The world has changed.

It is late on a quiet Saturday night in January. The strange torrential rains have gone from LA like a bad case of the flu and a light breeze blows in from the patio. Another night in paradise.

I am sitting at my desk in front of my computer when the familiar ring of the Yahoo instant messenger tells me my youngest daughter is checking in. I know it is my daughter because I downloaded the Yahoo program so I could stay in touch with her during her travels and she is the only person on the “Buddy List.”

But tonight there is something different: a video screen appears over the text messaging box and asks me if I want to receive a video from her.

I am confused. Karen is in the northern most region of the Chinese mainland. She is just South of Siberia and dead East of Northern Mongolia.  This is a child who makes Indiana Jones look like a choir boy. A couple of years ago, at 19, she left la la land to live in a Shao lin Buddhist monastery to train in Kung fu with the incredible Shao lin “body protection” monks.

This is a picture of her doing a hands-free horizontal cartwheel.  No, it’s not trick photography.  There are no strings.

After a year with the Shao lin monks and she came home for a few weeks and said that the monks were great, but they really didn’t permit enough sparring.  And so she returned to the Orient.  This time she went to the steaming jungles of Northern Thailand and trained in Muay Thai (Thai Kick boxing, the most brutal of the martial arts.)

My wife is apoplectic.  My daughter now has the confront of a Bengal tiger.

After a year of Mauy Thai she decides she wants to attend the Beijing University of Language and Culture.  she starts teaching herself Chinese ( as there is in no English spoken there) and then enrolls. At the semester break (after finals she is number one in the entire freshman class – sorry, I am shameless) she decides to take a 12 hour train trip north from Beijing to Harbin, the aforementioned city a little south of the vast frozen tundra of Eastern Russia.

They have an annual ice festival there that attracts ice sculptors from all over.  They build enormous ice castles, huge Oriental ice dragons and towering statues.  It’s like the Rose Parade but all made of ice and snow.

I click to accept the incoming video image with some uncertainty. But there she is, in an Internet café in what has to be one of the coldest, most remote places on the planet.  And I’m getting live video of her happy as a clam in a parka and earmuffs.

Like I said, the world has changed.

It is not an original thought to say that the Internet has changed our lives forever.  In fact it is almost trite. Even so, I think we are often so immersed in our day to day lives that we don’t step back and look at the fact that we are living in the most dynamic period of man’s very existence.  Sorry, nothing else compares.

The emergence of the World Wide Web and the digital universe in general is comparable to the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel. And I would not argue with anyone who said it was an even more profound development.

We are not going to debate the philosophical aspects of this phenomenon here – whether the Internet is the electronic window to man’s ultimate ability to physically communicate, or a blind march to Mordor, which will one day enslave the culture in an Orwellian cyber prison of zeros and ones. (The answer to which lies in the ethics of who is in control of the switch.)

For now it is enough to say that the impact of the Internet on the life and culture of planet earth is nothing short of mind-boggling. Fatherly pride notwithstanding, the introductory story is a simple case in point. Personal communication roars around the planet like a zillion electronic fire flies, now in live video from the frozen expanse of  Northern China.  Meanwhile banking, commerce and even politics are so rapidly and slavishly adapting the internet that business will soon be meaningless without it.

And what drives business, he asks rhetorically?

Marketing.

Yet as Internet marketing soares – with 40 million e-commerce transactions a month, and home-based broadband penetration approaching 50%, 2005 will see an estimated $10.5 billion in online advertising – top Internet advertising strategists wistfully editorialize wondering, “…what good online advertising looks like…”

Which brings me to the point of this newsletter: communications strategies — marketing, advertising, public relations — Internet or otherwise, should be built around a position.  The position should be represented by design and graphics as well as through the ad copy.

One need go no further than the luxury watch market for a mini case study.

Surely you have seen the advertising wars of the high-end watch market interspersed between the specious ads for the latest billion-dollar molecule from Big Pharma.  The luxury watch market generates $3 billion a year in revenues to the aristocratic Swiss-based manufacturers of these magnificent timepieces.

Prices start at $2000, and move up from there.  The competition is fierce, yet astonishingly; many of these manufacturers entirely omit positioning from their media campaigns.

The latest issue of Fortune carries full or double-page ads for seven different luxury watch brands.  Many of these ads have full-page four-color pictures of the watch and nothing else.  Some of the pictures are stunning.  But when you go from one to the next, to the next, it simply becomes a matter of taste.  This is true of Cartier, Tiffany, and Raymond Weil.  There is no positioning here at all.  And virtually no text either.  One presumes that these brands feel that their beauty is all that’s needed.

Perhaps.  But when several other brands are doing the same thing, it amounts to no positioning at all.  And this is dangerous indeed in a marketing environment in which consumers are barraged with 3000 messages a day.

Some brands position their watches with movie celebrities or sports figures.  Omega carries a two page ad in a magazine with a picture of the Spanish golfer, Sergio Garcia on one page and a picture of an Omega watch on the other. The text? It says, “Sergio Garcia,”  on one side of the watch.  The word “Choices”  appears on the other side of the watch.

Eh… I don’t get it.  If the message is Sergio Garcia chooses to wear an Omega, why in the world show him in a picture watchless?

Monte Blanc’s ad has a picture of Johnny Depp with a Monte Blanc pen and watch. The brand confusion problem aside ( Monte  Blanc means fine writing instrument – it does not mean fine watch), this positioning strategy is typical of several other luxury watch brands.  It is not very original, but it is hard to argue with the instant communication that a top celebrity brings to a product.

TAG Heuer  is the reigning king of the celebrity watch endorser.  Their current campaign carries ads featuring the likes of Tiger Woods, Uma Thurman and Brad Pitt wearing a TAG Heuer watch.

Well okay.  These are some of the planet’s seriously beautiful people, and if you are going to position your product with celebrities, these are some of the best.  Nike is the king of this strategy.  But then Nike has world-class athletes endorsing athletic shoes.

Nevertheless, these people are instantly recognizable (note the TAG Heuer ads do not have to spell out the person’s name in the ad copy. You swing a mean stick Sergio, but your face isn’t a worldwide brand outside the clubhouse yet).  And that at least gets the brand communicated and positioned at a glance (a requirement of good positioning).

But even here, there is a bit of “me too”. Whose watch do you go for, Brad Pitt’s or Johnny Depp’s?  Did you prefer Finding Neverland or Troy?

The most unique and inspiring positioning from our perspective was that of Breguet.  It is a double-page ad. On one full page is a picture of a classic timepiece.  On the other, a beautiful picture of a very old stone bridge built over a glassy smooth river surrounded by verdant green trees and bushes.  Across the river in good-sized white typeface is a quote.  The reader is instantly drawn to the quote – “He drew out the most delicious thin watch that Breguet had ever made.  Fancy, it is eleven o’clock.  I was up early.” Honore’ de Balzac “Eugenie Grandet”, 1833

The quote is from the famous French author, Balzac in 1833.  There is an instant positioning of this brand with European tradition and culture.

I am curious and drawn to their website.  The positioning here is immediate and embracing.  Here is a company with a history so steeped in the tradition and culture of Europe that buying one of their watches is like buying a small piece of history.  Their clients include Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Tallyrand, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, Queen Victoria, Churchill, Arthur Rubinstein, and…

There are stories on the site about how some of their clients first came to own a Breguet and references to their fine timepieces in literature over two centuries.  This is not a positioning that is likely to appeal to Gen X or Y. But then Gens X and Y are not usually coughing up thousands for a wristwatch (prices for some brands of luxury watches can run into six figures).

No.  Here is a unique place in the mind.  Here is a brand that carries a position that the very affluent, and yes, conservative, luxury watch buyer can enjoy with the pride of ownership that embraces the very fabric of European history.

You don’t have to think twice about who this company is, what they do or what they stand for.  Most importantly, for the purposes of our discussion, someone created the ad in Fortune who knows positioning and how to communicate it.

We say Bravo.

But if you are not a company with a 230-year-old tradition and clients the light of Churchill, Marie Antoinette, and the Tsars of Russia you might want to call us.  We can help you create a position for your product or service that will cut through the noise and communicate to your public like a 21st century laser.