The New Brand Communication Experience
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
The 21st Century marketeer is a busy character. Not
long ago (well, not in the grand scheme of things anyway) the
opportunities for a brand to speak to consumers were limited.
Posters, mail outs and TV campaigns. The odd bit of
sponsorship. The brands spoke to us through constrained channels
that were one directional, safe, and, to an extent, obvious.
The marketeer would say to the consumer, 'we have a new product
and we think it's the best. To prove it, we may send you a letter,
hope that you see our poster, and pay a fortune for a television
commercial that will make you think we're amazing.' And the
consumer would (sometimes) say to their mate 'have you seen that
Heineken ad with the girl burping? Its reasonably funny', and
there the one directional conversation would end.
But then along came the Internet, and connective technology,
social media, and YouTube. And suddenly brands could think broader,
and think bigger, and create reams of content that could be
streamed into people's homes and offices, and which - if good
enough - could be shared, passed around, discussed, and watched
again and again.
The branded YouTube channel is a chance for companies to say to
their consumers, and the public as a whole, 'this is what we're
about.' And the beauty is, with the chance to upload new content
every day on budgets a fraction of those for TV, press, and more
traditional media, they can claim to 'be about' almost
anything.
Someone sent the video below around our office. It's an
interesting, cool, original piece of content that charts the
evolution of the mobile phone in a genuinely cool way. Great sound
design, great visuals, and showcasing the cutting edge technology
of 3D projection. It's not perfect, and it does have a fairly DIY
feel (some of the comments on the page aren't totally positive),
but it's good enough to go viral - especially if you're into mobile
phone technology (or happen to have several mobile phone industry
clients in your agency's roster).
This piece of content is one of 136 on the official Vodafone
channel, and is typically varied. Their clips range from actually
quite funny skits featuring Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton
pitching a tent in a field in mid winter in order to secure a good
spot for a festival taking place in 6 months time (to promote the
early dibs on festival ticket sales available to Voda customers),
to back stage at Vodafone sponsored fashion shows, to insiders
guides to F1 race tracks. They're appealing to a wide range of
people, and showing many different facets of their brand. And
they've notched up nearly 4.5 million views of their vids on their
UK channel alone.
But of course other brands are doing it too, and it seems to be
an interesting barometer of consumers viewpoints on those brands.
Take the Apple page for example. They've had 25 million views on 68
videos but rather than viral, branded content of the sort Vodafone
focus on, theirs are almost exclusively product films showing
teasers of new pieces of software, user guides and reviews. It
shows just what genuine fans there are out their of Apple's
products. Vodafone doesn't really have tangible products that
consumers can be fans of, and so their clips have to be more
creative, and more focused loosely on services - and yet if the
content is good they will still share and watch and comment. And
through those actions the conversation is continued, and begins to
flow both ways - both from the brand and back to the brand.
With the new tools available brands are having to think even
more about what it is that makes them tick, and how they relate to
their consumers. And now consumers can react and interact even more
with them. Advertising has always been a social influencer, and
brands have always had a social impact. But now, with the
proliferation of shared content and the fact that brands have money
to spend on it, their impact on all of our lives (through their
impact on our entertainment, time wasting, and knowledge gathering)
is constantly increasing.
I don't know if these are the musings that Vodafone had in mind
when they uploaded their evolution of the mobile phone clip, but I
think it's worth all of us who work in or are interested in media
to look at how else those conversations can be continued, and how
else we want the brands we represent, or work with, to be
portrayed. Thanks to YouTube, the scope for that is endless, and it
seems to be working. So perhaps we should all be thinking about how
to translate that scope into other avenues, and I know that when it
comes to live communications and events Undercurrent certainly will
be.
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