Consumers (“people”) dont think about advertising much. And when they do, they rarely think about it as “Outdoor” or “Direct” or “Mobile”… They’re more likely to react in normal, emotional ways. That is, if the advertising is any good…
Contagious suggested today that we think about marketing in the following 4 brackets, with accompanying examples.
1. Advertising as entertainment. How can you engage and sustain your audience?
For example: Jay-Z and Bing teamed up to launch Decoded, Jigga’s book; Intel’s Museum of Me perhaps shows the weird skew to your real life that is Facebook, but a charming idea nonetheless; Arcade Fire’s Wilderness Downtown broke my laptop, but it’s a great execution; Mini Getaway in Stockholm; and of course my own favourite, Nike GRID.
2. Reacting in Real Time. How can you or your brands harness the power of a response? Can you turn disaster into an opportunity? Can you extend the relationship you have with consumers (people) who increasingly expect a dialogue with you?
Old Spice’s Responses; Mitsubishi’s Live Drive; James Ready’s Blank Bottle Cap recall; Kulula.com airline’s marketing during the World Cup (the link is only part of the whole campaign… sorry).
3. Work in Projects, not Campaigns (sure, there’s a time and a place, but real change comes with commitment – work that is born to live, not built to die).
This works off the idea of building a bonfire that draws people in to your point of view/ambition/(product). A little strange given that not long ago we talked about how “If you build it they will come” is an outdated model… but hey, that’s the Internet for you.
Good examples include GE’s Vacuum cleaner made from the floating plastic islands; Norte’s “best excuse ever”; WWF’s unprintable PDF; baby carrots sold as junk food; IBM’s Watson computer taking on the best Jeopardy contestants as a (de)volution of Deep Blue vs Kasparov (I write (de)volution, but really the Jeopardy test is arguably more interesting a measure of intelligence than chess… or is it simply memory?)
4. Marketing a service design. An interesting development from the first principal, furthering the idea that your advertising should enhance consumer’s existing behaviour.
Heineken’s Star Player is an incredible game to play during a group vieiwng event, and can easily be extended form Champion’s League football to include, for starters, US Open, Olympics, even X-Factor; Footlocker created the Sneakerpedia – sure, to enhance sneakerheads’ engagement with Nike, Adidas, etc… but really to develop incredible insight into that world for Footlocker, which can then be sold on to Nike etc when considering re-issues, collections to buy etc. It’s a CRM tool, really.
Below is a comment from Naomi Klein in the Guardian. Ten years after No Logo, Naomi Klein considers how corporate branding (marketing) has taken over America. I found this on Comme des Fuckdown who read it on somethingchanged, who must have quoted it from The Guardian. It’s relevant in a way, so I highlighted the bit I thought was most interesting.
“Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.”
Deep.
Thanks, Contagious.
