Michelle Novoselov, Social Media Community Manager for Blackglass, provides her discourse on how the underlying dynamics between Consumers, Brands and Content has rapidly changed over time.

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by Michelle Novoselov, Social Media Community Manager for Blackglass, an online marketing
agency.
In December, my colleague Adam and I attended the AIMIA Future of Digital event in Sydney.
There were so many fantastic and thought-provoking insights throughout the event that, rather
than riffing on just one, I thought I'd write about a general theme that seemed to resonate in the
different presentations.
I wrote about individuality in my first blog post and this idea came up again at the event. To be
specific, marketers and advertisers are together seeing a slow-burn move towards consumers
being more and more in control of their own content. Why?
The market, every market, is flooded with products and services. Not only that, we are inundated
with a myriad choices on how to access and interact with these brands all along the path to
purchase. What this means is that these days people can consume what they want, when they
want. Don't like TV? Fine, stream 30 Rock online. Morning radio a little on the boring side?
Connect Spotify to your audio system. You only have to look at the phenomenon of multi-
screening to see that we're all getting better and better at keeping ourselves distracted.
With so much competition and so many options, consumers can completely ignore the brands
and brand messages that they don't like or don't feel are relevant to them. Compare this to the
past when you really didn't have much choice but to watch prime time TV when you got home
from work.
Smart brands have realised they can wriggle themselves out of this modern dilemma by creating
marketing experiences and content that put consumers in the driving seat, on the throne even. A
great example of this was Lady Gaga's ARTPOP app created around the release of her most
recent album of the same name. It encouraged users to create their own GIFs and share them
both within the app and on wider social media.
What's really driving this idea of ‘consumer power' is that the more someone appreciates a
marketing concept, the longer and deeper their engagement will be. So that when it comes time to
purchase, they will go with the brand that they have an intimate, pre-existing relationship with.
Source:
http://blackglass.com.au/the-evolution-of-the-relationship-between-consumers-brands-and-
content