back in Jan of last year I wrote a post outlining five thoughts on viral marketing – which essentially were: what’s the motivation to pass on, is it easy to view and pass on, does it have contemporary relevance and can it be measured? the last of these is now infinitely easier with the announcement of YouTube’s new analytics tool – YouTube Insight.
whilst it’s good to know where in the world people are watching my holiday video, it will no doubt prove more useful in giving ammunition to the arsenals of agencies like Cake, who are responsible for distributing the above piece for Pot Noodle. made by AKQA, it’s a spoof of Guinness’ Tipping Point. and Honda’s Cog for that matter. or actually the Orange ad with those colours …or, come to think of it, a whole tranche of ads that have pretty much been developed on a similar theme ever since Cog’s effort.
what this viral relies on is it’s ability to pop a shot at these more glossy peers. from it’s windy start, thru electric wheelchairs and wheely bins, to a blow up doll and eventually the Pot itself, the piece relies on the ability to remix what is now a very much established theme. it’s creative remix at it’s best. it also voices the suggestion by some of us in the industry who are thinking maybe enough of th Cog-cloning now thanks…
what separates this from Guinness’ original effort is, fundamentally, what a brand wants to get away with… brands are eagerly able to rush in wherever the BACC fear to tread. but it’s also a reflection of money. it’s the level of available investment that determines whether a client adopts Pot Noodle’s viral model or the more investment-intensive broadcast model.
at lower budgets virals frankly are the only option, but it’s not quite that simple… let’s say the above cost £40k to make and – thru free seeding and non-paid for promotion – generates 1 million views. assuming that distribution costs nil, thats a cpt on views of £40.
compare that to a standard TV campaign that will cost – say – £300k to make and generate for the sake of argument an overall cpt (prod and media) for a 16-34 audience of around £20; twice as cost efficient as a viral. but twice as cost effective?! very possibly not…
the viral model is not only pulled rather than pushed content, but benefits from being recommended rather than broadcast to an individual. and when you consider that the above Tipping Pot viral clip has – according to Cake – been on 400 websites, three
national newspapers and on the Sky News viral round up, it’s not surprising that it’s considered to be a success.
ultimately though, each of the above models – whatever the numbers – both fundamentally rely on creativity… on the ability to capture and engage an audience with an idea. doing that gives a brand the luxury of choice in it’s media model. it’s perhaps to all of our detriment that too many brands – through a lack of creativity with their communications – depend only on broadcast communications for their efforts. applying the test of the viral distribution model to more ads would be a sterner test than anything the BACC could throw at them.
back in January I posted on JJ Abrams idea of Mystery Boxes; that the intentional withholding of information is much more engaging than giving someone the whole story… that sometimes mystery is more important than
knowledge. I suggested that in comunications planning we’re too obsessed with giving consumers
information and resolution… instead we need to more often give them some questions, some
intrigue.
I was reminded of this thinking recently when I caught the above ad for Visa. it opens with a big fat mystery box; a panicked guy running naked thru a desert. how come he’s there? why’s he naked? where’s he running to? lots of questions… which in short mean you keep on watching the ad.
it’s a great ad, but it could have been a lot braver with it’s media… why did they have to give the whole thing away in 30 seconds? they could have top and tailed it – extending the mystery box across the ad break or even across a whole TV show. and if they’d been really brave, they could have teased the ad for a week without showing the resolution.
by resolving the mystery box so soon, Visa have missed out on sparking a multitude of conversations, roughly around the theme of "why’s man running naked thru the desert with nothing but a Visa card?"
a great ad which missed out on being a brilliant piece of
communication because it played to the conventions of a TV spot… conventions are there for a reason, but sometimes they’re there to be broken…
Mediation is on tour in Australasia for a few weeks. whilst on it’s first stop in Hong Kong it noticed this little poster for Calvin Klein’s Steel range. towering above the island’s Central district, the building wrap dwarfs many of the surrounding buildings and can be seen not only from much of the island but also from Kowloon across the harbour.
it’s typical of the predominance of outdoor in the territory… from the biggest billboards to the depths of the underground, posters in a multitude of shapes and forms are everywhere. in Mediation’s native UK, shopfronts tell the story of what’s available inside – but in the visual arms race of Hong Kong you need to shout a lot louder, and higher.
this prevalence of outdoor tells us much about media consumption in the area… for a massively dense and highly mobile population it’s no doubt a very effective medium.
but it also tells us much about the cultural differences between Hong Kong and the UK. big building wraps like the above have occasionally been available in London – County Hall and Trafalgar Square’s Nelson’s column come to mind – but it’s difficult to imagine a 50ft crotch being put on display; the applications in London were as much about the suitability of a brand to the city’s culture and community as much as about how much a brand was prepared to pay for the space. commercially is simply not as big a factor as sensitivity to conservative public tastes.
the above building wrap would cause a public outcry in London. not so in Hong Kong… where the bustling life of the city continues seemingly oblivious to the Calvin Klein model towering above them. in the city’s outdoor arms race, the stakes have been raised. I’m not entirely sure how much further they could go…
…courtesy of M&Ms. this is quite old now but I just came across it today whilst browsing a post by Jason Oke who writes on the Leo Burnett Toronto blog.
so you’re M&Ms and you want people to know and remember that you have a new product in the form of Dark Chocolate. you could invest in an ad that communicates this and deploy thru relevant and effective media, or
…you could get consumers to find out and then re-enforce (multiple times over) the association for themselves via an online game where you have to find 50 hidden movies – all of which have a ‘dark’ theme.
this is stand out for two reasons. one, only the buffest of movie buffs will know all the answers, so you’re compelled to pass it on and try to work out the answers amongst your mates. it’s very sociably-networkable. which is good.
secondly this little piece stands out for the sheer elegant simplicity with which it has been put together. using flash you navigate your way around the image, zooming in and out as you go. and once you’ve spotted and noted a movie it blacks out, allowing you to focus on the remaining movies you haven’t got yet. infuriatingly addictive and of course very easy to pass on to others to inflict the same brand association building on them.
it’s in the second episode of ‘Alias’ that JJ Abrams first penned a reference to a random drink called Slusho. the mention – which was to be followed later by cameo in Heroes – was the first of a sustained, ingenious and elaborate viral campaign to promote his next project, the movie Cloverfield.
in doing so, Abrams created more hype than could ever have been generated by broadcast comms. but the approach has been more specific than that… at no point was everything held together in one place… to make sense of the clues, the dots had to be joined together; with seemingly random and stand-alone pieces of communication joining up; not in a script or on a schedule, but in the minds of consumers. thats the kind of headspace that broadcast money can’t buy.
Abrams talked about his approach to all his projects – from Alias to Lost and now Cloverfield – at the always amazing TED last March (click here to watch it). he talked about the idea of a ‘Mystery Box’, a $15 box he bought as a boy with the promise of $50 worth of magic inside. it remains unopened.
to Abrams his unopened box “represents infinite possibility, hope and potential”, he notes that “I find myself drawn to infinite possibility and that sense of potential and I realise that mystery is the catalyst for the imagination … what are stories but mystery boxes?” he describes how in TV the first act is called the teaser, it asks a fundamental question. but as soon as it’s answered there’s another question; another Mystery Box, and another after that…
his point is that the intentional withholding of information is much more engaging than giving someone the whole story… a lesson from which advertising could in many instances learn…
intrigue and the witholding of information in order to engage should more often be at the heart of a comms brief. we more often need to let product intrinsics or resolution within the context of a TV script take a back seat. we need to be creating more mystery boxes. then using media to join the mystery boxes together… a broadcast TV ad with a random link to a website. which has a list of postcodes, each of which has a series of posters. we shouldn’t be afraid of challenging our consumers… what a individual can’t piece together a networked community of individuals can…
in comunications planning we’re too obsessed with giving consumers information, we need to start giving them some questions, some intrigue. as Abrams says, “sometimes mystery is more important than knowledge”.
got to the cinema super early this week and was delivered two bits of commerciality from the BBC.
the first was audio for the Chris Moyles Show, with the man himself chatting to a side-kick as sounds flew around the cinema. lots of "ooohh, I can make this sound go from left to right, listen…".
innovative and interesting use of the capabilities of the media channel’s surround sound.
the next was a trailer for the Doctor Who Christmas Special. the corporation no doubt hopes that Voyage of the Damned, the Tennent / Kylie-fest planned for Christmas Day will be better received by critics than last year’s spiderfest.
a straight-forward TV trailer then, played in a cinema.
one of these two ads was brilliant, the other was irritating and annoying. no prizes for guessing which one…
by the time Moyles and co were halfway through, I was ready to personally pull the speakers off the wall. it was childish and tired; and anyone who thought that playing with sound in a cinema would impress, should check out what Dolby have been doing – consistently and rather elegantly – for years…
the Doctor Who trailer on the other hand was glorious. seeing it on the big screen did justice to the both the quality of the cast and ambition of the plot and effects. a simple piece of media planning that put the right communication in the best of places at the right time.
the lessons here is that sometimes less is more. of the two pieces, the Moyles audio was by far the more customised for it’s environment – it was infinitely smarter; but that didn’t make it better. by contrast the simple act of trailing a TV show on a big public screen rather than a small personal one, afforded it the credibility of a cinema piece with the anticipation of a movie trailer. I know which one I’ll be tuning into.
encoding in neural tissue that provides a physical basis for the persistence of memory; a memory trace (1)
E·col·o·gy [i-kol–uh-jee]– noun
branch of biology dealing with relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms (2)
I believe the concept of the individual brand engram for the purposes of marketing communications is redundant. I believe that a truer reflection of brands can be found by examining the dynamics of engram herds within a population.
1. The Myth of the Isolated Engram
The emergence of neuroscience has informed us that brands are not definitive established entities. Rather they are ideas. An ever-changing and dynamic concept of meanings and associations held – amongst millions of others (4) – within our minds. As Wendy Gordon puts it, “a brand in memory is a totality of stored synaptic connections between neurones … gradually built up through the combination of many past experiences and ongoing current encounters with a brand” (5). The term engram – coined originally by Richard Semon in 1904 – refers to this ‘memory trace’ (6) within which a brand is held.
Two key properties emerge from this concept:
First, the brand-as-engram is largely malleable and open to influence. Whilst marketers would hold that this gives them remit to leverage this set of associations thru advertising and other means, the reality is quite different;
The stimuli we receive don’t uniformly alter the engram. Daniel Schacter notes that; “our memory systems are built so that we are likely to remember what is most important to us” (7). Not all stimulus is created equal, as Willmott and Nelson observe; “ in a networked society, where people not only have more contacts but rely on them more for advice and support … personal recommendations, and recriminations, have more weight” (8). In other words brand engrams are – by their very nature – most open to influence by other people. Brand engrams are most open to influence by other engrams.
The second property to emerge from the brand-as-engram concept is that because engrams are formed from different experiences in different individual’s heads, no two engrams can be the identical. As Wendy Gordon puts it; “two people can never experience an identical set of encounters with a brand, and therefore their brand engrams will be different” (9).
So brand engrams are mostly open to influence by other engrams, each of which is unique; the concept of the isolated and definitive brand engram is therefore a myth.
Brands aren’t individual ideas, but herds of ideas, within a population. Herds that over time will grow or shrink, become more disparate or move more tightly together, or that become more or less consistent; all as a result of their environment that includes other engrams. It is this latter facet of the engram herd – consistency – upon which this submission will focus.
2. The Importance of the Consistent Herd
Key to successful marketing of a brand is to have a consistent engram herd, with consistent meanings and values associated with a brand. As Wendy Gordon points out, “new entrants to established product categories require an enormous financial investment to build these values, which ensure that a target group of consumers are able to share a similar pattern of specific belief system about a brand” (10).
There are several reasons why consistency of engram throughout a herd is crucial; as a shared language for word of mouth, as a consistent reference for self-identity, and within the concept of transactive memory:
2.1 The importance of consistent herd in Word of mouth epidemics
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes what he calls ‘the law of the few’ and describes how it was beneficial to the spreading of Hush Puppies from a few individuals in New York’s East Village to the mainstream American malls; “The law of the few says the answer is that one of these exceptional people [the few] found out about the trend and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm and personality spread the word about Hush Puppies” (11).
But what the malls of mainstream America depended upon, what made the spread of the idea commercial on a large scale, was the creation and existence of an engram herd which consistently adopted Hush Puppies as cool. Gladwell’s ‘exceptional people’ may spread a message, but once tipped, it requires consistency of an engram throughout the herd to hold, and maintain it.
And what any individual relies upon when receiving or transmitting messages within a word of mouth epidemic is a consistent frame of reference throughout that herd, a consistent language, a consistent engram on which to build.
The point is backed up by Caroline Whitehall who – in describing tactics to reduce marketing inertia – notes that “most of us are only likely to change behaviour if there is evidence of a larger movement emerging” (12). What this tactic relies upon is a consistent understanding throughout the herd of what that larger movement means; in order to create meaningful understanding of what adopting that group idea or behaviour entails.
2.2 The role of the consistent herd in communicating self-identity
Heath and Potter observe that “what we are all really after is not individuality, it is distinction, and distinction is achieved not by being different, but by being different in a way that makes us recognisable as members of an exclusive club” (13).
This construction of identity is achieved in various ways, the adoption and presentation of brands to others being one. We rely on the meanings and associations of the brands we choose to communicate something about ourselves, what Daniel Dennett calls ‘centres of narrative gravity’ (14).
The creation and communication of identity is wholly dependent on this centre of gravity, this consistency amongst the herd of what a brand means and the associations it therefore imparts to the individual who bears it. Only with consistency throughout the herd, other people carrying the engram are immediately aware of what – for example – wearing a t-shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch, or Armani, or Bathing Ape, imparts to the wearer.
Without consistency of meaning the message is at best diffused and at worst lost; the brand less effectively contributes to identity. Wendy Gordon notes that “A brand is metaphor for a complex pattern of associations” (15). Without consistency of engrams across the herd, that metaphor is meaningless.
2.3 The need for a consistent herd for a functioning transactive memory
A final example of the value of herd consistency is a concept developed by Daniel Wenger of the University of Virginia and described by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point; that of Transactive Memory. “When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored inside outside our brains … we store information with other people” (16).
This ‘outside’ information is encoded within and amongst engrams, many of which will be held within those of brand engrams. For example when we talk about Live Aid with people who also hold that engram, we may be reminded of information about the concert and the events surrounding it that we may have forgotten. We recall that the event happened as well as those specifics most pertinent to us within our own individual engrams, but we expect and require the herd engram to hold the greater body of information and detail of that brand.
It is in many ways a concept analogous to that of the Wisdom of Crowds, and idea James Surowiecki expounds in his book of the same name: “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them … chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd” (17).
The same could be said of a marketer wishing to understand how a brand is perceived; stop hunting a ‘typical’ individual engram; no such thing exists. Start by understanding the nature and dynamics of the engram herd as a whole, in which the greater and truer reflection of the brand can be found.
3. Case Study – Articulating eBay’s engram herd
One brand that has seen a chasm develop within its engram herd is eBay, a brand that is seeing its growth slow (18). Existing heavy users hold very positive associations – both with the complexity of the site and the community around it. But a great many of the engram herd have lapsed from use of eBay, citing that it’s too complicated and riskier than conventional online purchasing (19).
These are two very different centres of narrative gravity. And they’re in direct conflict. I’d suggest that it is partly this conflict within the herd that is resulting firstly in the slowed growth that eBay is currently experiencing, and secondly in decreasingly effective marketing communications. Put simply, communications are failing to reflect, and therefore resonate with, the herd engram footprint.
Saying ‘buy this on eBay’ (20) isn’t indicative of the heavy user positive engram gravity well; to heavy users it feels patronising. Nor does it address the negative engram gravity well typical of lapsed users who feel that eBay is complicated and risky.
To test this theory, I conducted some proprietary quantitative research amongst 88 randomly selected consumers (from my Facebook friends!) and asked them to indicate whether or not a range of words applied to eBay as well as three other brands within the online commerce space – Amazon, Play.com and HMV.co.uk.
Figure 1 shows the extent to which various associations were made with each of the four brands. So for example across the 88 respondents 70 connected the association ‘affordable’ with Amazon, 56 respondents with Play.com, 46 with eBay etc. By pooling the associations we get an indication of the herd engram footprint for these brands, indicating the extent to which these four brands overlap with each other.
Figure 1: herd engram associations by brand 21
But when each brand is examined individually, a much more distinct herd engram emerges. Figure 2 shows only the eBay data, ranked by association.
Figure 2: eBay herd engram associations ranked strongest first 21
Big, community, choice and affordable emerge top (reflecting the positive gravity well), as do time-consuming and risky (the negative gravity well). In an individual engram this picture wouldn’t have emerged, the gravity well of that individual would have dominated. Only by looking at the herd engram are the range of (in eBay’s case less consistent) associations observed.
But the real indication of the relative strength of herd consistency comes when the brand herd engrams are compared. Figure 3 shows each of the four brand herd engram footprints as ranked by each brand independently of association (i.e. the first point on the x-axis is the strongest association for each of the four brands).
Figure 3 brand herd engram footprints as ranked by each brand independently of association (21)
Amazon’s herd engram footprint has most connections concentrated across fewer associations. In short its herd is the most consistent. Amazon’s herd more easily and implicitly recognise what its individual members mean when they mention Amazon or when it is used as a display of self-identity.
The challenge for eBay is to use its marketing communications to help generate consistency across its herd engram. At present those carrying the engram are forming very different memory traces orientated around different experiences of the product, ensuring that broadcast communications resonate less well with the collective associations of eBay’s herd.
The challenge for all advertisers is to acknowledge the existence of the herd brand engram and accept its truer reflection of the brand as it exists across the memory traces of consumers. Articulate it. Measure its consistency. Identify the foci for the gravity wells that will influence the currents and eddies of the conversations and interactions – the ecology – of the herd engram.
Wendy Gordon. Brands on the brain: new scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking. Kogan Page. P115
Wendy Gordon. Understanding Brands, by 10 people who do. Chapter 2: Accessing the brand through research. Ed Don Cowley. Kogan Page. p36
Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point. Abacus. p21-22
Caroline Whitehall. Inertia is Good. Admap December 2005, Issue 467. p3
Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture. Capstone Publishing. p219
Daniel Dennett. ‘The Self as a Centre of Narrative Gravity’ in Self and Consciousness, ed F. Kessel, P. Cole, D.Johnson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992
Wendy Gordon. Brands on the brain: new scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking. Kogan Page. P112
Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point. Abacus. p188
James Surowiecki. The Wisdom of Crowds. Abacus. p xiv-xv
As reported by eBay, specific proprietary data is confidential.
The author. eBay proprietary qualitative research. June 2007
This was – amongst other specific messages eg Trust & Safety – the general message communicated by eBay from circa. 2005 until mid-2007
Independent proprietary quantitative research conducted by the author for the purposes of this paper. Sample on 88 respondents (recruited via Facebook – not nationally representative). September 2007
I caught this treat of a TV ad last night, and it is – for me – by far and away the best of this year’s Chrimbo crop. a simple and elegant piece that taps into our collective sense of Christmas spirit. more celebrities than you know what to do with are on display, but none one of them is trying to sell us groceries or boost their own profile. rather, they’re all doing exactly what they do best – laughing, hugging, loving, crying and – in the case of the Grinch – scowling their way through the festive season.
if I had one critisim, it’s that this ad doesn’t need an end line, or a tag line for that matter. the suggestion that the montage featured movies ‘for the people you love’ is not only implicit, but negates against people drawing their own – and therefore more powerful – conclusions as the what the ad is conveying. and as for ‘get closer’, well that doesn’t mean anything at all!
but it’s absolutely the right move for HMV, who are never going to compete with the
online retailers on price. instead they’re reinforcing their
associations with movies, the objective presumably being that over the
next few weeks, as we all negotiate our ways down our respective frenetic
highstreets, we see that Jack Russell and make a detour into it’s store over
others. time will tell if with this effort HMV manage a Merry little Christmas themselves… I supsect it may just work!
I’ve seen this latest Guinness effort a few times since it launched on TV last Thursday. it’s a fantastic piece of advertising, as of course it should be for the £10m price-tag that came attached to it. but according to an article by Stephen Armstrong in today’s Media Guardian;
"By the time the 60-second film broke last week … it had already been pieced together and posted on YouTube by thousands of net users across the world in an enormous online hunt for a golden domino … AMV BBDO gave out the first clue on posters, beer mats and websites two weeks ago. Solving each of the 11 clues released a code that revealed a few more seconds of the commercial, with the first to sling the completed film on to YouTube earning the brewers’ version of Willy Wonka’s ticket."
really!? you could have fooled me. not a jot have I seen of it! which is more than a little disappointing.
the investment behind Guinness’s broadcast media (and a £10m ad) should quite rightly take priority in the mix – but to invest so little behind a genuinely interesting and smart piece of consumer engagement shows at best a lack of confidence, and at worst a distinct case of ‘let’s do the consumer engagement bit’ as an add-on. the fact that – as a thirty year old urban alcohol drinker – I didn’t see the golden domino activity could just be accident; the fact that this activity started a mere two weeks before the ad was first broadcast definitely wasn’t.
a case of smart, very smart, thinking just not backed-up by investment. this should and could have been huge, the fact that it wasn’t (96,000 views to the discussion forum just doesn’t cut it), represents a genuinely missed opportunity.
the same article observes that "alarm is growing in the advertising community over the idea that the net allows clients to pay for an ad in one territory and then reap the benefits for free across the globe". the fact that ‘if I paid £10m for something, I’d feel I had the right to do whatever the hell I liked with it’ aside, one way to combat this threat is to ground the ad into a territory with exactly the kind of comms behaviour that golden domino demonstrates so well…
great ads will for a very long time to come have a key part to play in any communication strategy… but a failure to use them as part of a bigger picture, and more importantly invest in that bigger picture, will only contribute to the spot ad’s woes.
this wonderful piece of content, entitled Information R/evolution, is by Michael Wesch of the Kansas State University. it explores the basic tenants of information and how they have fundamentally changed as information has moved from paper to digital storage.
the principles of how consumers aggregate relevant information to their own ends is especially true for the business of brand communications. it has become a given that the double revolutions challenging advertisers and their agencies are (1) a digitally driven explosion of content and (2) technologically-driven consumer control over that content.
advertisers hoping to push through this double whammy of virtually infinite (and expanding) content and consumer control over it by force of sheer strength (and budgets) will learn to their cost that information and its storage – no matter what its source – no longer permits such behaviour.
the role of many brand communications in the early 21st Century is to package brand messages in such a way that they not only avoid being filtered out, but are actively invited and aggregated by consumers around themselves (and each other).
what the above video communicates so well is a poignant reminder that underpinning much of the current change in the business of brand comms is the simple transfer of information to a digital realm. whether it’s an essay, blog, advert for a fizzy drink, CD single or TV episode; the fundamental rules of how they are delivered and consumed are being re-written. some key questions then arise for those creating brand communications to ask themselves:
1. am I creating something people want to have or experience? 2. does it change or add benefit to their lives? 3. can it be easily found and consumed at any time? 4. does it articulate and reflect my brand? 5. could a competitor have made it?
advertising is information. the nature of information is changing. our advertising and brand communications must evolve in order to remain relevant and effective in a changing world.
MEDIATION 