How is that for a headline? It is a quote from mega new media/tech publisher and conference guru, Tim O’Reilly during a one-on-one interview he did with Jason Calacanis on Friday at this year’s SXSW conference.  O’Reilly told the story of how the government/military GPS program was made public during Reagan’s presidency paving the way for today’s location-based maps and corresponding applications.

I’m a longtime veteran of SXSW Music, but only a sophomore at SXSW Interactive.  This year’s SXSWi was incredible with attendance surging between 15,000 – 20,000 attendees.  A collection of techies, brands, nerds, hipsters, and foodies came together to learn, meet, eat, and drink.

This year’s standout technology was group messaging with GroupMe and Beluga leading the charge. The idea here is that you invite a small group of friends to follow and interact with you, thus avoiding all the clutter and keeping tabs on just the specific people you are most interested in hearing from.  That said, plenty of people were using last year’s darlings Foursquare and year before favorite Twitter to communicate where they were and what they were doing.

Celebrities were abound with sightings of Ashton Kutcher, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Pee Wee Herman stopping by parties, panels, and the IFC Crossroads House for interviews.

Also standing out were some significant brand activations.  Chevy was cutting into the local cab business by providing attendees with free rides in their Volts and other new cars, AT&T supplied much-needed phone recharge centers, and Pepsi had the largest party zone featuring Foursquare-sponsored four square tournaments and plenty of free PepsiMax.

Panels were spread out amongst numerous venues and standouts were AT&T’s head of social media Chris Baccus explaining the complexities of handling customer complaints via Facebook and Twitter, R/GA’s top brass advising on how to avoid your brand becoming obsolete and Wieden+Kennedy presenting the Old Spice case study to a packed room that left hundreds turned away at the door.

While the dense crowds at the Driskill and Four Season hotels made business meetings a challenge, there was still a lot of networking getting done.  Despite the occasional feeling of claustrophobia and exhaustion, SXSW continues to be the most informative and fun conference of the year.

Pepsi, FedEx and GM have all pulled out from Super Bowl commercials this year, while brands like Doritos hope to repeat the success of their Crash the Super Bowl campaign.  At the 2010 Winter Olympics, Visa, one of the event’s largest sponsors for more than twenty years, is expanding their advertising to a multi-platform strategy with a heavy digital focus.  Sony Ericsson, the official mobile sponsor of the 2010 World Cup, has forgone all traditional advertising in favor of a fan-centric approach that reaches out through online channels.  If 2009 was the year that big companies began embracing social media, then 2010 looks like the year that they will be getting engaged in social matrimony.

As the official soft drink of the NFL, Pepsi made a drastic and progressive decision to forgo all Super Bowl television commercials in favor of their $20 million Pepsi Refresh Project digital advertising campaign.  After voting on the site goes live on February 1, the project will give grant money to the winners with the best ideas to “refresh” their community.  This marks the first time a major NFL sponsor will not be airing commercials during the Super Bowl.  Even in a deflated market, 30-second Super Bowl spots are selling for $2.5 million to $2.7 million, making the reach and measurability of digital word-of-mouth strategies that much more appealing.

Just days after the Super Bowl winner is crowned, the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will commence.  This year, major sponsors like Visa have developed campaigns that encompass a variety of digital channels.  They will be utilizing microsites to showcase interviews and personal stories of athletes, along with downloadable athlete widgets and posts on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

From a news media perspective, Web 2.0 and social tools have allowed nearly anyone to become a “reporter.”  For that reason, the IOC has created a rule that only accredited media members may act as journalists with rights to publish audio and moving pictures from the games.  There will apparently be a few exceptions to this rule though as the Vancouver Organizing Committee launched a competition for area students to become a reporter during the games.  Using social media tools like videos, web invites, blog posts and photo journals, the winning students will be filing stories, conducting interviews and hosting an interactive website with other participants from around the globe.  The project, called Students Live, can be followed on Twitter @studentslive.

Sony Ericsson, the official mobile sponsor of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, has followed the suit of Pepsi, Visa and others by going completely with an online approach to customer engagement.  As a truly global event, the audience of the World Cup is hard to target by geographic region and television broadcasts don’t draw the same amount of viewers as the Super Bowl and Olympics.  This is where social media and online channels step in, providing Sony Ericsson with the ability to engage customers and generate conversations that penetrate national and social borders.  Sony Ericsson has already launched a Twitter-based competition between fans of each participating country, a ticket giveaway promotion and a World Cup branded search engine termed the Worldcupopedia.

Adoption of new marketing strategies will always lag years behind the technology itself, but the recent moves by Pepsi, Visa, Sony Ericsson and others indicate that companies are adapting to the changing landscape in full force.  These shifts in advertising budget are merely the precursors to an entire paradigm shift that will continue to see more large companies incorporating word of mouth strategies and social media as a genuine part of their marketing mix.

I’ve been really impressed by the marketing efforts behind the rebranding of Pepsi. The recently released ads for Pepsi’s “Wordplay” campaign really caught my attention; the campaign uses the new Pepsi logo to spell out positive and cheerful words, most notable among them “HOPE” playing to generation Obama and “CAN” — a more clever attempt at the same.

Both in the spot above and the more recent campaign spot aired during the Super Bowl, Pepsi directs viewers to RefreshEverything.com. The site is Pepsi’s hub for all that’s refreshing about now – the brand, the administration, the country. Anyone can watch new videos from Pepsi and share them with friends. You can even upload your own video documenting what you would say to our new President “the man who is about to refresh America?”

The entire initiative conveys such a positive feeling. Not surprisingly, it goes hand in hand with the new presidency and administration and the current buzz that surrounds them.  Pepsi’s recallable hook “Generation Next” seems to be taking a brief pit-stop to celebrate with “Generation Now”