One of my favourite airports in the world is Charles De Gaulle in Paris. Its sweeping concrete lines and internal transport tubes seem to promise an optimistic super sleek future that even decades later, never seemed to quite materialise. Certainly, I’m sure the original designers of the airport would have sooner conceived of space faring jets docking by 2011, rather than having to herd flocks of discount airlines and their attendant rabble of dollar diving tourists. I’m not saying that the future is more likely to be easyJet than than Jetset - but what is interesting is how our perceptions of the ‘futuristic’ are really an embodiment of our hopes and fears about the present. You could almost argue that there is an archaelogy of the future just waiting to be explored.

Some time ago I came across a wonderful clip of Orson Welles narrating a documentary based on Alvin Toffler. From its psychedelic opening titles, to its melodramatic opening featuring Welles walking down an airport terminal smoking a cigar - it seeks to astonish with an array of now mundane statistics of rapid change. Of course, it is easy to laugh at yesterday’s future visions, but I wonder how well turgid web virals like ‘Did You Know?’ will hold up to scrutiny in ten years time?

Predicting the future is hard enough. But even more tricky is finding ways to talk about it. Futurists have to walk the precarious line between highlighting the forces that will genuinely change the word, and the ones that sound like they will. Imagine being a futurist fifty years ago and identifying penicillin, refrigeration and shipping containers as the three forces that would underpin modern civilisation. Neither very sexy nor a great theme for selling books - and even if you turned out to be right, no one would remember it. I’d argue that we still revere theorists like Marshall Mcluhan today, not because he accurately predicted the future - but because, like Andy Warhol - he managed to combine stylish self promotion with enough ambiguity, that even years later - we can adapt his slogans to whatever point we are trying to make. Future Schlock indeed.

One of the best exhibitions I have seen in a while was ‘L’Art De L’Automobile’ - a selection of stunning vehicles from the Ralph Lauren car collection in Paris. You will see the cars of your dreams - and I mean that literally. These are not the original cars as they rolled off their production lines. You may see a historic sports car, but from its unique colour, upgraded upholstery, and bespoke ornamentation - means that it was much built by Bugatti as finished by Ralph Lauren. The purists are enraged at the motoring sacrilege, but I was rather delighted. It reminded me of the wonderful ways that we imbue technology with design and materials that are emblematic of its underlying attributes. A car should look fast even when its standing still, it should look expensive even when we don’t know the price tag, and a sports car should look like a race car even when its built for fat, rich old men. And what is true for cars, is especially true for gadgets. 

Technological objects are by nature fetishistic. iPad, Blackberries, Android tablets - our devices in the modern age are our drowsing sticks, totems, and ritual wands. They make us feel more powerful, because they look powerful. I asked someone once in Turkey why people who couldn’t afford expensive smart phones spent months of salary on the latest branded device. In Ottoman times, my friend replied, when men met each other they would show each other the size of their knife or gun. And, he said with a wry smile - what else is a phone today but your weapon?

If I have learnt one thing from studying innovation in emerging markets it is that constraint is the mother of invention. When you are short of energy, money or resources - you are often forced to find solutions that are smarter, cheaper and more flexible. But there is another, darker example of constraint led innovation - tobacco marketing. As you can see from this photo I shot at the airport duty free the other day, Davidoff were more than a little inspired by Moleskine in their latest packaging design. Time for more regulation - the non-smokers and air puritans among you cry! But is there any point? The real issue in controlling Big Tobacco in the future will be not stamping out innovation but dealing with what consumers are already doing on their behalf. Social media is a minefield for tobacco regulators.

So far, the big brands have exercised caution about lighting up on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But in a sense, they haven’t needed to do anything. Search YouTube for references to Marlboro and you will find thousands of videos - none of them created by the brand themselves. Clips from movies, old Marlboro Man TV ads, and bizarrely enough - smoker fan videos. Equally disconcerting - growing membership numbers on consumer generated fan pages and forums. All of this demonstrates one simple fact - in a network connected world - marketing is less about what brands say to consumers, and more about what consumers say about brands to each other. In the future, banning cigarette marketing will prove increasingly futile. Already in many countries, packet warnings seem tepid, and at times, even counterproductive. In Istanbul I saw one packet with a picture of a beautiful woman and an empty baby stroller. The label helpfully proclaimed that smoking makes it harder to get your girlfriend pregnant. The ambiguity of that statement is fairly self evident!

So here’s the issue - you can try and stop Big Tobacco advertising, regulate their packaging and even force them to display their brands as generic texts - but the damage is done. The iconic metaphors of smoking - The Marlboro Man, Joe Camel and the millions of scenes in movies old and new - have taken on a life of their own. Like the artist Richard Prince’s re-photographs of smoking cowboy advertisements - our commercial unconscious is already full of the ghosts of prohibited brand icons roaming free in the landscapes of our mind. And can you really hope to ban consumers talking about the brands they love?

One of the biggest challenges for luxury brands is how they preserve their aura of exclusivity in the digital domain. If you walk around a high end shopping district, you will see the investment luxury brands make in their retail experience. The luxury boutique is not where you go to buy, it is where reverent consumers pay homage to the brands they idolise. But how do you replicate that quasi religious experience when that same customer goes online and Google serves up pages of fake products, poorly merchandised wholesalers, and amateur review forums?

Two things have happened in the last few years that indicate a shift in the way that luxury brands view the Web. The first is that many major brands have taken back control over the distribution and presentation of their products online. They have restricted online wholesaling and treated their own websites as a kind of master boutique designed to educate and extend the in-store experience. Secondly, some of the major luxury groups have started to purchase or establish their own retail platforms. Case in point is Richemont’s acquisition last year of fashion innovator Net-A-Porter.

Watch carefully what happens next with luxury online. For many brands, and especially those in the prestige space - content and storytelling is a crucial component of the way that the luxury brand mythology is created and sustained. Transmedia is an ideal vehicle for this - and also for careful brand cross fertilisation. For example, if you venture onto the newly designed IWC website, you will note a new collaboration with the men’s department of Net-A-Porter, Mr Porter. Entitled the ‘Portofino Watch Lover’s Look’ - the section is a clever integration between style advice, product merchandising and brand storytelling. And naturally - both companies are owned by Richemont. They say you can tell a man by his shoes - so what should a man’s watch say about his clothes?

I had fun this week playing with the GQ’s UK edition iPad app. With its slick interface, rich additional materials and engaging content - it was not only superior to its US counterpart, but also one of the better iPad magazines I’ve seen. That said, something was still missing. And, as is often the case - it was missing from my mind. One of the most interesting theories on mental states is ‘flow’ - proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. The theory is deceptively simple - during certain activities it is possible to be so happily immersed in your task that you reach a point when action and awareness seem to merge. Musicians, racing car drivers and Buddhist monks have all experienced it. And normally, while reading the print edition of GQ in a cool cafe with a strong expresso - I can also get pretty close. But alas, not so much on my iPad. Somewhere in all that exploring, poking, rotating, and sliding of screen elements - while admirably interactive - the experience of media flow is disrupted.

Please don’t take this as a simple preference of analogue versus digital mediums. I can lose myself in a Kindle book, or while typing in a flow orientated interface like the IA Writer. The problem is more subtle. Years ago, when the first CD-ROMs made multimedia sexy, we envisioned a day when all of our entertainment content would become non-linear, multi-path adventures. It didn’t take long to discover that there is a reason that the likes of Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott are famous directors - they do a better job of selecting scenes and narrative options than the average Joe. Interactivity, quite simply, can get in the way of a good story. Or, it would seem, also a little glossy magazine gratification.