Be Sweet, Please Retweet

There has always been something alluring about the myth of the creative advertising genius. A Mad Man style maven sitting in a palatial corner office, twirling a pencil and then devising a diabolical way to sell more cigarettes, cars or potato chips. But the new media landscape has made a mockery of that. It used to be enough to make ads that people remembered when they watched them. Now, being a great creative means being smart enough to ensure people watch them at all.

Early this year, I spoke at PromaxBDA Europe - a TV marketing conference in the Czech Republic. Prague is a beautiful city. Look outside your window and you will be rewarded with an exquisite gothic skyline marred only by a single building — the Žižkov TV tower. When I asked about it, I was told that the Soviets thought that if they beamed out a strong enough TV signal, they could blanket out any competing programming from Western countries. It was a cunning plan and quite possible in a world where television had a monopoly on moving pictures and sound in households. For the last 50 years or so, you could literally buy people’s attention. Now, it’s not so easy.

On the Internet, there is no concept of prime time. You can program television, but when online people discover and consume content, it is often because it has been sent to them by other people they know. Whether a tweet on Twitter, a blog post on Wordpress or a shared link on Facebook, the most influential distribution assets now are not broadcast networks but rather audience networks.

Consider the recent transformation of the social media space. Social networks have evolved from an orgy of self-expression to brand communication channels and tools of political influence. The new prize is realtime search. Traditional search is great for finding non-time-sensitive material, but if you want to know what people are saying and thinking right now about your brand, TV show or anything else, you need to be able to dip into the live stream of social chatter and link sharing.

From a creative perspective, real-time search creates a unique challenge. Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake. You would be surprised how few marketers take that into account and are left wondering when their viral campaigns are socially vaccinated before they get off the ground.

Funnily enough, one of the best examples of smart social creativity this year came from far North Australia. Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign took three Grand Prix awards at the Cannes advertising awards this year. The campaign, which was ostensibly just promoting a caretaker job on Hamilton Island, generated more than AU$332 million in media coverage, 34,684 video entries from 197 countries and eight million site visits with an average of eight minutes and 15 seconds spent on the site per visitor. What made the campaign so effectively viral was not how it looked or where the ads were placed, but rather the power of its core idea. After all, who wouldn’t want to get paid to hang out on a desert island? Great ideas are like social candy to consumer networks.

Social media doesn’t mean the death of TV advertising, but it does place it into context. Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods.

It takes true creative genius.

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What do you think? As always - I welcome your thoughts and feedback through the community forum. Click here to comment.

Comments

[Dana Ashmore]

Formerly a stay at home mom, it is difficult to enter the public realm, and be taken seriously. Innately, I create art and write because that is who I am. I was good at it before I went to college for it. The degree just makes me "qualified" in other people's eyes. I hope there is a platform where people like me can be heard without the self righteous snobbery of an impressive resume getting in the way.
Getting attention is not easy. I have tried to offer a public service to my community by heralding its main attraction, fossils. My goal was not monetary compensation, or self promotion, but to improve the available information in the public domain. Google search yields my images now, but my peers are oblivious to it. Not one of my pertinent messages has ever been forwarded by my followers, and frankly, one sided relationships never work.

[edelmaria]

Insightful article on audience networks and how to target advertising campaigns but there is something inherently depressing about "the peoples brand". Depressing but true, it seems to take us further away from our true selves in that we have now moved from human beings to consumers to brands.. what next I wonder?

[EL]

I'll ditto edelmaria's observation which also speaks to Dana's dilemma of trying to get attention. As a former-starving-artist turned educational technology "artist", I'm sensitive to what I see as the commodification of life. My innate response is to barricade, ignore and filter. I resent the relentless intrusion of capitalism into my psyche and I use all the technological and cognitive means I have available to be "fight back." When I'm not exhausted by it, I love it. I vote with my dollars too.

Advertisers would do well to hire people like me, to find out how to get to people like me, because I will continue to fight back.

[Austin]

I would disagree with the notion that 'the people's brand' is a limiting and violating concept. It's something that's always existed, even if we didn't have a name for it. You ask your friends, family, and neighbors about a product or a service. These have always been our most valuable sources of 'advertising' and continue to be so. The migration of this type of social referral from our backyard fences to the digital realm should be celebrated and embraced.

Marketers and advertisers need to do more to understand this kind of 'virality' by giving users value within the campaigns themselves. Whether it be entertainment, visceral stimulation, or an old-fashioned product message, the end product of an advertisement now is a share, or a post, or a tweet.

The spread of real-time information has made it tougher, yes, but by attaching offers and ads to valuable content and by making ad that are themselves valuable content, the real-time phenomenon only increases the dissemination of words, feelings, and ideas - and as long as yours is the message to be spread, that's an advertiser's dream.

[tobias]

great post. i work at a realtime search engine (OneRiot) that exists to help users find the most relevant content being shared right now by users on the social web. as usage of these engines takes off, it has huge implications for brands wanting to get in front of these users. For example, SEO doesn’t apply (it's replaced by active sharing of content by influential people) and SEM needs rethinking (how do brands react fast enough to capitalize on trending topics and bursty search activity?). All fascinating stuff – both for the marketer _and_ the search engine (who makes money from the advertiser, and so needs them to be successful). We’re working on some great solutions here (I’ll spare you the shill ;-). I’d be very happy to talk more. Tobias GM, OneRiot

[emptyofwhat]

I find this part the most interesting

"What made the campaign so effectively viral was not how it looked or where the ads were placed, but rather the power of its core idea"

Its almost as if it is saying that the most successful ad was for the best product. What a concept!

After years of having crap crammed down our throats by marketers whoose only goal was to relieve of more of our money, the tide is finally turning. Now you must actually be hawking something of value (even if it is only entertainment value) to get our attention.

oh boy do I love the internet!

[Kerry Rego]

"You would be surprised how few marketers take that into account and are left wondering when their viral campaigns are socially vaccinated before they get off the ground." This is going to be running around in my brain all day. Great read!

[Chris Simon]

Real-time search is a unique challenge from a creative perspective, but it’s worrying that some in charge of running the social audience networks are the guys with pony-tails twirling pointers at what they call their filofax phones from their palatial 2009 corner offices. A lot of them are ex trad-ad and today’s network-tv and internet guys. Some, God forbid, are judging what makes workable mobile video-ad campaigns, where audiences literally lie at the world’s touch. It does not take any genius to realize that user experience will disappoint if other channels simply recreate on what is now an optimal environment. In the same way as you must know social technologies, you must have studied characteristics uniquely enabled by handsets. Some ‘pony-tailers’ are only capable of just touching their phones and crave followers for their tweets more than audiences for their direction of someone else’s stunning art interaction.

Look at how many brands the above digital mad men mavericks have already destroyed worldwide these last few years up until yesterday and will continue doing so into next year and after! The only effective campaign you’re “able” to mention is certainly one of my favourites, being Queensland’s best job. I don’t think its funny how smart it was; just extremely good branding of an aspiring destination and proof amongst quite a “few” of the entries, what stunning art direction lies in the hands of “a few” amongst worldwide audiences. Brisbane, BTW, has been gaining a reputation in good worldwide multimedia planning over the last decade.

Social media doesn’t mean the death of anything and yes, it does place everything into context. The context simply being that the world changed faster than any one person claiming expertise could ever predict and that media and marketing would become slower than consumer behaviour. Something “only a few of us” were predicting a long time ago.

There are no “tricks” in turning audiences into brand advocates and “true creative genius” has been around since Sandro Botticelli and even well before that “renaissance”.

Audience advocates convert from just good old hard work and understanding that social media:

1/ Is today’s most empowered involvement medium and environment, (not by any specific brand name, no matter what the claimed figures currently).

2/ A brand experience environment that “can” exceed expectations.

3/ A new commercial television, radio, press and broadcast station.

4/ A transmission medium for mobile phones, the internet and a streaming channel.

5/ A deliverer of audited audience data and, perhaps, the most sophisticated and in depth data the world has ever witnessed, as of today.

And if anyone really wants to know my biggest concern for the whole wide world today, it is who is currently claiming and who might in the near future be claiming to create reliable, verified data issued without bias or opinion based on this good old hard work.

It’s absolutely no longer about i-anything or the PC. But, boy, it needs new Personal Communicators. Bye for now or BFN. (I like both).

[psp games]

I like the inside content of this article because it is targeting inherently to the market. I am jest wondering what next?

[r4]

I agree with the post that Marketers and advertisers need to do more to understand this kind of 'virality' by giving users value within the campaigns themselves. Whether it be entertainment, visceral stimulation, or an old-fashioned product message, the end product of an advertisement now is a share, or a post, or a tweet.

[vitamine h]

I agree.In the era of the Internet and social media, it's just important for us to think before we post content to a forum,a blog or our accounts on services like Facebook,Linkedin,Twitter etc.Yes this is not easy to turn audience into advocatea but social media is that medium that helps to do this.