional one-space-per unit standard marks the confluence of zoning strategies to diminish urban traffic congestion; reduced utility of personal vehicles in cities where businesses don’t provide parking; and a perception among young people that a owning a car is ecologically immoral and fiscally irrational.   Public transport and internet-mediated car-share services will do just fine, thank you.

It’s obvious why residential downsizing matters.  With less room for “stuff”, it’ll be harder to sell stuff.

Clearly a boon to the planet, but maybe not so good for annual bonuses.

The videogames most packaged-goods marketing execs grew up were first-person shooters (you gun down enemy warriors, giant rats, evil ogres) like Wolfenstein, Doom, Marathon, and Duke Nukem.

In the 1990’s, the graphics of these games seemed great. But they feel like kindergarten sketches compared to the eye-saturating imagery of current action games like Crysis, Metro 2033, Mass Effect and Just Cause. Why does this matter?  Because (as we all remember) hours and hours of staring at a game screen affects what the non-game world looks like.

New food, beverage and personal products packages concocted for the teens and twenty-somethings of today look great to product managers and test well enough against existing products.  But we suspect that they seem pretty flat to the young consumers they’re aimed at.

What would win a “gnar” from the lips of a shredder? Visual intensity and complexity beyond anything on the shelf (or in the store) would probably work.

Need inspiration? This image from noor khan trucks might jack up your design director:

We all learned in kindergarten that “it’s good to share”.

Converging ecological, economic and social motives underlie “collaborative consumption” – a term Rachel Botsman coined in What’s Mine Is Yours for a new trend with seismic implications for marketers of many goods and some services.

Consumers of all ages are using the internet to share cars (whipcar.com); sports gear and power tools (snapgoods.com); dressy clothes (swishing.com); parking spaces (parkatmyhouse.com) and even a place to crash for a few days (couchsurfing.com).

In the 1/31/11 issue of The New Yorker Patricia Marx’s The Borrowers describes a mixture of bricks-and-mortar and internet businesses offering short-term use and/or passing-on of everything from designer handbags to children’s toys.

Because in most cases the sharer is paid a fee by the user, business gurus write all of this off as a way to turn your inventory possessions into pocket money. As Bill Clinton put it, “it’s the economy, stupid!”

But to us it looks like more than that.

Consumer sharing has the flavor of a rejection of the reckless consumption of the past 3 decades.  Not only do sharers feel smart for renting a weekend’s camping gear for $20 rather than buying same for $200 – or earning $20 tax-free bucks out of that tent, pack and sleeping bag in the garage – they feel good about conserving the planet’s resources their transactions.

Consumer sharing also has the scent of an emerging social media category.  Making a friend online is easier when you have something in common.  Being willing to share, posting offers online, and the experiences you have in sharing are fodder for online socialization.

Craigslist.com is the father of reuse and sharing (maybe ebay.com is the grandfather); its booming progeny may well change the dynamics of manufacturing and marketing.

As The Doors put it, been down so long it looks like up to me captures the current mood of consumers (and marketers) mired in recession.

But it’s not all gloom and doom.  Besides reducing the cost of a house for first-time homebuyers, a recession shakes geriatric calcification out of the joints of commerce.  Old companies and old brands bite the dust, making room (office space, factory space, shelf space) for young companies with new ideas.

Japan’s been mired in recession since a liquidity induced real-estate bubble (sound familiar?) imploded in the 80′s.  One result is that young people – denied the traditional salaryman’s path from university to corporation to retirement when companies stopped hiring – have launched wave after wave of fresh new ventures.

The streets of Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka glitter with inventive new restaurants, stores and services created by a generation of college graduates who, absent the recession, would today be bored middle-management bureaucrats.

A similar phenomenon marked America’s Great Depression.  In 1933, for example, entrepreneurs founded small ventures that grew into Ashley Furniture Stores, E&J Gallo Winery, North American Van Lines, Rockwell Collins, Rubbermaid, Ryder System, and Waldenbooks. Waldenbooks was a typical recession idea, started by George Hoyt as a low-cost rental library in Bridgeport CT.

Which brings us to giant frogs.  The back pages of Depression-era pulp magazines were crammed with “business opportunities for entrepreneurs” like:

The internet is today’s pulp magazine.  We haven’t googled “Giant Frog”, but…