Another brilliant TED talk by Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland.
Brands that don’t exist
I love Herbert Simon’s idea that we live in an ‘attention economy’. In a world where we are busier than ever, the ideas or brands that we choose to spend our time with have the most currency. Those that we choose to spend no time with don’t exist. This poses an incredible challenge for companies that are used to buying attention from mass media audiences that are declining every day.
Today we have absolute control over how we consume media and interact with brands. We can DVR our favourite TV shows and skip the ads. We can install the AdBlock Firefox plugin and ignore banner ads. We can choose what organisations we want to ‘Like’ and communicate with on Facebook. We download our music from iTunes. We get our news from the RSS feeds that we chose to subscribe to.
How can marketers respond to this?
There are a lot of stopgap solutions we can put in place. We can still reach consumers through interruptive mass media advertising, although it’s getting harder every day. We can experiment with new ways to make digital media more interruptive and more like traditional media. In the short to medium term these will work, but I don’t believe that they are really viable long-term solutions to the fundamental problem.
As far as I can see, there’s only one real long-term solution. We need to learn to create our own media. The terms ‘owned media’ and ‘earned media’ are not new and they are certainly in vogue amongst digital people right now. But very few brands are actually doing it.
There’s no doubt that creating your own media is unpredictable. When you buy 2000 TARPs from the TV networks, you know pretty much exactly what you’ll get. You can probably model the sales increase you’ll get from the TV buy pretty accurately too. But when you put 80% of your budget into creating content that will earn you media, you don’t really know what will happen. It’s scary stuff.
Luckily the skills that advertising agencies have learned over the past 60 years will be more relevant than ever in a world where we need to make our own content to create media. Audiences will continue to congregate around the most compelling ideas and content, it’s just that this won’t necessarily be a 30 minute network sitcom. It could well be something created by an agency.
The incredible storytelling skills that have been built up in the advertising industry will need to be applied in new and different ways. A lot of our work will still end up as linear video content, but instead of making one extremely expensive 30 second clip, we’ll need to make executions in any number of lengths or formats at much lower costs.
But sometimes the skills required won’t be storytelling - sometimes that brand will need to use technology skills to create a software platform that becomes owned media. The most commonly cited example of this is Nike+, which has become an integral part of the product and has brought new relevance to a brand that was rapidly losing ground with runners.
In any case, the thinking will always have to start with “what can we make that will be entertaining or useful for our audience?” rather than “how do we communicate this message to our audience?”
Some are getting this right. Wieden + Kennedy’s ‘Write the Future’ spot for Nike has had nearly 15 million views in just a few weeks. They spent $12 million (US) on production, and little or nothing on paid media. Fiat EcoDrive is a technology system that integrates into the car and helps drivers be more environmentally friendly, earning Fiat free media around the globe and bringing real credibility to their brand’s eco-friendly positioning.
The brands and agencies that figure out how to create their own media will ultimately survive and thrive as the currency of the attention economy rises. Those that don’t adapt won’t exist.
The emergence of a new media system is typified by a period of transposition, where the behavioural grammar of the previous system remains dominant. The first television shows were radio shows with people talking directly into camera. The first films were stageplays that had been filmed. And the first marketing forays online took what we knew about media and branding from broadcast media and applied it to a whole new space.
But digital is different. Digital is not a channel. It’s a suite of platforms, channels and tactics that will, ultimately subsume its parents entirely. Digital marketing is not simply a new place to disperse persuasive symbols, but the emergence of any entirely new behavioural grammar, as companies and their customer begin to engage with each other in entirely new ways in entirely new spaces, where everyone has an equal voice.
From this MUST READ post by Faris, ”A decade of digital: 10 things for 2010”
We’re looking for a Digital Strategist - come join our team!
We need a Digital Strategist with a strong social media focus to join DTDigital / Ogilvy Melbourne’s rapidly growing team. This is an opportunity to play a key role in building the best social media team in town.
We have a track record of award-winning digital work dating back to 1996, and over the years have created an awesome culture and an unbeatable client list (were talkin Honda, Myer, NAB, Bunnings, Sensis, Football Australia and Fosters, just to name a few).
Day-to-day, you will be responsible for:
- Monitoring and analysing key topics of conversation about our clients brands
- Advising clients on how they can best approach engaging their audiences through social media
- Collaborating with creative agency teams on developing integrated campaigns
- Identifying and converting new business opportunities
- Running social media training sessions for clients
You have:
- A deep understanding of how real people use the internet in their daily lives
- A strong personal presence on key social networks
- Proven ability to work independently to deadlines and budgets
- Exceptional verbal and written communication skills
- A love for collaborative problem solving (and mad lolz!)
- Ability to confidently present ideas and strategies to senior-level clients
- Relevant degree-level tertiary qualification(s)
Obviously a PR background would be highly advantageous, as would experience working in a digital, creative or media agency environment.
If you display some or all of the symptoms above, then send a brief cover letter and CV to alex.campbell AT ogilvy.com.au
reblogged from dtdigital
Anonymous asked: What does a strategic planner do?
To answer this let’s look at some background first…
In the early days of advertising, advertising agencies had two main roles. They would develop creative messages to engage their audience, as well as working out the best ways to deliver these messages through buying media on their client’s behalf.
In the 1970s these roles were split into two types of agencies. ‘Creative agencies’ come up with ideas for communicating the client’s messages. ‘Media agencies’ plan and buy the media to deliver these messages.
As this split happened, creative agencies realised that the social science that went into media planning could be used to help them make more effective ads. The role of ‘account planning’ emerged in creative agencies – so called because it comes from both ‘account management’ and ‘media planning’.
In traditional agencies, the role of planners is to unearth insights that creative teams could use to make more relevant, impactful ads. In order to do this planners conduct endless research into their target markets, looking for new trends, behaviours and needs that will allow the client’s message to cut through and truly connect with its audience. That’s the theory.
In some agencies (like the one I work at) the role is much more strategic, hence “strategic planner”. It involves a lot of consulting work with clients, identifying what the real business problem is that we’re trying to solve. It involves structuring the problem in such a way that our different teams can each solve part of it – some problems need creative solutions, some problems need technological innovation, some problems need content, many need all of the above.
The role also involves working collaboratively with creative teams on media selection, because in so much of what we do the message is deeply connected to and informed by the medium. And finally it involves filtering back the work through the brief to make sure it is still on-message and on-target, and helping present and rationalise the work to the client.
Unearthing insights and understanding cultural context is still an important part of what we do. But in digital this is much more of an ongoing, evolutionary process - we don’t create one-off 30 second spot and run 1200 TARPs, we create experiences that live indefinitely and require ongoing re-thinking and optimisation. And I believe increasingly our role should be to make creative work more culturally disruptive, rather than getting it to fit into culture. We should make trends rather than follow them!
