Video: Jo Lyall from Mindshare on Sticky Stories, Purchasing Paths – #AdVision – Microsoft Advertising Blog – Microsoft Advertising Community

Video: Jo Lyall from Mindshare on Sticky Stories, Purchasing Paths – #AdVision – Microsoft Advertising Blog – Microsoft Advertising Community.

Mobile applications turn static comms into engaging experiences

Technology provides the vehicle that turns paid advertising into owned and earned value.   Autonomy, a UK search technology company developed application called Aurasma that allows a user to point their iPhone or iPad at a static image and generate a video.  essentially this allows you to bring a print ad to life and creates a richer more engaging brand experience for the consumer.  This type of technology falls under the augmented reality category and Google offers a similar tool in it Goggles application.  I think we will see more of this integrated advertising made possible through the growth of smart phones.  The FT recently used this technology in a partnership with Wally Yachts, it turned a still image into a film of boat racing.  http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1075744/Ad-recognition-app-feature-FT-super-yacht-campaign

Time and technology + story the new model for modern marketing

The new Audi Le Mans ad premiered tonight before the Champs League kick off.  The 2.5 min ad tells the story of what it is like to be an Audi driver in the 24 hour Le Mans race.  The ad in shot in 2d and 3d (viewable on Sky and in cinema).  It is beautiful and engaging, it is an ad that you want to watch.  Longer time lengths, smart use of technology combined with a story gives a brand stand out but will it pay back on the media cost (at circa £160k per 30 secs)?

From what I can see they have a fabulous piece of owned content + an incredibly high quality paid media spot but have made very little effort to maximize the earned media value….  In my opinion if you are going to spend that much on one spot it should be supported by digital media in the paid and earned space.  The YouTube film has not been posted publicly so that it is discoverable and there is not any paid search to overcome the lack of natural visibility.

I really believe this is the new model for marketing in a POE world but you have to get all the elements working together to make the most of the new media ecosystem.

Made for me – BMW owned driving earned

I enjoyed reading an article in the FT this morning about BMW’s built to order business that is starting to take off in the US .  For some years now BMW have already sold cars on a  made to order basis in Germany but now the US consumers can also get involved.  From their Spartanburg factory you can order an X3 and with over 70m possible configurations you can get quite personal.  Allowing your customer be part of the product creation without actually having to change anything that you do is a smart way of making your owned assets work harder. In this example BMW have been clever in also giving their customers a film that shows their car being built at various stages of the production line.  The built to order models are no more expensive to the consumer and actually are potentially a better business model for dealers to avoid them having speculate over which cars to have in the showroom.  This product gives people a reason to choose BMW and most importantly gives them motivation to talk about it.  If you ‘designed’ your own car you would tell all your friends wouldn’t you? and you may even want to show them the film…

BT paid owned and earned for the second biggest wedding of the year

I quite enjoyed the 1min 34 second BT advert at the weekend showing the wedding of Jane and Adam.  I especially admire the fact that BT have told a consistent story that more recently had the input of their fans along the way.  They have once again modernised the BT family communication to connect better with todays consumer. Whether you like the ads or not is somewhat irrelevant, I think BT have put themselves out there much more than usual and have been innovative in their approach to capture some emotion and engagement from UK consumers.  480k votes were cast over what dress she should wear, what car they would travel in and what song would be their first dance.  As far as I can see they seem to have done things in the right way and showed the finished ads and extra behind the scenes content to facebook fans first as a reward for their input and fans even got the chance to be extras at the wedding.  Last year 1.6 million people voted on Jane’s pregnancy, based on numbers alone the wedding doesn’t seem as quite as successful but it certainly grew the facebook following.
BT have successfully used a long standing owned content asset to generate conversation and positive sentiment from consumers as well as delivering impact through traditional paid media channels.  This integrated campaign is a good example for other advertisers to see how a story can be told simply across multiple channels which encourages sharing and contribution along the way.

Honda integrating Paid and Owned

Capitalizing on the multi screen viewing behaviour of consumers today the new Honda Jazz ad nicely integrates paid media with owned content, driving greater engagement and connection.  The ad invites viewers to interact through their iPhone by literally grabbing characters off the screen and collecting them inside an app.  The idea has received mixed reviews but personally I think it is congruent with the Honda brand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbDYdjhnfEg

Excerpt from The Digital Buzz blog: The campaign was created by W+K London and uses whats called “screen hopping” that works by having sound from the TV ad recgonised by the iPhone App, so when pre defined sound waves are read, the app knows to display the same character that was on screen at that moment, essentially giving you the ability to interact with the TV ad in real time.

Screen hopping takes this a little further though, once you’ve got the character, you can interact separately with each one away from the TV ad, by doing things like singing into the iPhone to make characters dance.

The Age of ‘More’ – The impact of POE on the role of a media planner

It will come as no surprise to you that media consumption has entered the age of ‘more’.

More personalized, more on-demand and more choice.  This makes media planning more complex and much more interesting.  Good media is not just about reaching the right audience but about how it can spark or amplify conversations involving the brand.

PAID, OWNED AND EARNED

The boundaries for what is ‘media’ have expanded and potentially anything we can imagine can fill this new space.  We must consider every touchpoint and the role it plays in building the brand’s connection with consumers.  This takes into account Paid, Owned and Earned media.  Paid, largely being the spaces filled by advertising; Owned, being  all brand assets, products and associated content; Earned being the resulting conversation about the brand and the role people play in spreading the message further.

In a POE world a brand must have something to say (owned content) and have permission to say it in order to start or be part of conversations.

The more time people spend with a brand’s owned content and being exposed to positive earned opinion and content from influencers, the more relevant and powerful the paid media becomes. 

The effectiveness POE ecosystem is therefore massively reliant on a well thought through consumer journey.

THE CONSUMER JOURNEY

Understanding and becoming expert in the consumer journey is undoubtedly the biggest change for media planners.

The consumer journey is now less linear and controllable, therefore, how a brand networks its communications across platforms and formats is critical to telling a consistent and powerful story.  This changes the start point for the planner in building a communications strategy and asks them to consider the owned content first.

The modern media planner must be fluent in multiple platforms and must be able to think about the architecture of the journey between paid, owned and earned media. They must be able to plan for always-on communication balancing pushed and pulled messages. 

They should be able to clearly articulate the relationship between paid media and the brand experience making it less directional and more involving; they must become proficient content planners and conversation architects, building more complex and layered communications plans.

They must understand the inter-relationships and dependencies between the channels and platforms and considering all the implications that a multi-platform content strategy may have.

The modern media agency is one that is fluent in content, conversation and reach.  Being a media planner in this context must be one of the best jobs in the agency.

Shopping together is better

Getting advice from friends or someone you trust has always been a valuable thing to have when shopping.  E-commerce has revolutionised the retail industry beyond recognition. According to EConsultancy 42% of us buy something online once per week.  71% of us state that recommendations from a friend or family influences which website we choose. For the last decade we have slowly been increasing the amount of time and money that we spend shopping online but until this year that shopping experience has been a relatively lonely past time.  We have been able to get advice from strangers or experts in the form of reviews or from smart website solutions like Amazon that make recommendations based on what you have bought before but now we can also get an additional and very important opinions and advice from our own community.  This latest change is driven by social network technology that can connect our shopping experiences to our social graph.  Facebook open graph is probably the most significant contributer to this from a scale point of view, the simple action of ‘likes’ tells me if the product I am considering is a popular choice.  Some brands have gone one step further and taken their shopping experience to Facebook itself.  If you go to the BestBuy facebook page you can shop for their products and request reviews and comments from your friends at the touch of a button. This is achieved through their ‘Shop and Share’ app – http://www.facebook.com/bestbuy?v=app_110144381181.   This is a great experience for the consumer and a smart way of generating earned media for BestBuy.  We are also witnessing a rise in collaborative buying on sites like Groupon or My City deal, we have seen this model in the past (lets buy it.com) but it did not work as well as it does today because now consumer demand meets technology capability.

The Fashion brands who in the past have been slow to embrace digital media are now emerging as leaders in the social retail space, M&S, Topshop and ASOS to name a few are taking innovative approaches to how they drive shoppers to their site more often across multiple social platforms.  They create content to inspire shoppers, they provide customer support and offer special incentives and deals to fans.  Facebook is often the highest referrer of traffic to a retailers site after google, if this is not the case for you then take a look at your Facebook strategy because the opportunity and scale are both there.

Foursquare users can checkin to get discounts in some of their favourite stores, whilst this is not mainstream yet Facebook Places with the ‘deals’ product over-layed will bring scale to this idea very quickly.  It launched in the US this week with GAP and Starbucks.

Our technology driven world is getting more and more connected each day and for some people this is seen as a negative, but personally I quite like it.  As long as I am in the driving seat and can turn my connections off and on then why wouldn’t I want some social context to everything I read, search for or buy online?

If this subject interests you then join us at Mindshare for a WPP Stream style discussion on social and retail:

Stream London – Breakfast Discussion @ Internet Week Europe: “Shopping together is better”. To RSVP and find out more http://bit.ly/crvX1U

 

A match made for owned heaven

Heston and Delia, maybe an unlikely combination on first glance but I am emjoying Waitrose’ current comms strategy that has put a content partnership at its heart.  This campaign has been executed with consistency across multiple channels and it is encouraging me as customer to spend more time thinking about waitrose.  Delia and Heston can be experienced in store, in their weekly newspaper, on the website, on youtube and on my iphone.  What a brilliant example of making your ‘owned’ assets work for you, i think is more they could be doing to drive earned media from this activity to make it even more powerful.  Focusing on ‘owned’ i like the fact that however I choose to access this content the story is simple to follow and it provides me with something useful whether I see it first in store, or read about it in their newspaper or discover it on my iphone. The new iphone app allows me to view the recipes and add to my shopping list (not to buy via iphone but to use in store) if i want to watch the chefs in action I can go to their new Youtube channel.  I also read that waitrose are launching a cooking school later this year.  In my mind Waitrose are now a premium brand but now also really demonstrate their value by offering me more products and services that I would have expected from a supermarket and just in case I still feel that I should be more careful with my grocery money then the new ATL campaign is making me feel better that on over 1000 products they are same price as Tesco.  Another example of a brand who gets the new ecosystem and how each layer of content can contribute to how I feel about them… just need to be a bit more in the earned space….