Advertising giant George Lois (inventor of “The Big Idea”) always spoke about the power of images in ads. For what it’s worth, I certainly agree – image stop us in our tracks, imprint idelibly on our minds (concious and subconcious?), and leave us with lasting impressions that may even transcend the brand itself. Advertisers hate that last part, of course.

During the process of creating a new print ad for Rainier, I began to ask myself: What image best conveys our brand promise of merging technology expertise and PR excellence? The image we eventually chose for our final ad looks like a brain slice from a CT scan, where the brain topology looks like circuit traces overlayed with a few integrated circuit chips.

Cool image, in my opinion, and pretty evocative of our brand statement.

BUT, is it too limited in scope? Does it fail to convey our expertise across a wide variety of technologies and markets? Or does it pigeonhole our image in the electronics/semiconductor space?

Then last night, I was reading Sports Illustrated (whose baseball postseason coverage sadly did not include the Red Sox…), and came across a two-page spread ad from Toyota. The message the ad was trying to convey was that Toyota is an innovator, and the main image was the word INNOVATION spelled out in circuit board font.

I wondered how much money Toyota had spent developing and focus grouping the ad. At any rate, Toyota chose to represent “innovation” with circuits, despite the fact that Toyota is certainly not in the electronics business.

So what, if anything, is the best image strategy for evoking a brand association with broadbased innovation and technology? Is it the circuit board? Highly overused images like astronauts? A lightbulb? Albert Einstein? A Van de Graf generator? Puzzle pieces? Fiber optic lightpipes?

I welcome your comments and ideas around this topic.

Lost in the media swirl around Sigma Designs’ acquisition of home networking chipmaker (and Rainier client) Coppergate is the exciting news that last week the ITU-T approved the key Physical Layer and architecture components of the G.hn home networking specification. The holy grail of home networking, a unified standard that drives broadband content over “everywire,” is now one step closer to becoming a commercial reality.

With the ITU-T approval, the G.hn standard is now deemed stable enough to allow silicon manufacturers like Coppergate to move forward with their development programs and bring products to market.

The approval marks another step in the steady adoption of G.hn and reaffirms a longstanding desire to unite a fragmented industry which currently uses a variety of incompatible technologies that typically address only single types of household wiring options – coax, phone line, or power line.

Having played in the home networking silicon market since the 1990s when we launched Enikia, and having worked with HomePLUG, as well, we’ve had a front row seat to a decade of wrangling over home networking standards. I’m as excited as the next guy (well, as the next guy who cares about such things) to see G.hn coming closer to fruition.

Imagine when connectivity and content routing inside our homes becomes as easy as electricity is today.

I’m one of those computer-savvy geeks who’s absolutely awful about backing things up. But I think I’ve finally seen something that will change those bad habits. We launched Vembu Home today, and I think it’s a really usable backup application.

Clearly there’s no shortage of on-line backup solutions on the market, but our assessment is that Vembu has done a great job taking things to a new level. This isn’t just a blatant endorsement of a Rainier client – I’ve downloaded the product and am using it (to try it, go to Vembu Home and enter the limited invitation code: BACKMEUPSCOTTY).

Both in terms of flexibility and the user interface (it’s the first backup application built using the Adobe Air+Flex platform) Vembu’s come up with a good solution, in my opinion.

First of all, this is the first and only unified backup product, meaning you can backup locally or to the Amazon (web services) Cloud, or to both, from one user interface. Second, the user interface is gorgeous. Finally, the product is based on Vembu’s company’s StoreGrid technology, which already runs on something like 100,000 enterprise computers worldwide.

Basically Vembu Home is enterprise grade stuff repackaged and priced for home users who never back their stuff up. Until now.

Mary Tripsas from the Harvard Business School writes that “Humans instinctively sort and classify things. It’s how we make sense of a complex world.”

She rightly points out that when technology companies develop innovative products and services that don’t obviously fit into established categories, “managers need to help people understand what comparison to make.” Without this step, the marketing job of storytelling, we’re often left wondering, “What is it?”

We are often confronted with this paradox with our startup clients whose innovations don’t exactly fit into existing product/market boxes, or in categories covered by industry analysts. Sure, we’re all dying to be in a Gartner Magic Quadrant, but what if such categorizations aren’t able to reflect the disruptive qualities of some technologies?

These are the kind of strategic discussions that can make or break the launch of a new technology. And this is where the marketing part of the innovation equation comes into play. Is it an innovation or just an invention? Good storytelling, through good public relations, can be the crucial factor.

Read Mary Tripsas’ article in the New York Times.