Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

In This Article on GigaOM,  Liz Gannes reported on some statements made at the OMMA Global conference by Mark Kvamme, an industry insider, where he basically stated that if marketers harness the power of Social Media, they shouldn’t have to pay for advertising anymore.

It’s a bold statement (which goes over well at industry conferences I hear).  And if you’re interested in the finer points of his argument, feel free to read through Gannes piece which seemed to cover the supporting arguments pretty well (shrewedly highlighting the vested interest the speaker had for at least some of his remarks).  But for the real fun – as happens so often in the online world – DON’T forget to read the comments.

I mean, sure – the idea that some new platforms like Twitter or Facebook or others have low or no cost of entry is wonderful, and when we are convincing stakeholders of opportunities for testing and learning we advise Clients to avoid sinking crazy amounts of money in developing ‘owned’ platforms.  But to take this fact and leap to say that user generated media equates to free marketing is missing some crucial considerations, and it can be misleading for Clients who are entering the space.

1.  Just because you have a message, doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear it. If we start from examining Human Behavior, then - don’t take it personally – no one wants to be ‘friends’ with your Brand’s Mission Statement. Brands should take time and care to determining their place, actions, and voice in social media, and ‘tune’ them in order to participate fluidly and gracefully.  This is not child’s play.  Look at marketers do it consistently well – do they seem to be careless in terms of  their approach?  Are they repeating their :30 tagline on their Facebook page?

2. And just because users can spread your message doesn’t mean that they will. Figuring out why people may want to pass on a message or ask their friends to do something has to be considered in the actual development of what that message or experience is.  This takes time, effort and yes, investment.  In fact you may need to be monitoring the space, because if they are already talking about you, they are quite likely not using your talking points.  And trust me, there are lots of companies out to make money on the fact that these tools need power and utility, as well as smart people to use them. Even Coke’s Facebook success in supporting a pair of fans who started their page is a tribute to targeted investing.  Coke recognized their fans’ serious skills –  then rewarded and supported them.  If passion in the community is there then you’ve got a good shot, but the work doesn’t stop there.

3.  There’s more to it than just ‘do it’. I find comments like ‘Brands just need to harness the power of social media’ or ‘you just need to figure out how to work in this new world’ are pretty glib statements.  Brands can test and learn here, sure, but perhaps an approach might be nice?  Maybe something that starts with questions like, ‘Are my customers using these tools?  Or are the influencers of my customers using these tools?’  Maybe I need to consider producing some content for users to interact with?  Be on the lookout for an article by Michelle Davidson, a colleague of mine, talking about the hidden high cost of User Generated Content.  She and others are talking about behavioral economics and user expectations in social media spaces – and yes, you may have to ‘give to get’. Placing any old content into any old free platform does not constitute a strategic use of social media, nor does it guarantee you an overnight success story in terms of viral buzz.

4. Speaking of viral buzz – just because a video ‘went viral’ does not mean that no money was spent on it. There are actually processes and procedures that marketers and agencies can put in place to help successful videos to spread faster and get into featured lists. And even if the production is done on a dime, the idea needs to be developed in the first place.  But don’t assume the inverse of this thinking proves the rule: your :30 spot may not have viral potential. Too often it is tempting to think that ‘We spent all this money on this commercial – of COURSE it has viral potential.’  Sadly, this may not necessarily be true, and all the preparation in the world can’t make up for the fact that there really are ‘different horses for different courses’.

I could go on and on, like how calling online marketing ‘Advertising’ gets my blood boiling, but in the end I think that a successful marketer will strive to understand the social space and how to use it, which takes investigation, thinking, planning, creativity and yes – investing.  I would agree with the speaker that social media has changed things for marketers hugely, and how they spend their money is one of the most important considerations they have to make right now.  But I don’t think that soundbites about marketing being free are helpful or accurate.  Free doesn’t come cheap.

Disclaimer: I was working in my office during the convention:  I wasn’t there.  Maybe he added some caveats?

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Have you heard about flattr.com (@flattr)?

It’s a site currently in closed beta which tries to take on the problem of making money with user generated content. It is only logical that, in a world where old content business models are failing due to people’s behavior of not paying for content, they would also come up with a way to solve the problem of content creators not being paid for their efforts.

This idea is based on the existing behavior of voting (or liking/disliking) content, only that a “like” by flattr users will bring money to those whose content is liked. The amount is based on how much you decide to pay into your flattr account divided by the amount of “likes” you clicked.

Let’s see what happens. Is the social web generation really as stingy as always assumed, or is it just that there hasn’t been an adequate way of doing it in the social web? We will see.

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Sometimes it takes a long time for the simplest ideas to take shape.  Flighttrackers have been around for a while, however nothing has been around for social media that had total accuracy (tripit and dopplr do connect to your social profiles, but they don’t do it in real time). In fact, we pitched a similar idea to LH earlier this year.

Finally, Lufthansa launched a service, called MyskyStatus, which allows users to have real-time flight data of their flight being automatically posted to their Twitter and Facebook. Not only does this mimic the already existing human behavior of people tweeting their arrival, it provides more accuracy and also twitters for you when you are still in the air.

What’s more, it doesn’t just work for Lufthansa, but pretty much all airlines, even when you’re booked on a competitor airline. Finally a common sense move based in the understanding that as a brand today, you cannot create proprietary experiences that last very long: you have to do something for people that makes a qualitative difference in their lives, enabled by not limited to your own brand. In fact, by offering this service, it could well be a first mover advantage that positively attaches to the brand image of Lufthansa. Kudos!! Next step: get existing services such as tripit and dopplr to integrate.

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WWF’s Earth Hour today launched a world first social mapping platform aimed at illustrating the global mandate for action on climate change.

The new ‘Show Your Vote‘ platform, developed as part of Earth Hour’s Vote Earth campaign, asks people to show their Vote for Earth (over Global Warming) in the lead up to the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen this December.

The platform was developed using Google technology and launched with Earth Hour creative partner Leo Burnett at Google’s Creative Sandbox event last night in Sydney.

http://www.earthhour.org/

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Kay Karstensen had an idea: a HMO (German: Krankenkasse) for young people. He presented his business model using this video. The idea was picked up by a leading German medical insurance and now is running under the name Kranke Kasse (a play on the word Krankenkasse, meaning sick HMO) The site at http://www.krankekasse.de features all the social network tools for the next generation of insured people, and features fun promotions such as a lottery where 99 of the first 100 entrants win roadkill toys. Sick? Yes. Innovative? Definitely!

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Just in the last week I saw a surge of this type of Twitter behavior in my Twitter-network. I am not going to name people, to avoid looking like I am bashing them, in an outrageous attempt to copy their strategy.

Tell me if I am way off here, or if you think what I am saying is obvious and naive: In my research of strategies and tactics with which people try to increase their followership on twitter, I came across this, at first sight, counter-intuitive strategy: just bash the people that recently followed you.

You could say that this is one of the basic way Twitter works: when you post something interesting or controversial, people who disagree will join in and ultimately more people will follow you. However, the strategy I am describing works for people who have nothing controversial or interesting to share.

1) you post a tweet, and then wait until someone follows you because of it. For example: you post a funny video on apples and then get followed by an apple farmer. This would be an occasion to essentially retweet and ridicule the reason why this someone followed you. It is important that most of your followers and their followers would agree with your ridicule or find it funny. This way, if you gauged correctly, you get more followers because they think you are cool for bashing the follower or at least laughed at it, wondrously.

2) This is the more girly version: you just WAIT until someone follows you and then tweet to everyone, asking if they know this person, because you’re not sure about them, and you’re, like, totally worried, and stuff. Again, people might find this funny, and do the bashing for you and thank you for it by following you.

So essentially, if you got nothing to say, you can still go back to the high-school bully or girly way of making sure you are the most popular kid in class.

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In an article for TIME, Lev Grossman talks about how Facebook is really best designed for the middle-aged, not the young. He lists 10 reasons Facebook is for ‘old fogies’ such as:  it’s for finding people you’ve lost track of, we don’t get drunk and post bad pictures, people use it for business contact, we don’t want to ‘do’ anything, but just sit back read and judge, we want to share pictures of our children etc.

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Looking to connect to planners on twitter?

Misentropy put together a list.

http://www.misentropy.com/planners-who-twitter.html

Also I really enjoy his series “1o Things I didn’t know until last week”. What a great idea.

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We all know brands have been making some forays into social media an networking platforms.

Apart from monitoring the twittersphere for spotting trends, and buying ad space there also seems to a new use: personalized brand reputation management.

Today, Adage’s Chris Abraham reports that he was contacted by the Director of Social and Emerging Media of PepsiCo, via Twitter apologizing for some inappropriate advertising Chris had complained about previously.

Here is the quoted Tweet.

I saw your tweet and I just wanted to make sure I responded personally. We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologize and please know it won’t run again. Also, thanks for the feedback and the Digg, it is important to discuss these types of issues.

My best friend committed suicide and this is a topic very close to my heart. So again I offer my deepest apologies.

Feel free to follow-up via twitter to me - @boughb or Huw - @huwgilbert or respond to this email.

Thanks, Bonin

It’s safe to assume that we need to be prepated for more of this. Not only do we have to listen more closely to what really moves people in the context of their daily lives to avoid creating advertising without a human purpose in the first place, but we also have to be ready to have systems, process and people in place that deal with people’s expectations and outrage when brands do mess up their communications.

In the case of Chris, the apology worked, and it’s a no-brainer: using the personal nature of social media does have more oomph than a stale public apology from a faceless company.

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With traditional forms of advertising being under pressure more and more, it seems banners have been sold as the “digital” way to keep doing mass communication. Fact though is,  since banners also communicate single-minded propositions, just like a TV ad, they really are no different, except you can maybe target them better (which is actually not always done) and measured better (also not always done). However, the modus operandi these days still for agencies seems to be that as long as you slap the label “digital” on something, it’s easier to sell. But, let’s face it, it’s still just advertising.

Looking at banners closely from a people’s point if view, banner advertising is one of the most annoying forms of advertising, maybe even more annoying than TV-Spots because they interrupt people’s task flows. So it is only natural that their effectiveness has been questioned for quite some time now. If you look at digital marketing budgets and the percentage of how much of it is spent on media versus creating rich experiences where the media buys should lead, unforunately, usually only a fraction is spent on creating the experiences. The mindset of “reach” is still more prevalent than that of “relevance” and offering people value in exchange for their attention and time. Banners are just messaging, and rarely have included meaningful experiences.

According to Adweek, AvenueA/Razorfish is trying to change all that with a new format they call AdLife and have been testing with a roster of their clients. AdLife banners have built in social-media features such as customer testimonials.

Singh [global social media lead for Avenue A/Razorfish] said efforts like AdLife are part of an industry-wide effort to solve a critical challenge: How to attract consumers’ attention at a time when display ads are ignored and customers rely more on what others say than advertisers.

“What’s driving this is the recognition that social influence has a big influence on purchases and brand affinity,” he said. “Customers listen to other customers more than anything else. It makes sense for the ad unit to carry customer voices.”

This seems to make sense at first sight, and will probably improve CTRs and bring value to AARFs ad clients.

However, there are two things I feel weary about:

1. If the focus is still on the effort on how to attract consumers attention from the brand point of view, you are not addressing the issue that they want a value exchange for that attention. It’s advertising think. Focus what people want first, then on how the brand can make a meaningful contribution. Not the other way around.

2. It is true that people listen to other people more than to messages. However, if you carry a consumers voice in an ad, it is still an ad. Testimonial advertising isn’t exactly new, and therefore is just, well, advertising. Also, social media work best, not only when people create the content, but also have the feeling it happens in the context of a social community the call their own. Can a banner ever provide that context?

So, apart from AARF’s honorable quest to keep deliver innovative solutions for their client’s problems, how much of an innovation is this in terms of focusing on creating human brand acts as opposed to delivering new forms of ads? Not much. It’s a more like hitting the pause button on the undeniable fact that pure messaging media will have to become de-emphasized in the favor of building holistic brand experiences.

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