Jim Collins, in his book, Good to Great, talks about how great brands do one thousand little things well. With a look ahead to 2008, we thought we’d bestow some awards on a few practitioners of innovation, nearly all of whom understand the value of simple thoughts and insights.

The Douglas MacArthur “Beat ‘em Where They Ain’t” Award (with a nod to Sam Walton). MacArthur won the war in the Pacific by taking control of islands where the Japanese weren’t. Likewise, Sam Walton talked about not competing with him on what he did well, but rather on what he did not do well.

With these two concepts in mind, we salute both HEB and Supervalu for ceding to Wal-Mart what it does great and pursuing a vision of retail that is both a great experience and relevant to consumers. HEB’s new, high-end footprint, Central Market, eliminates anything that Wal-Mart would sell and focuses squarely on fresh, exciting, gourmet-style fare. Gone are the paper goods, cleaning supplies and the like.

Supervalu, with its “Fresh” initiative and innovative programs like the Wild Seafood Tour, brings theatre and great shopping experiences on a consistent basis, knowing that it is becoming a leader in what Wal-Mart will never do well — fresh foods and healthy lifestyles across the store.

The Peter Finch “I’m Mad as Hell and I‘m Not Going to Take it Anymore” Award. To General Motors and Johnson & Johnson — for having the brilliant insight that they should treat their media spend more like a stock portfolio than, well, like a media plan. The historic pullback in traditional media spend by GM and the demand for more accountability of the spend by J&J represents the front-end of a sea change that will occur over the next few years.

While there are some things to like about traditional media firms (they certainly have an infrastructure for research and do keep track of trends well enough), they are falling behind in the actual science of cause-and-effect of what moves brands and makes people buy.

These two great iconic American brands are asking the right questions and showing the courage to take appropriate action. Well done. The “We Do What We Say and Say What We Do” Award to Nike and Nintendo. Nike recently announced that sometime in the not-too-distant future, 80 percent of their media spend will be on experience-based initiatives. Nintendo believes, similarly, that more and more of what they do will mirror the products that they sell.

For both of these brands, it means that the communications they use will more and more be like what the products do — and how they fit into our lives.

Nike has steadily built a global infrastructure around running clubs where Nike advocates meet their ‘twins’ and participate in thousands of Nike events. The results are predictably robust — with loyalty and social diffusion creating a mega brand that “does what it says.”

For Nintendo, it is the kid in all of us — meaning that once you’ve tried the Wii you are hooked. That is something that calls for and requires the live experience, and Nintendo’s commitment to integrated marketing and live events has created that magical word-of-mouth that all brands would love to have.

The “This is Hard Work but Someone Has to Do It” Award. It is not easy preaching innovation from the outside in. Working with large companies that have appropriately large matrices of influence and authority is not for the impatient or the faint-of-heart.

This award goes to Naked, for showing how innovative outsiders can make a huge, evolutionary difference. Recently named by Johnson & Johnson as its communications planning partner, Naked has become the strategic glue and bridge between the media buyers, creative agencies and the brands themselves. More of this to come — but a great start and something that other brands will find useful.

Also to Carat for its feisty, smart alternatives. Similar to Naked, Carat is a solution-based communications group with enough of a twist to give marketers the courage to head in different directions. And, finally, to Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the folks who masquerade as an ad agency so they can get into pitches with ad agencies … so they can beat them with an integrated marketer’s approach that leaves ad agencies far behind.

The “Remember the Titans” Award. When I think about those thousand little things that make brands great, I think of Michael Bronner. His concept of service brands over twenty years ago — brands that looked at everything they did as a service, as a superlative experience, as an unceasing journey to get all the little things right — has now been baked into the culture of brand greatness.

And it is something that the agency he founded, and by extension, Digitas, has always aimed for and tried to achieve for its clients. David Kenney took Bronner’s concepts and evolved and made them even better.

The “Everyday is an Innovation Day and We Mean Business” Award goes to Google. It’s not enough that they changed the game forever with the simple, elegant insight that is search. And following on those heels there were contextual ads, offline ad placement, email integration, desktop tools, and on and on.

But perhaps the biggest thing that Google is planning is their announcement that they will take the lead on knitting together, through Open Source API’s (Application Programming Interfaces), more than 600 social networking sites, creating a defacto RSS for social networking so that users can pull together, in one interface, anyplace they like to hang out.

A simple and brilliant move. Simple because it is a natural progression from Yahoo!’s build-your-own portal, to the ubiquity of RSS itself to this. Brilliant, because in their relentlessness Google continues to defy us, in that we all wait for them to somehow trip up or misstep across any and all of the dozens of initiatives they are juggling. While many fear Google, we need to all acknowledge they deserve to be feared because it is their smarts that clearly keep them a step ahead.

And finally…what end-of-year awards column would be complete without the “King Midas in Reverse, Yogi Berra, ‘This is Déjà vu All Over Again’” Award: This one goes to Facebook. You know, there are still enough of us around who remember the DoubleClick acquisition of the Abacus database. It was pre-bubble, but it’s not like we’re talking about the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

So, when a youngster (you’re a youngster until you can shave and then you become a young adult … I recommend the Norelco electric shaver series when it is time to shave) like 23-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gets up and says he is going to change the face of marketing and advertising and then proceeds to tell us what DoubleClick said during the Abacus debacle (circa 1999), one had to laugh.

We all knew what the reaction would be — and it came hard and fast. Instead of saying: “Hey, we’re going to make all this data about you available to marketers — but we will share in the revenue stream with you — and create a philanthropic platform to solve world hunger,” young Mark gets up and turns himself into Gordon Geckko in one fell swoop.

Way to go, Marky-Mark! So here’s your award. I look forward to buying my next Norelco electric shaver from you — because obviously, once you start shaving you’ll love it so much you’ll buy the company (and probably a few dozen more).