HotHouse - Noise

January 15, 2008

2008: The year of getting engaged

Connecting with consumers
In doing so, they took the Nike+ product experience far beyond just a running shoe or an iPod.

Of course they still spend money on traditional media, but they're spending more and more in ways that don't interrupt their consumers, rather they provide useful content and applications to provide real value.

The success of Nike+ has not gone unnoticed – how could it as a Cannes Cyber Lion Grand Prix winner in the "innovative ideas" category? And we're starting to see this thinking starting to shape global marketing budgets. Moving away from traditional interruption advertising and embracing the idea of developing content to provide value.

A story in the New York Times last year claimed that "Nike spent just 33 percent of its $678 million United States advertising budget on ads with television networks and other traditional media companies. That's down from 55 percent 10 years ago, according to the trade publication Advertising Age."

That's a staggering number – just 33 per cent of its advertising budget on traditional media – particularly for a company that has made some of the biggest, glossiest, most entertaining ads ever. But as Trevor Edwards, Nike's corporate vice president for global brand and category management is quoted as saying in the same New York Times story: "We're not in the business of keeping the media companies alive… We're in the business of connecting with consumers."

What a quote. And if media companies and traditional advertising agencies don't get it now – I don't think they ever will.

Moving beyond traditional advertising
There's a big price to pay for not keeping up with the tastes and needs of customers, but innovative consumer brand marketers who do move beyond traditional advertising and actively engage with their customers – will ensure not only the overall health of their brand but the of their business. And this may mean creating content rather than relying simply on advertising during commercial breaks.

This thinking certainly seems to be behind the Adidas OriginalsFestival, which was launched in Australia in December last year and runs through to the end of February 08. The OriginalsFestival is an online game which, within your preset $100K budget, lets you dream up your own music festival, book the venue and secure the headline acts and supporting bands. Then you've got to promote the whole shebang with the single goal of attracting the greatest attendance (the most number of visits) to win the grand prize of a trip for 2 to the Berlin Festival 2008.

Of course attracting the biggest crowd attendance means designing a stand-out poster and promoting the event big time which means that game players will be hitting their email, blogs, Myspace and Facebook pages to generate word of mouth and drive traffic to their events. The concept seems to be a spot on way to engage the youth market and it will be interesting to see what kind of numbers this game draws and the attendance numbers of the most successful festival.

In another example of a big brand developing content, last year Toyota launched Little Deviant to promote its compact Scion xD in the US. In this game, the user takes on the persona of the monster xD, who wages war against the conformist Sheeple. While the game isn't quite everyone's cup of tea, nor is it meant to be, it's clear that little old ladies aren't the Scion xD's target audience, but the site has proved to be a hit with the xD's target audience of young, urban consumers who thrive and it builds in enough car references in the games to get both brand messages and product features across to its audience.

I think these examples show that global brands are starting to consider how to make their brand relevant in the social media age, so that consumers actively engage with them and happily share that brand message. Sure, it's not as easy as working out a traditional media buy but it's going to be far more interesting. And this year we will see more and more brands turning to content development to excite, entertain and engage.

After all, as Seth Godin says, "The truism of the web: people talking about you is far more effective than talking about yourself".

Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 10:48 AM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)

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