Making Good Stuff: Creating Content in the Flight to Quality.

X-Factor – great cross-platform content is in demand

Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at Buzz Machine writes in the Guardian today about fundamental changes at Dell, in which the company adopted digital behaviours to more actively engage with their customers. as a result of investing in everything from their own blogs, Wikis and forums, to IdeaStorm – a website where customers can tell Dell what to do – the company’s new problem is "managing and spreading all this knowledge from consumers". Jarvis comments that:

"Dell and its customers are collaborating on the creation of content, media and marketing – without content, media or marketing companies. Advertising is no one’s first choice as the basis of a relationship … clearly, the direct relationship between a customer and a company is preferable. but that direct connection cuts out the middlemen – that is the media."

now then, I’d be the last person to dispute the principle that marketers should invest in actively engaging with their customers, but whilst this may be the ideal for all brands its just not terribly feasible for many, if not most!

firstly, Dell – as a manufacturer of laptops – is an example of a brand with a product that requires active involvement on the part of it’s owner. laptops needs to be updated and managed, software upgraded or fixed. moreover, laptops will for many customers occupy a central role within their lives; laptops keep our content and provide access to communications. they enable us to work and play. not all brands are in this fortunate position. everything about Dell products make them amenable to being engaged with. most brands will struggle to occupy such fortunate a position

secondly, if we all engaged ‘hands-on’ with all the brands we ever consumed there’d be little time for us to do anything else. we may very well co-create with and contribute to a company, but it’s only ever with a few of the brands that sit at the top of our trees. there are hundreds of other brands with which we have ‘hands-off’ relationships; relationships that must be nurtured and evolve without the benefit of active hands-on consumer engagement.

our media model isn’t broken. it’s just changing. in the olden days there was lots of stuff – like TV shows or fashion shoots or a movie or
the latest single from Spice Girls or Take That (first time round!)

consumers accessed all that stuff thru conduits called media channels – so advertisers invested in the media channels that were most able to deliver either lots of – or the most relevant – consumers at the end of them. the bigger the conduit, or the fewer conduits reaching a consumer, the more the conduits were worth.

advertiser money rode the back of this content and attached their brands to it.

nowadays essentially three things have changed… firstly, there’s a lot more conduits – media fragmentation. secondly, there’s a load more stuff – mainly because of the increase in conduits, the largest of which has been the internet – a global library of stuff ready and waiting on demand.

but the third and most significant factor – and the one to which Jeff Jarvis refers – is the changing relationship between consumers and stuff…

what’s not happening is the disintermediation of the conduits. there is still relatively little stuff that consumers directly engage with – the majority of media time remains within the confines of the media conduits. the real story is of conduit control…

PVRs, Google (thought I’d get thru a post without mentioning them but no luck!), Podcasting – all examples not of consumers abandoning the media conduits, but of consumers controlling them – accessing and organising them to their own ends. why? because of the explosion of more stuff thru more conduits.

more stuff via more conduits >>> more control over content >>> the inevitable result of which is that advertisers are looking to get closer to the stuff at the end. and this is where it’s getting fun!

a former associate who works at a London ad agency was explaining yesterday over lunch that one of the key strands of a campaign they’re planning won’t be a TV ad but a TV series. they’re pitching a 22 episode season in order to tell the brand story they wish to convey. investment still goes into the media model – it’s just into the ‘stuff’ bit as well as the ‘conduit’ stuff. content still gets made, advertisers still spend to attach themselves to the stuff, and consumers still get great content that other people (brands) pay to make.

when viewed in this way the conventional ad takes on a whole new meaning. it’s a little bit of stuff in itself. how can we as agencies help our clients make more and better use of these little content canapes? how can they sit alongside their meat and two veg season-long siblings that we’re increasingly looking to create? but most importantly how can we make them stand out?

Emily Bell made reference to this in her MediaGuardian column today.

"In the world of web content, which has been fuelling the
content innovation fire, there is a new trend called ‘the flight to
quality’, which describes the process of refining something to the
point where you are producing the best object, clip, article package,
conversation on a theme or topic or object that the rest of the web
wants to point at."

it won’t be enough to create stuff. it’s got to be the best of stuff. but we’re fortunate on two fronts; one, London agencies are the best in the world at creating great content – they’ve just got to change their scope from 30" to 30 mins! two, the production houses are waiting for our ideas. Lorraine Heggessey, former controller of BBC1 and chief exec of talkbackThames in today’s Independent media section explains that "as she grows the company, [she] is constantly searching for new formats that have the potential for export". that sounds like a gauntlet being laid down. I hope it is, and I hope more advertisers and agencies have the gumption to pick it up and run with it!

advertising, branding, engaging, planning

The Information R/evolution and it’s consequences for Advertising and Brand Communications

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.

for more on this subject they point in the direction of Clay Shirky”s work, as well as David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.

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.

advertising, branding, engaging, planning

Why Great Ads Are Great, But Not Great Enough

a strange thing has started happenning. I’ve started watching ads. Sky+ no longer gets to do it’s thing… it started a few weeks ago, with THAT gorilla ad. we wanted to know what all the fuss was about, so we re-wound and watch it. then we watched it again. thats what seems to have started it all. then last Friday Ugly Bettty was interrupted by the spanking new effort from Fallon for Bravia… if you haven’t seen it, watch it now…

Play-Doh is a pleasure to watch. repeatedly. and thats a heck of a lot more important that how it compares to it’s predecessors. an argument was made to me yesterday that viewer expectations of the series are now so high that Bravia / Fallon can’t hope to meet them. that’s unfair; I can’t imagine a level on which Play-Doh doesn’t engage and entertain the viewer. this emerging trend of me watching ads continued more recently with eBay’s effort.

knowingly retro, clean and fresh, and containing a wonderfully insightful moment where one of the characters looses a bid, this marks a strong start for what is hopefully set to become a long-running platform for the brand… eBay has a world to play with, ads created in isolation should only be the first and shallowest expression of that world… this is begging to be transmedia-planned.

another new effort comes from the Post-Office. the ants – thank God – have gone and been replaced by a sitcom assortment of characters. again there’s knowingness in the derogatory reference to sub-standard carpets, and then Joan Collins crops up. all very random but it works… but it could be argued just making an ad is a very shallow window on this world and brand. I would love to see what could be done with this concept extended into 5-8 min sitcom-style shorts online… a Victoria Wood meets Gervais / Merchant approach could create some genuinely entertaining content (above and beyond which the ads could reference, again a nod to transmedia-ness)…

but the trend isn’t restricted to TV. a lovely press ad for the Peugeot 407 caught my eye recently too…

the flowchart on the left is genuinely fun and invites you – by playing thru a decision-making tree – to think about what’s important when buying a car. a simple idea that’s entertaining whilst remaining embedded in the product… and there’s an intriguing url – http://www.407trustyourinstinct.co.uk/ – which depressingly is not a smarter deeper reflection of the ad but lots of pictures of cars, a product not a brand experience.

and I suppose that this is the nub of all this… brands are ideas. and ads are the multitudes of individual expressions of those ideas. but to end there, with a great ad, is simply no longer enough. media offers more, and brands deserve more. the opportunity is not just to make great ads like the above, but to do the smart interesting stuff with and behind them that a 21st Century media landscape permits…

whether it’s communicating the mythology of making the ad a la Play-Doh, or creating and bringing a world to life like eBay (storybooks, documentaries anyone?); or potentially making entertaining content (Post-Office sitcom please), or something as simple as taking that Gorilla ad that sparked this bout of ad-watching, and changing the smallest thing to make the biggest difference… the below played out just before 8pm on Saturday 13th October, a few minutes before England played France. if you didn’t catch this watch the ad again – the gem crops up just at the end. enjoy.

advertising, branding

Strong brand. Stretched. Better for it.

so you’re Harvey Nichols and you want to communicate your food hall credentials. tough one; you’re known for fashionable garms, so just putting the HN badge on some nice food may just look bland – or worse, a flagrant imitation of the M&S food campaign. what to do?

remember who you are is what!

apply the Harvey Nichols brand engram to food… fabulous, fashionable, glamourous, elaborate, indulgent, self-aware… and get a solution thats obvious once you’ve seen the punchline but surely required the neatest of thinking to get there as part of the planning process.

a nod too to the production values. this is a concept that could have failed in execution. it doesn’t. it’s a knowing, elegant, high-value piece (implicitly – of course – affirming the existing HN brand engram). this ad is everything good brand communications should be. lovely.

advertising, branding, engaging, internet, user-generating

Making Up Your Own Foreign Melodrama

one of the highlights in what has been a pretty gloomy year for Virgin Media has surely to be their sponsorship of BB, which has consistently outdone the programme it sponsors in terms of entertaining content.

but those clever people at GoodStuff communications haven’t let Virgin stop there. they’ve persuaded the sponsor (and the creative agency) to let consumers subtitle their own bumpers – the best ones will be played out in the BB final.

to take part you simply go to the Subtitle Superstar website where you can choose a clip and subtitle to your hearts content.

getting consumers to create their content is nothing new, but this has the double winner of 1. demanding creativity within the context of (in BB) a very highly-valued piece of scheduling real-estate, and 2. rewarding the best creations by showing it to an audience of millions during one of the few truly event TV occasions remaining in the TV calendar.

what makes this stand out isn’t that it’s asking consumers to create content; the sorely-missed Tony Hart’s Gallery did that a long time ago, and the age of the internet has made this a staple of the comms planner’s tool-kit. what makes it stand out is the access it gives consumers to a highly-valued media brand. like it or loathe it, BB retains a very high stock with 16-34s, and this kind of access isn’t easily come by. the fact that the access comes courtesy of Virgin Media can only do good stuff for the brand.

as an aside, it’s worth noting that it comes in the wake of a pretty bad week for the BBC, GMTV and their bedfellows who were less than honest with viewings during TV competitions. failing standards, plummeting levels of trust, a fundamental betrayal (if reports are to be believed) of the nation – and that’s just page 2 of a full-colour supplement on the issue courtesy of the Mail!

…despite the fact that it’s been massively over reported, the fact remains that the TV stations have genuinely been caught with the pants down. why? because they were so keen to give viewers the perception that they were involved in the programme, they forgot to make sure they were actually genuinely involved in the programme. could they really have been surprised when viewers reacted not too happily about it not all being as it seemed.

and herein lies the rub… the reaction of viewers and the media told us not about the lack of trust between consumers and brands, but about the absolute existence of trust between consumers and brands. the extent of the reaction bears testimony to the high levels of trust that brands (the BBC it must be said in particular) have engendered.

because engaging with consumers and co-creating content with them has become such a staple of many brands’ activities, consumers are spending more time than ever before engaging with them. and when any brand asks consumers to engage with them, to spend precious time with them, to commit energy and creativity to them, they can’t be surprised if – when this relationship is undermined – consumers get more pissed off than they would if they didn’t particularly like a 25×4 colour.

engaging with consumers is two-way relationship. and if the comms planning and marketing community wants to continue to evolve the nature of brand communications, they better make sure that they live up to their end of the bargain.

advertising, branding

Products are over. What idea are you selling?

there was a queue to get into the new Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store in London yesterday. at least a couple of dozen excited young things were happily waiting their turn to get the opportunity to spend their pocket money in America’s latest retail export.

the launch of the store (the first outside the Americas) has generated significant word of mouth and editorial coverage despite a limited media spend. the discussion has come about not from the clothes on the shelves, but from the beautiful young things stacking them.

much of the discussion has been negative; the brand shamelessly exploits the idea of the body beautiful – typified by David and Peter Sheath from Swansea who meet and greet the bright young things in nothing but low hung jeans and flip-flops. it would be easy to dismiss such coverage as a PR failing, but its almost certainly quite the opposite.

in A&F’s pursuit of communicating their brand of beautiful bright young men, they are selling much more than a few preppy clothes. they’re selling an idea. you’re understanding of the brand isn’t about clothes at all… but rather – perhaps – the very nature of beauty. and whether your take on this is aspirational, envy or just bemusement – what’s important is that you almost certainly will have a take on it.

when brands stand for something, they compellingly invite us to have an opinion. and in doing so they win some headspace. and that’s rather valuable. A&F’s body beautiful is in a very real sense the anti-real beauty campaign from Dove. if you haven’t seen their Evolution creative execution, watch it now…

both these brands stand for something. and both – whilst the success of A&F in the UK is to be seen – are doing rather well as a result. this is telling in a week that saw the retail chain Next announce that like for like sales were down 7.2%. selling products – certainly for many high street retailers – isn’t enough any more. there’s too much on and offline competition to rely on the products to do all of the talking. brands that stand for something – that sell an idea – get noticed. thats why there was a queue to get into the A&F store yesterday, and thats why anyone working on a brand that doesn’t know what it stands for, should be very nervous.

advertising, branding, engaging, planning

five thoughts on peer to peer (viral) marketing

whilst there aren’t rules per se, and the way a brand creates viral – or what I’d suggest we term peer to peer marketing – will vary depending on the market, brand, and most significantly the target audience; there are some general principles that I think are pertinent:

one – motivation

the consumer’s motivation to pass on will always be grounded in what’s in it for them, this can be one of a variety of things…

> credibility – getting kudos for finding something first, the act of passing it on is implicit proof of this

> financial reward – people who do something as a result of you passing something on earns the sender a reward (many online promotions work like this)

> exclusivity – you could famously only join Gmail if you were asked to join by an existing member

the rule of thumb therefore is don’t create peer to peer marketing material on your terms, but on consumers’ …what’s in it for them?

two – mechanism

consider how the material will be seeded, received, consumed and passed on…

> seeding / receiving – who are you originally sending it to and how? material that comes from a known source will have more credibility

> consumption – is it easy and quick to access the material?

> passed on – is it easy and quick to pass it on? – remember consumers are time poor and information heavy

facilitate the spread – minimise viral file size (or host remotely) and allow forwarding easy

three – methodology

historically – viral comms were spread via the garden fence; communities were geographically limited

with the advent of tintinet – it became possible to quickly reach a multitude of people very quickly (exponential spreading of material)

more recently the creation of hosting platforms has attracted attention – eg MySpace, YouTube… which has meant that material is hosted independently of the viral location of it (ie it’s the link that’s viral – the content is hosted by an aggregator eg YouTube)

so… consider where and how you choose to host – it will convey independence (or otherwise), but this will have consequences for the extent to which – as creator – you are given credit

four – contemporacy

novelty value – if it or it’s like has been seen before, it will be less likely to be passed on

currency – easier to spread if its grounded in current affairs or the zeitgeist

reportage – ideal is to get established media to report the activity – such breakthroughs are rare but massively extend the reach of the viral as well as convey credibility and ‘buzz’

make it relevant to something beyond the current state and needs of your brand

five – measurement

whatever you’re putting out there, make sure you keep track of what’s happening to it

who’s getting it, who’s passing it on, who comments? – technorati, delicious and blogpulse all can help brands do this

Host the content somewhere where there is inbuilt measurement (YouTube, MySpace etc)

basically… don’t send off all you hard work into the ether without tying a lead on it first

branding, praising

in praise of… Innocent Smoothie Bobble Hats

this isn’t just a couple of innocent smoothies bobble hats on. …well, actually it is just a couple of innocent smoothies with bobble hats on, but its more than that too.

me and my friend Charity met for breakfast this morning at EAT on Tottenham Court Road where to our surprise and joy the entire shelf of innocent smoothies were adorned with bobble hats.

it turns out that 50p from the sale of each bottle (25% of the retail price) goes to Age Concern. so a great case study of a Christmas-season promotion to make people feel better about spending £2 on a bottle of crushed fruit. well yes, and no…

of course its a marketing campaign with the aim of getting you to buy more smoothies, but the promotion doesn’t stop at the shelf… the Innocent smoothies blog directs you to the Supergran flickr group, where you can view pics of all the hats different people have knitted, as well as the people who’ve knitted them. it really doesn’t feel cynical or false, its a promotion that seems to have galvanised a community of people to get knitting for good.

and thats the real joy of this promotion. when you learn that each hat is individual and hand made, and that for the last six months thousands of volunteers have been knitting hundreds of thousands of bobble hats. for smoothies. for us to buy. so that Innocent can sell more bottles and give money to Age Concern. its actually all a bit crazy when you think about it, but I guess thats why I like it.

so to Innocent smoothies and moreover to all the volunteers who have worked for half a year to knit hats for bottles of fruit… we salute you.

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MEDIATION

negotiating the future of media and communications

Category Archives: branding

Making Good Stuff: Creating Content in the Flight to Quality.

The Information R/evolution and it’s consequences for Advertising and Brand Communications

Why Great Ads Are Great, But Not Great Enough

Strong brand. Stretched. Better for it.

Making Up Your Own Foreign Melodrama

Products are over. What idea are you selling?

five thoughts on peer to peer (viral) marketing

in praise of… Innocent Smoothie Bobble Hats