Brands that make online work for them

5 October 2007

More and more consumer brands are making effective use of online to get their message across to their customers, as Simon van Wyk writes.

Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a US-based media investment bank (that's a politically correct term for private equity firm), recently published the 21st edition of its seminal Communications Industry Forecast report, and there were a couple of gems buried in the report among all the CAGRs and GDPs of the detail.

The first is that for the first time in nearly 10 years, average consumer media consumption dropped slightly â€“ 0.5% - in 2006, to just over 9 hours per day. The last time this figure declined was in 1997, when the Internet had yet to take off.

The VSS report attributes the decline to "digital media efficiencies", which means people are watching a few minutes of YouTube instead of 30 minutes of news or comedy. This must be keeping TV programmers up at night â€“ people are choosing to watch a college student dance in front of a webcam in their underwear instead of watching TV shows that have cost millions of dollars to produce.

Media use is expected to increase slowly over the next five years, driven largely by video gaming. Overall spending on communications media is predicted to grow by 6.7% per year over that period to US$1 trillion.

Here's the other gem in the report: VSS predicts that by 2011, Internet advertising will surpass newspaper advertising as the largest ad medium. Alternative media spending is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 17.4% between now and 2011, while traditional advertising and marketing will only grow by 3.2 per cent. Internet advertising and marketing has finally come of age.

Another interesting conclusion from the VSS research was that although consumers spent less time with media in 2006 while at home, they spent more time using the media at work. VSS reports that usage by institutional end-users grew 3.2 percent to 260 hours per employee (an hour per workday).

"We are in the midst of a major shift in the media landscape that is being fueled by changes in technology, end-user behaviours and the response by brand marketers and communications companies," said VSS MD James Rutherfurd.

Note that he included brand marketer activity in his response. More brands these days are successfully using new media to extend their message to customers.

In Australia, the Coke Side of Life website complements the brand's traditional media campaign, which has a quirky/retro theme. The website offers a myriad of interactive options such as Diet Coke films, footie dream teams, design your own Coke can, the Massive Red Lunchbox roadshow, telling you where to get a free lunch with your Coke, and a host of other activities.

It's well-branded and has something to appeal to all parts of Coke's demographic, but its strength is also its weakness - there are really too many things to choose from and it doesn't deliver a strong message to any one part of its audience.

A simpler, if more bizarre, campaign is the Little Deviant site which was launched in the US by Toyota to promote its compact Scion xD. On the Gothic gaming-themed site, the user takes on the persona of the monster xD, who wages war against the conformist Sheeple.

As the opening chapter of the game commands: "Send the Sheeple from the streetsâ€¦. Knock the stuffing out of them and collect their blood. Turn that awful bleating into awesome bleeding."

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, as marketing site ClickZ describes, xD's target audience of "young, urban consumers who thrive on individuality and the unconventional." It builds in enough car references in the games to get both brand messages and product features across to its audience. Unlike the Coke site, the Little Deviant site focuses on one message for one (key) part of its audience.

Another successful way to get a brand message across to lads online is to use toilet humour and sex appeal. The Mitchum Man website promoting the iconic deodorant brand, has both in spades.

The armpit orchestra, where you can compose tunes based on the tones of underarm farts, is simple yet funny (well, at least to blokes). The proudly politically-incorrect Mitchum Man-o-Meter features a video quiz where, the more 'manly' your answers, the more clothes the quiz mistress sheds.

Apparently Mitchum has some products that are used by women, but this website is not designed for them. Like the Little Deviant site, it zeroes in on the most important part of its target audience and uses devices that evoke its key brand message.

One of the important differences about online marketing campaigns today compared to several years ago is that marketers finally seem to be getting the message that online should be an integrated component of a broad marketing campaign. They've now realised that the best way to extend their brand online is to keep their message and their activities consistent with their offline activities.

The active, interactive nature of the new media gives customers the chance to get familiar and bond with a product and a brand in a way they can't do on television or in print. Whether it be games, entertainment or widgets, interactive content can build the relationship between a brand and its key customers.

Websites mentioned in this article include:

Simon van Wyk is Founder of HotHouse Interactive. Comment on this story at the HotHouse blog.

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Brands that make online work for them