Uneven Distribution.

When Conversations Become Content (part 2)

February 6th, 2008

In the first part of this post, I talked about the changes we are already seeing to mainstream entertainment and news media. It wasn’t long ago that people were watching their TV’s and reading their papers. But now people are using the internet, and it’s replacing all other forms of media and entertainment at a cracking pace. So in this second part I’m going to discuss what this means exactly for advertising and brands online. There’s only 2 parts, and it was all written as one, but I just thought I’d break it into two because it’s rather long for a blog post (ironic, really).

Traditionally brands have advertised above the line, in entertainment and news media, while utilising marketing and PR for conversations with their consumers (when and if they actually ever happened). In the future however, the conversational (PR) and entertainment (advertising) overlap. This means future digital advertising has to be part of the conversation, while at the same time the brand conversations have to work as advertising. This presents a few issues, firstly that conversations are personal and honest whereas advertising is often perceived as neither of these, and secondly that brand communications have to be truly unified.

In the case of personal and honest conversations, the medium may be the solution. Many early examples of online brand conversations failed due to perceived astro-turfing, resulting in the public turning on the brand and creating a huge amount of negative noise. However the use of video in these conversations will lend a sense of authenticity and honesty that, if done well, could be extremely positive. An important point here is that a brand cannot just manufacture authenticity and honesty, they will actually have to believe in it.

This authenticity will also require a unified brand message. This point may seem a bit contradictory to what so many analysts and futurists have been talking about personalisation and localisation being the biggest future trends. The real art here will be taking that message and personalising it for each individual conversation. This personalisation of a unified message will result in consistency of the brand experience, and this in turn will support the authenticity of the conversation.

Loic Le Meur, the creator of Seesmic, actually used Seesmic to ask his users what they thought of advertising on the site. The question wasn’t purely theoretical either, it was posed by a Loreal marketing executive interested in how brands could be integrated into the service. The responses from Seesmic users predictably started with a lot of “No, please don’t do it!”. But as the conversation evolved there was a realisation of the potential to rethink advertising, “turning participators into the advertisers”.

Google has already showed us how these conversations can be used to create a positive brand message. Loic Le Meur began by asking a few questions about whether his company should join Google’s OpenSocial. Seesmic users replied with comments, opinions, and more questions about both Seesmic and OpenSocial. The conversation that resulted culminated in a Google representative posting a video offering answers to all of the questions posed. While this was all happening it was simply a conversation, but once over it was a truly succesful and authentic ad.

So how do we get started? Firstly all the brand custodians need to be aware of, and preferably utilising these technologies. Without understanding there is little chance that any real value can be found in these new channels. From there, brands just need to get out there. Look at the media opportunities on these new channels and get your message in there. If you’re reaching your market then you’ll no doubt illicit some form of response, and this is where there is an opportunity for a positive conversation. This is the simplest way to succeed, simply participate in the conversation and make your brand experience innate to your conversation. If you want to go even further you will be able to instigate conversations. Give people a reason to talk, ask questions about the brand, products, your competitors, or about the attitudes of the segment.

To take this even further we could start considering Captology in the area of advertising. This would require massive paradigm shifts in the brand/marketing/agency relationships and is still a long way off, but the idea that by changing communication with users to optimise so as to influence people is extremely exciting (and hopefully positive for both advertisers and consumers). Take this idea further still to location aware mobile aplications, and suddenly you’re providing a localised, customised, positive advertising experience to your customers.

We’ve known for a long time that the way people experience their entertainment and news is going to change. Finally the exact scale and nature of this change is becoming apparent, and we need to begin considering how marketing and advertising is going to operate in this new space. We’ve already seen the emergence of brand conversations on a macro
scale through the corporate greening of recent years, and in the future
a simple conversation between real brand representatives and real
consumers could be far more powerful than a $500,000 TVC.

Links
Seesmic World Project
Loic Le Meur discusses advertising in Seesmic
Physics lectures online. This isn’t a surprise anymore. It’s just awesome.
Google Open Social questions and answers on Seesmic
Stanford Captology Studies
The absolutely nutty Seemic lads talking about integrating brands into their platform.
Rumours of Yahoo launching a life-casting service are starting already

Comments

I think there is a significant tension between the twin desires for personalisation and unification of brand messages. I think it’s difficult to see how a brand message can be both personalised and unified.
If personalisation is taken as meaning presenting a relevant and individual message to all of the people in a given target market segment, it becomes a near-impossible task to present a unified brand image. This tension could presumably be addressed to an extent by astute market segmentation, but I suspect that with fragmentation of markets and the way consumers move fluidly between social and media niches it becomes harder to pin people in a particular market segment. Too many people operate across too many conversations to present a truly unified brand if you’re attempting to atomise the market (to whatever degree) and personalise the brand conversation. Besides, you would still ultimately have the problem of presenting a relevant, appropriate and consistent brand message across multiple segments. Make the market segments bigger and you lose personalisation, make them smaller and presenting a unified brand message becomes impossible.

And it will only be the most confident brand owners that will be willing to open up their message to upstart consumers and their conversation (with associated critique). When you’ve spent a lifetime building up control of your brand, you don’t relinquish it lightly!

But then, I’m not a marketer.