Thursday, June 19, 2008

Add Friend for Advertisers


Two great presentations have been floating around on What’s Next in Marketing & Advertising, by Paul Isakson, and an extension of this, What’s Next in Media, by Neil Perkin, with a stronger content focus. Both highlight the continuing evolution of media, social media, the power of the consumer, and the demand for advertisers to engage and interact, conversations. They deliver the message simple and straight to the point, watch them when you can.


It’s a word I find myself using a lot of on this blog, but it’s about how can the advertiser add ‘value’, helping people, helping communities, do what they want to do. It’s about the product becoming the ad, content being the new currency, and a flattening of the advertiser/consumer brand control hierarchy.

It's why I believe display ads, no matter how hyper-super-granular-targeted they are, aren't the answer to social media. You can build signs around it, ‘sponsor’ it, paint the walls in which consumers play in, but to extract value from the 'social' in social media, converse, involve and interact, you need to earn your place in the social media community. It's not short-term, it's not 'campaign' based, and it's not for every brand, but the audience is there, the opportunity is there, and the long term benefit for brands who truly understand and involve themselves in social media is massive.

1 comments:

Gavin Heaton said...

You are right, Glenn ... it's about organisations (and agencies)figuring out how they can participate and contribute to the conversations already happening in and through the communities that engage with their brands.

But activating a social media strategy requires a rethinking around "campaigns" -- giving them a much longer term horizon and building metrics in a whole new way.