Category Archives: engaging

branding, engaging, planning

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

Xfactor 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!)

Media_conduit_one

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…

Media_conduit_two

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!

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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.

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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…

Peugeot_dps_2the 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.

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advertising, branding, engaging, internet, user-generating

Making Up Your Own Foreign Melodrama

Bb_virgin_subtitle_superstar_2 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.

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advertising, engaging

When your product is this good, don’t let advertising get in the way

Titian_oneI had a little look Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne this morning.  not in a gallery.  in St Anne’s Court.  on the way back from a meeting.

I was able to do so courtesy of a piece of communication from The National Gallery called The Grand Tour – whereby;

"…over the next twelve weeks [The National Gallery is] turning the West End into a giant gallery by lining the streets of Soho, Piccadilly, and Covent Garden with some of the world’s most famous paintings"

(source: Grand Tour Website)

which is great; when your product is as good as the creations of Europe’s greatest painters, don’t formulate an advertising intermediary – get it out there and let people experience your product on their own terms.  it’s like 50 little pop-up galleries, I hope they become permanent sites, rotating the image every month.

Grand_tour_web

but if that wasn’t a nice enough idea in itself, if you go to The Grand Tour website you can not only view an interactive map of where the images are and find out more about the artist and piece, you can also download a range of audio tours for your MP3 player…

do an hour’s tour over a lunch-break, or take a romantic stroll on summer evening – the route and commentary courtesy of The Lovers’ Tour – all from the web.

a great, neat, joined up piece of communications which utilises digital capabilities not as a bolt-on, but as an inherent part of the idea, genuinely and relevantly adding to the enjoyment of the product.

and I got to view a Titian on a rainy Monday morning, which was more than enough to brighten up the day.

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advertising, engaging, internet, social networking, user-generating

From ‘send’ to ‘recieve’ mode; lessons for politicians and advertisers

Houses_of_parliamentpic from solarnavigator.net

There’s been a lot of media-orientated political comment about over the last week.  Firstly Whitehall last Thursday published a report by Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the national consumer council and Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety, recommending that the Government acknowledges the importance of, and utilises, existing internet-based communities.

The three specific recommendations were that the Government:

  • welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
  • supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
  • protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unavailable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage

These sentiments were echoed by Tim Montgomerie – editor of ConservativeHome.com – in The Spectator’s Politics column last week where he suggested that the next general election will be remembered as “Britain’s first internet election”.  He notes that “in this new world [of internet communities] the campaign staff of political parties and traditional media will have a much smaller share of power”; and points to the fact that “more Americans have watched Mr de Vellis’s advert [below] than have watched any official commercial”.

Such is the power of a searchable internet, populated by aggregations of communities with their own opinions, wants and behaviours.  It’s a force that both politicians and brands must understand and engage with on the communities’ terms; Montgomerie notes that politicians “still see the web as a way of providing superior distribution channels for unchanged messages.  They are in ‘send mode’ … the political parties that prosper in the internet age will embrace ‘receive mode’.

Try reading that last quote again replacing politicians with the word brands.  There are parallels indeed.

The third element in all of this is the broadcast media; Montgomerie – in citing predictions that “most print newspapers will have closed by 2025” – takes a different position to Tony Blair, who waded in to the debate this week in a polemic against the print media.  Blair believes that “there is a market in providing serous, balanced, news.  There is a desire for impartiality.  The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for news being real is not”.

But deciding ‘what is real’ will no longer be the preserve of politicians and brands communicating through broadcast media.  In both the advertising and political arenas, that will be for us all – as co-creators and consumers – to decide.  There will be – as there has always been – two key questions; who owns the message and who owns the media?  In creating content we all have the potential to own the message, something politicians and advertisers will have to come to terms with.

As for who owns the media – that remains to be seen…  Different strategies will emerge.  This week HMV appointed digital agency LBi to create a new social networking site to take on rivals facebook and YouTube.  Good luck with that!  Gideon Lask, e-commerce director of HMV said “The HMV social networking site will be an important element in our customer engagement strategy”.  All admirable, but what’s wrong with utilising the networks already out there?  His brand – like politics – is still in ‘send mode’, I’d suggest that the sooner ‘receive mode’ is engaged, the better.

Sources:

‘The Power of Information’ – a review by Mayo and Steinberg

‘The next general election will be won and lost on the internet’, a Spectator column by Tim Montgomerie

Blair’s Feral Media speech – full text as reported by the BBC here

‘HMV appoints LBi to create facebook rival’ as reported in Campaign

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advertising, engaging

Advertising Isn’t to Blame for Commercial Radio’s Woes

Radio_mast_3 Fru Hazlitt, the new MD of GCap last week gave a keynote speech at the Media 360 event to assert that bad ads were causing listeners to abandon commercial radio.

whilst Hazlitt stopped short of threatening to pull ‘poor’ ads from schedules, plans were announced to set up a listener poll to rate the quality of ads.

there’s a big assumption here – that bad ads = disgruntled listeners = defection = strong BBC.  and thats a big assumption to make.

whilst it’s true that commercial radio is suffering against a consistently strong BBC, and that the lack of ads on the latter certainly plays a part in it’s success; what this assertion ignores are other potentially strong factors that have combined to produce a strong BBC…

no channel is feeling the effects of a changing media landscape more than radio.  the combination of the i-pod generation carrying their music libraries wherever they go along with the wide and often free access to music offered by the internet has left some stations struggling to maintain their relevance.

it was this aspect that the speech last week ignored.  in a world where music is available on demand, three things become key to a radio station staying relevant

  • unique content (stuff that you can’t listen to or get from elsewhere else eg talk radio)
  • newness (eg tracks or bands you may not have heard before)
  • great packaging (eg respected DJs, innovative formats)

it is across these aspects that the BBC has arguably out-performed commercial radio.  from the strength and breadth of non-music offerings (Five Live being a case in point), to innovative and less-mainstream stations (of which 6 music is arguably the strongest), the BBC is doing more than capitalizing on listeners frustrations with advertising.  commercial radio on the other hand – in the main – continues to peddle mainstream music music without the necessary investment in either innovative formats or value-adding presenters.

there are exceptions, GCap’s Xfm continues to outperform rivals with a combination of credible new music and innovative formats (see X-posure for evidence), recently winning the last FM analogue license in South Wales.  but this week will see GCap ‘overhaul’ the brand, with changes expected in DJ line-up and music formats.  perhaps it will also introduce viewer ad-polling as part of the review.

advertising may be part of commercial radio’s woes, but it’s far from the only one.  and there’s a lot radio station owners could do to help their cause before alienating and then potentially culling their biggest source of income.

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advertising, engaging, planning

TV and Online – Forever Frenemies

Tv_online
in a post on The Black Box Fallacy, in which I referenced Transmedia storytelling, I concluded by noting that;

‘whats going to be fun is to see to what extent commercial advertisers
use transmedia storytelling.  at the moment a campaign idea tends to be
executed across different channels.  there’s little consideration given
to how what is produced can be contextualised from the off.  and
there’s massive opportunity for the advertisers – and indeed the
agencies – that learn how to do this best first’

I recalled this whilst watching two recent examples of advertising campaigns.  both of which are pieces of communication with two very different expressions in TV and Online channels.  in both cases TV merely provides the precursor, the call to action being to go online…

Army_jobs_home_2

the first is for Army Jobs, where a series of video clips show different aspects of Army life.  in each example the execution is cut short – the ending… is to be found online.

here you not only get to view all the video’s in a dedicated player, but can also – by addressing a series of questions in the Pathfinder – identify which aspects of Army life would be most appropriate for you.

it’s all very slick and involving, making the visit from the TV execution more than worth the effort, whether you’re interested in a life in the Army or just curious to see how the stories end.

the second example is beyond surreal…

yup.  it’s the R&D team who developed the Peanut Chunky inviting you to punish them if you don’t like what they’ve come up with.  whether you did or didn’t like it is irrelevant, as when you get to the website you’re given the option to punish them or…  punish them…

Peanut_chunky_home

another very slick online experience not only shows you what happens when the staff are inflicted to a cactus bath or lobster down the pants.  but in an added trick some of the juiciest content is locked.  you unlock it by sending video clips to friends…

Peanut_chunky_two

the most interesting thing about both of these campaigns is that the online content could have quite happily existed without the presence of a TV ad.  but TV brought efficient mass reach – as well as a wealth of credibility – to the invite to engage with both of these brands.

both channels benefit hugely from the other.  at it’s most basic, if either brand schedule had prioritised one channel over the other (or sacrificed a large chunk of the budget in one channel to do a broadcast job in the other!) it wouldn’t have worked.  but more importantly it shows integration within or across creative agencies that will be not just beneficial but crucial in the future implementation of digital (across all channels) media schedules.

is it Transmedia storytelling?  no… that would require different and dedicated content across different and dedicated channels bringing a concept to life in very different and relevant ways.  but its two big and very slick steps in the right direction.

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advertising, engaging, planning

Thinking Inside the Box

Thinkbox_dispatcheslast Friday saw tv marketing body thinkbox present findings from it’s Engagement Study, a project to understand how different audiences interact with TV and as a result how advertisers can best use TV to reach those audiences.

interestingly the first question they needed to address is what is engagement?  thinkbox turned to a definition coined by their equivelant body in the States… that "engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context",  which despite being very TV advertising focusses, seems as good a definition as any.

learnings were then presented from the project, including a TV audience segmentation the study has identified, as well as some extreme types of behaviours demonstrated across the segments.  I’ve outlined the findings of the research in a seperate post here.

a brilliant presentation by Dr Ali Good from duckfoot research then discussed explicit vs implicit memory, and how media and advertising research is great at measuring the former but not so good at the latter…  so he took the audience thru a technique for exploring implicit memory, via a great case study for Virgin Trains’ Return of the Train ad.

the last aspect of the morning was a discussion led by Sue Unerman of Mediacom on what all this research means for advertising and specifically media planning.  ten questions ranged from "is it better to be noticed or ignored?" to "are we fiddling while Rome burns?", taking in everything from bemoaning the disapearance of jingles to the role of media vs creative planning strategies on the way.

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advertising, branding, engaging, planning

five thoughts on peer to peer (viral) marketing

Network_p2pwhilst 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

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