49. CONTENT IS THE NEW CURRENCY 1 Week = $1.6 Million Source: Chicago Tribune / Leisure Blogs / Turn It Up - http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/reznors-one-wee.html
57. ENGAGEMENT No. 1 seller in Personal Grooming category on Amazon.com for the first two months after launch. Source: MediaPost - http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=53172
88. IMAGE CREDITS IMG_6515 Tony de Marco Flickr Anonymous at Scientology in Los Angeles sklathill Flickr Brick Tamland Wallpaper Anchorman The Movie Web Site Brick Wallpaper Bloc Party Crowd @ Ogden Theatre Paul Isakson Flickr Google Screen Grab Google Google.com iPhone e-Learning content authoring Google Loves The iPhone Wii Networking Audio/Video X-OOM Software Brings Media Streaming To The Wii Starbucks Coffee Boston.com Aging Music Heroes' Haven Tracy Morgan Saturday Night Live Black Is The New President, Bitch Ghosts I - IV Nine Inch Nails Ghosts.nin.com
89. IMAGE CREDITS RCRD LBL_ + Widgets RCRD LBL rcrdlbl.com Whopper Freakout Burger King WhopperFreakout.com Shave Everywhere Philips / Norelco ShaveEverywhere.com The Coke Zero Game Coca-Cola Company CokeZeroGame.com The Coke Zero Game Coca-Cola Company CokeZeroGame.com Nike+ Healthy Living NYC Every Step You Take... Domino’s Pizza Builder Domino’s Pizza Dominos.com Domino’s BFD Pizza Builder Adverblog & Domino’s Pizza Domino's Pizza Builder & Dominos.com My Vegas Logic + Emotion My Vegas Is Showing: Brand Utility + Event Based Social Networking Digital Ethnography + Anthropology All logos taken from their respective Web sites.
90. IMAGE CREDITS Consumer Collaboration Paul Isakson [paul isakson] Kluster Kluster Kluster.com My Starbucks Idea Starbucks MyStarbucksIdea.com
91.
Notes de l'éditeur
Just wanted to share a few thoughts today on where things are moving. This isn’t the long-term outlook so much as the direction stuff is shifting today thanks to the growing realization of the power the Web holds to tell stories, engage people, and give them things that are more relevant and useful as far as brands are concerned.
So… the future of advertising…
… Just Kidding… But before I go on, that picture was from São Paulo, Brazil, where they’ve banned outdoor advertising. The entire city looks like that. Ghosts of ads past. And this is a result of what is driving the change in advertising and marketing - people are tired of the information pollution cluttering their surroundings and interrupting their lives…
Now, let’s chat about the future outlook for marketing…
The idea of brands and branding aren’t really going to change. How we go about building them is and will continue to do so…
Just for a quick reminder…
From the voice of the consumer. Much like the Golden Rule - Do unto others… If brands do helpful and good things for people, people will continue to like and use them - giving the brand their hard-earned money.
All about pushing things out at people. A one way process. Shove, shout, sell.
Just pay attention to me… Interruption
It has all become noise. Everybody is yelling and nobody has been listening. People aren’t sure what all the yelling is about anymore… to them it’s not really worth yelling about, so they’ve tuned it out and as a response, brands have just been increasing the volume… this is broken…
Smart brands are looking for ways to change that. If people are tuning out the noise, then it’s time to look for new ways that will help us connect better…
Instead of using marketing to shove things out and yell, it’s about creating things that draw people in. Things that make them want to come learn/see/engage more.
If a brand does this right, they’ll create a following. They’ll create their own passionate crowd…
… the digital space has become the primary hub for these gatherings to take place… it’s an ideal point for people to collect and connect, both with each other and with brands.
How can we create fans for our clients’ brands? How can we make our clients the rock stars that drew the crowd in the image a few slides back?
By helping them deliver more value around their products and services through their marketing.
Save them time. Save them energy. Give them something useful. Help them learn something. Give them a story to tell others… do little things that make their days a little better. A little easier to get through.
… Well, one of the ways agencies can help companies is in the area of product innovation. Applying creative insight to the product development process is an area agencies can add value to their clients…
So…
… Seth Godin was talking about this long ago…
CP+B - an agency who is doing a great job transitioning with the times was talking about this at least as early as a year and a half ago…
… NITRO, an agency picking up more and more buzz is focusing on this…
… and AQKA says it’s all one thing now - there is no separation between the marketing experience and the product experience… I think a few of you are Halo fans, look at what they did with the marketing for Halo 3 and how that was an experience akin to the game…
Think back… How many of you found out about Google from an ad? Now how many found out because someone told you about it?
… the iPhone… even though they do advertise it, look at what the ads do… they show you how you can USE it to make life better…
… the Wii … again they advertise it, but they show people experiencing the product and how fun it is…
… Starbucks. They built a global coffee empire without global, or even national, advertising. Sure, they did local and grass roots to some extent, but largely it was people carrying around the cups and telling their friends… the product marketed itself.
So, what if your product isn’t innately cool?
Enhance the product through content
… if you didn’t see this online or on SNL last week, look it up. Anyway…
Let’s look at the music industry, where “nobody buys music anymore”
Trent Reznor made $1.6 million in one week when people could get 9 songs for free. What’d he do? He made content that people believed was worth paying for.
It’s not just people who will pay for content though.
If you haven’t heard of RCRD LBL, they are a Web site that lets people download new and exclusive songs for free through partnerships they have with their own artists and other labels. Brands pay to be presenting sponsors of widgets/content and so the labels and artists can still get paid while fans get free music…
Here’s another quote from CP+B - they are all about creating content - not ads - content
So, what does content need to be or do? There are a few things, but since we have limited time I’ve picked two broader topics. The first is engagement. Content needs to be engaging if you’re going to create brand fans.
But that content can’t just be engaging for the sake of engagement. It needs to be focused on helping the clients grow their bottom line and build their brands.
Here’s a rumor / urban legend from CP+B that I thought was interesting… Bogusky doesn’t want to see the script for the content - he wants to see how it will be talked about - how and why will people care - what is going to make people want to interact or get involved…
What CP+B has done with engaging content for BK is working. At a time when fast food is under scrutiny and the industry is seeing weakened sales, BK has been seeing consistent, solid growth.
Tribal DDB’s engaging content for the Norelco Bodygroom helped it become the top seller in its category on Amazon
And here’s a new example that’s getting some buzz right now for Coke Zero…
O.K., now moving on from engagement… the second area of content I wanted to cover is one that’s getting a lot of buzz right now. Utility.
Ben Palmer from Barbarian Group was talking about the importance of utility a year and a half ago. They were getting tired of putting in several hours to build micro sites that took the same amount of time to create as software but only lived as long as the ad campaign that they were for did. They want to move away from this and create things that can be used for much longer timeframes and that will help strengthen the relationship a brand has with the people that use it.
Here’s a quote from Nick Law at R/GA… time is the new luxury… any way brands can help people save time in their over-committed days is a good thing… again, it’s about making their lives better…
R/GA helped Nike do this in creating Nike+
It’s not advertising. It’s an application, like Barbarian was talking about…
CP+B has helped Domino’s create an easy way to order a custom pizza…
Not only can you custom create your pizza, but you can name it and then save it so you can order it easily again in the future - even from your mobile phone. It doesn’t just stop with ordering your pizza though. Once you’ve ordered it, you can track how far along it is in getting to your door… if you’re short on time and need to order a pizza, why wouldn’t you go this route over their competition?…
… and here’s one that Critical Mass created for Vegas. It’s a social network that let’s you create your Vegas persona, because we all become someone else in Vegas, right… and then you can connect with your friends to share pics, plan your trips, make reservations, buy tickets to shows… for the Vegas lovers who go there more than a few times a year, this becomes a very useful tool…
Now, how can we help our clients create this kind of marketing?
Sony’s co-founder believed people didn’t know what they wanted because they didn’t know what was possible for the most part…
Steve Jobs holds a similar belief…
So how do you create things for people if they don’t know what they want or need until they see it? By deeply understanding them and getting to the things they aren’t saying, but are revealing. Getting to rich insights.
Here’s a quote on the importance and power of insight from the CEO of Digitas in this week’s Ad Age… This is why agencies are in a great position to help their clients now more than ever. We have smart, strategic, creative thinkers who can not only uncover these insights, but also apply them in meaninful ways…
Watch how people behave. How they shop. How they use things. How they go through a web site. How they play a game. Ask them questions. Listen. Ask more questions. Listen twice as much… Notice and note the areas that could be improved …
Some of the traditional ways we can uncover insights that still have their place and time… … it’s all about using the right tools and methods for what you need to learn… in addition to these, I wanted to highlight a couple things that are getting used and talked about more and more…
People are broadly and publicly sharing more about their lives than ever before. We can learn a lot about what people want and need simply by looking at what they’re sharing…
Another interesting thing brands can do is collaborate more closely with their agencies and customers/consumers - especially in the area of product innovation that we talked about before…
The Web is enabling collaboration to take place easier and quicker… companies can share information with consumers and get their input directly … agencies can pull insights out of that information exchange as well as get quick feedback on ideas as they develop… the agency and company can then take the learnings and insights to create things people need or want, even if they didn’t realize these things when they were talking to them… this goes along with a growing idea in the planner blog world for Brands in Beta … where brands are constantly tweaking and improving by getting real-time, on-going feedback from consumers… But to the earlier quotes from Sony and Apple… the web is enabling people to now know more about what they didn’t know. As this continues, brands can get even better insights and feedback, which is going on right now…
Kluster is a site putting this idea in action. It’s a social network for elevating and developing ideas. When you have some time, go check them out.
Starbucks is putting this into action as well. They’ve been under scrutiny lately and now they’re looking to get ideas from passionate Starbucks drinkers.
… I’ve probably gone just over my 15-minutes… (sorry Ben) … but I’ll close it up and ask that if you only remember one thing from all of this…
Think about this on whatever you’re creating now and next… how can we make this make peoples’ lives better…
For real this time…
Last thing… if you want to talk more about any of this, PLEASE come by my office or grab me when I’m walking by. I’d love to chat. And if you want to stay on top of what I’m thinking around things like this, you can read them on my blog…
Thanks for your time and now I’ll turn it over to Ben…