Are "ad campaigns" dead?

Until recently we lived in an oligarchic media world where a few TV networks ruled the roost. News came from newspapers, usually only a couple general ones in most markets. There was no internet. No YouTube. No facebook. No world of 500 channels, no Tivo, video on demand, Apple Television, Blackberry’s, iPhones or satellite radio.

Advertising then was about creating one-way messages aimed at a target audience. The notion was to pinpoint a single audience of 25-30 year-old single females with post-secondary education and household income of $75,000 +, or 18-24 beer drinking males in urban centres, and create a singular message born out of an insight into their behavior. If you had enough money, you’d create three, or a campaign, executions of the same singular idea to keep things fresh.

In order to maximize the amount of times the audience would be exposed to the message, advertisers and agencies negotiated large buys at the beginning of the year, and then they’d hammer the message home time and time again.

And while there are now 500 channels, and the internet has surpassed broadcast tv in terms of time spent with per week and over 67 million people are on Facebook, ad agencies are still planning campaigns and media as if we still lived in the old world.

We think it’s time to rethink this notion. And we think it presents a huge opportunity to advertisers.

First of all, recognize that your brand doesn’t just appeal, or interact with one “demographic”, but that it could fit into several different sub-cultures, or communities, in different ways. And while your brand should have a core set of values, and a personality, just like you or me it can communicate and interact with different communities of people in different ways, as long as it stays true to itself.

Secondly, it’s time to realize that you can use the fragmented media world we live in to your advantage, because it let’s you get closer to core groups of people who share similar interests and values – subcultures. They in turn use their social networks to get more like-minded people involved. And you can do this for the same, or less, than you would have spent blowing your budget on traditional campaigns.

So your brand can then become about being inclusive, rather than exclusive. It can be more relevant to more people, which drives ROI.

To achieve this nirvana, advertisers and agencies have to rethink how media is bought. Many large advertisers, especially here in Canada, are still buying the bulk of their media at the beginning of the year in order to enjoy cost savings. But then they and their agency are locked into a course of action that can result in nothing other than a traditional campaign, with at best an online “component”.

However, rethinking the whole notion of what a campaign is and how a brand can be built can result in much higher savings because the money spent on expensive traditional media is lessened greatly, just to get the ball rolling, or not at all.

Which is why we think we can do with 5 or six bucks what most agencies need ten to achieve.
And that’s what we call Return on Involvement.

Comments

[Alex Luna]

I think we should not think about ad campaigns anymore, but of ad conversations. We, as an agency, start the talk, receive feedback and then reply, creating a chain and a relationship. The brand can and will change the subject of the conversation according to the consumers.

The great lesson is: stop giving orders to the consumers, and start taking orders. That's how we should do business, isn't it?

Sounds thrilling. Ain't it great?

[Andy Shortt]

I think you're right. The new marketing is definitely a two-way proposition. Advertisers can take it further by building the marketing right into the product. It all starts with a notion of how we can use the brand to make the peoples' lives better.

So now it's not hat we can tell people, but what can we do for them? Do we give them a forum to have a conversation with our brand and like-minded individuals? Do we entertain them? Do we help them get involved in a larger social cause? Do we provide them with a service to make their brand experience better?

It's a great time to be creative, because being creative means going outside your comfort zone and exploring new possibilities.

But it all comes back to a very old-fashioned notion. How do we get people to connect with our brand?

[Alex Luna]

The same way you make people connect with you: be interesting, be interested in them and how they relate to you, listen twice more than you talk, don't be a bore, don't try to push on them, and most important of all, enjoy.

[Brian Allen]

Have you read the "Elongation Tail of Brand Communications"?

I believe it is related quite closely to this.

Here's a link:
blaiq.typepad.com/occams_razor/files/the_elongating_tail_of_brand_communication_by_mohammed_iqbal.pdf