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.

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buying, planning

The Disintermediation of the Media Agency

Balihoologo_2 whilst it may be premature to suggest the media agency planning and buying model is about to become redundant, a new search engine’s aspiration to become "the Google for media planning" should surely provide food for thought for those of us who spend a few minutes each day meditating on the future of communications planning.

Steve Roest, who blogs at Open House, has pointed me in the direction of Balihoo, an engine who’s spiders have, for the last few years, searched the web and logged online – and offline – media properties available for purchase by either media buyers or clients direct.  Ad Age’s Media Morph describe the model thus:

"A marketer or media planner can enter a category or genre — say, kayaking — and it’ll return all the media properties about kayaking, as well as related media with similar demographic profiles — including ones that might not be included in or subscribe to traditional media-planning tools … While some marketers might do Google searches, Balihoo refines results to include only properties where advertisers can buy media." (see the full article here)

in a world of unprecedented media fragmentation, the proposition of an engine that will return a comprehensive list of all related media spaces to a brand or subject is an attractive one.  but that is to miss the point. there are several central objections to the suggestion that this means the end for agencies…

firstly, if media planning as a discipline was the amalgamation of media opportunities, a search engine could do it; it would indeed aid the disintermediation of the media agency, giving clients and marketers the power to find and buy media space according to their needs.

but not all media opportunities are created equal, and whilst Balihoo may offer a valuable starting point for initial exploration of a brief, what it won’t do is give credible guarantees of the value of one opportunity versus the other.  it is arguably – to quote (the rarely wrong) JRT Smith – a tool for those that understand "the cost of everything and the value of nothing".

secondly but more fundamentally, using a search engine for media planning alone relies on the push model of media planning.  a model which suggests that by reaching as many of the right people most of the time brands can attempt to build or change the set of associations as required by the marketer.

but thats a pretty outdated model.  the role of media planning is not to hit as many people over the head with an advertising message, in as many places, as possible; but rather to make a value judgment so that the places and spaces in which brands are seen are not only relevant, but add implicit value to the advertising message by the very virtue of being seen in those spaces.

and thats not – fortunately – something a search engine can do.  yet.  it’s not even – to give Balihoo’s ambition of creating a scoring system where agencies and clients can rate opportunities – something an online community can yet do.  value judgments always have to be made within the context of the brief and brand in question. the agency model is safe for a while yet, but only – it should be said – for those agencies that do more than list opportunities – it’s one thing to know the cost of media space, quite another to know it’s value to a brand.

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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, converging, internet, planning

When Words Collide – a perpective from DDB

thanks to John V Willshire who pointed me in the direction of this video featuring Matt Dyke, Worldwide Planning Director DDB and Jeroen Matser, Senior Planner DDB, discussing the new landscape of digital innovations converging with the physical world.

much is said about convergence but this take on how the internet is colliding and interacting with the too-often-overlooked offline world is timely and refreshing.
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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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internet, planning, social networking, user-generating

It’s not what I post on facebook; but the fact that I post, that counts

Mark_zuckerberg_facebookpic source: Paul Sakuma / AP File

I’ve been wanting to write a post on social networking for a while now but it’s taken me ages, mostly because I’ve been mainly engaged in rampant friendgeneering.

let me explain.

about a month ago I joined facebook, an act which quickly and forever changed my internet browsing habits.  it became and remains the first and last site I visit in any online session, and keep it on in the background whilst tabbing thru other sites.  a straw poll suggests that I am not alone.  this is significant.

the other key behaviour I noticed myself adopting in the early weeks of facebook was some very serious (and along with my housemate, competitive) ‘friendgeneering’ – a term coined by my colleague and friend John V Willshire in his Artrocker Blog, to describe:

"the accumulation of friends that everyone goes through … because (a) it’s like engineering in it’s very methodical, processed, designed nature, unlike making friends in real life and (b) I have too much time on my hands clearly, and can sit around thinking of terms like ‘friendgeneering’"

now whilst it’s certainly true that John has too much free time – the phrase actually very succinctly captures the various acts of friend-collection I went through, and only stopped when I felt that a certain critical mass had been achieved (note: I don’t know why I felt I’d reached my personal critical mass – would be interesting to find out if other users had similar experiences).  I felt uncomfortable until ‘enough’ of them were there with me, and feel a great deal more comfortable now that they are there.

it’s a concept Faris Yakob – writing on his blog TIGS – described in a post in which he termed continuous partial presence:

"…everyone is always there. The most important feature of instant messenger programmes, in some ways, isn’t the actual messages – it’s the buddy list. With your buddy list there, you’re always in a group, you’re friends are always present, whenver they’re online. This is why it was so compelling, to begin with, to younger people – kids are far more likely to hang out in large social groups. This continuous partial presence is oddly satisfying, and also a feature of services like Twitter and Jaiku"

in her book Watching The English, Kate Fox describes how the mobile phone has had a similar effect:

"The mobile phone has, I believe, become the modern equivelant of the garden fence or village green.  the space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent ‘grooming talk’ with a tightly integrated social network of family and friends"

what both of these commentaries identify is the fact that the content of the status updates, photos, and now videos (and more) I put on facebook, aren’t as important as the act of putting them up there in the first place.  it’s the contemporary equivelant of "good morning, send my best to X" that was typical of times gone by, and just as reassuring.  indeed – as Fox suggests – the origins of my ‘comfort’ at having my friendgeneered buddies continually partially present, may be ancient indeed…  as old as the highly communal nature of homo sapien society itself.

this last fact alone is reason enough for advertisers and brands to take facebook and it’s rapidly expanding contemporaries very seriously indeed. it fulfills and deeply ingrained social need, and I fully anticipate that I will become as inseperable from my social network of choice as I am from my mobile phone.

but the reasons go beyond human social need…  the act of media planning in many regards is – at it’s basest – the identification and communication to, aggregated audiences (for obvious reasons I exclude direct forms of marketing from this description).  between October 06 and April 07, facebook increased it’s base from 500k to 3.69m; over the same period readership of the Sun dropped from 3.1m to 3.0m (source NRS).  facebook and social network sites per se are big, growing and committed aggregations of audience.

to that end, you can try putting an ad on facebook, but I wouldn’t recommend it; facebook is a place and space for friends, and a pushed media impact from a keen brand is an invasion – unless a brand suceeds in rewarding my just for watching it (for example Virgin Media feeding me live Big Brother updates, rather than a banner asking me to sign up now)…

the commercial model aside (till another day), other ways exist for brands to capitalise on this bigger-than-the-Sun audience (globally) of which I am a proud and active part; a facebook group created around your brand – or something for which it stands – is a great deal more involving that a bit of flash, and also acts as a badge for a social network user should they choose to join.  plus, with the opening up of application development to third parties, brands should be asking themselves what applications they could develop to graciously and appropriately feed and enhance online activities.

brands that understand how to talk to an audience in this way understand that it’s not how many friends you can reach; but how you talk to them, that counts.

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gaming

How Will You Shape The Internet?

Pmogit’s not something you have to answer right away because some clever people have designed a game that will tell you.  the game is a Passive Multiplayer Online Game (as opposed to a MMOG) and once you’ve signed up it will use your internet browsing habits to define what kind of internet user you are.  plus you get points, cool stuff, and can play additional games.

there’s a neat video that explains the concept here.  the Game has been developed by Duncan Gough, and I was pointed in it’s direction by the lovely Tom at 3rd Sense.  you can sign up for the game here.  do it.  just be careful which websites you visit!

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advertising, broadcasting, internet, planning, social networking

The Transmedia Tardis

the above video is from a MySpace page I came across with some clients whilst browsing some social networking sites last week.  it didn’t make much sense till Saturday, when during Doctor Who there was a reference to Mr Saxon’s election win.  the name rang a bell.  a few minutes digging this morning revealed the reason for the MySpace page, and also the suggestion of which character is due to make an appearance later this season.

it’s not only a great bit of marketing from the BBC – one that logged the existence of a character in my head long before any reference in the programme – but a piece of marketing that says much about the nature of the Doctor Who brand.  it follows on from a great bit of semiotic play from the first (contemporary) series in the form of Bad Wolf – references scattered across the series which pointed towards and larger more malevolent threat than any dealt with in individual episodes.

but above all this is a great bit of Transmedia storytelling.  TV does one job in broadcasting the crafted programme, the internet is doing another – inviting and encouraging the audience to explore the world behind the programme.  more than anything else this makes the world of Doctor Who seem bigger than it otherwise would on one media channel alone – something older as well as more contemporary audiences will have come to love and expect from the franchise…

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