Interruption Advertising & the difference that digital makes.
Driving into the office this morning I thought about some of the conversations I had had last night at the graduation ceremony of the aaa school of advertising. The conversation often turned to digital marketing and advertising and I felt that I needed to share my thoughts.
Firstly we cannot understand what can be done until we free ourselves from the interruption marketing/advertising paradigm.
We have been conditioned to think that our job as branders, marketers and advertisers is to change people’s perceptions by presenting them with a message. We know that the more impactful the message is the easier it will cut through the tremendous clutter of information that surrounds every human being. We feel that the way to do that is to find someone doing something and deliver the message to them, interrupting what they are doing and if we grab their attention the message will get across.
So we find people driving down the road and set up a billboard, people watching sport and the insert a TV spot or people browsing the Internet and we insert an CPC ad. We know that the more relevant that ad is to the person whom we are interrupting’s frame of mind at the time we interrupt them the more successful we will be at getting our message home.
But, we get stuck there and we think of the digital space as we have been conditioned to as a different activity that we can interrupt, and so we miss the point.
The opportunity offered by digital media, especially by the Web 2.0 technology should really force us to think totally differently about our whole approach to advertising.
- We need to recognise that in a connected world, we as advertisers we don’t control the message any longer.
- We need to understand that we have the opportunity to engage in a two way conversation.
- We need to understand the ability to build communities around our brand.
- We need to use our ability to test and get feedback from the community.
In an earlier post, the one on Alice’s Restaurant I spoke about building a brand by creating a movement around an idea and a concept. I believe that’s what Barack Obama did with the “Yes we can” mantra.
Is the trick to find the idea, the customer value proposition, then to follow this formula?
- Find the talkers
- Give them something to talk about.
- Give them a way to help them talk about it.
I believe that that’s how we could use digital media in our marketing efforts, find the value, the idea, get it out there using the incredible characteristics of the Internet and online mobile connections to let it spread supported by building communities and then accelerate the growth of the idea using traditional media.
We are still making the rules so I would love to hear your comments.
Photo credit: alicepopkorn on Flickr
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Advertising, Branding, interuption, Marketing, media, mobile, social media
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http://www.mediafrenzy.co.za Allan