Live from Ad:Tech San Francisco: Converse, Don’t Shout, Brands Say
Shouting is out and conversing is in, leading consumer brand marketing executives agreed during a panel discussion at ad:tech San Francisco 2008 this week.
“The old method of integrated marketing said that the more touch points you had with the same message, the louder your message got in the market,” said Daina Middleton, global advertising and interactive marketing director for Hewlett Packard’s printing and imaging division. “But today it’s about making sure that you’re engaging in a conversation in the appropriate place, in the appropriate way so that conversation continues wherever the customer wants it to.”
Middleton pointed to “Project Direct,” a contest Hewlett-Packard sponsored for independent filmmakers from seven countries on YouTube last October. Visitors were able to view the submissions on YouTube and to select a winner from among the 20 finalists chosen by an expert panel.
While engaging with HP customers was valuable in itself, what Middleton found most useful was developing “a suite of printing tools for that [film maker] audience, allowing directors to print out DVD covers and T-shirt transfers,” she said. “So we were thinking about how people could use printing in that environment and not just blasting them with a sponsorship or ad message.”
Finding influential consumers and getting them to become advocates for a brand or product is key, according to Mel Clements, advertising and digital manager for basketball at Nike.
“I can target 10,000 loyal customers, but that doesn’t scale,” he said. “But if I can reach 10,000 key influencers and get them to champion me, that’s powerful.”
Nike targets the “pockets of culture” around specific athletes like LeBron James and the collector community of “sneakerheads” with content that draws them in. But what that content will be is hard to predict in advance, Clements said. “No one ever asked for an MP3 player that holds 40,000 songs; but you have one, and you love it.”
One approach to the problem of scaling online marketing efforts is to go viral, according to Zdenek Kratky, consumer lifestyle brand manager for Philips DAP North America. They are the brand behind the funny “Shave Everywhere” microsite for the Philips personal groomer.
“You can scale by entertaining and engaging and then inviting,” Kratky said. “In the case of ‘Shave Everywhere,’ we invited folks to tell others, and we measured and tracked every part of it. Forty percent of the people who came to that site passed it on to friends. Recently we’ve been re-inviting visitors with new content. I think that’s the best way to scale in digital.”
Asked what effect a softening economy might have on their brands’ marketing campaigns, Clements said it might make consumers more price-conscious about their buying.
“In a downturn, discretionary spending is probably gong to go down, people are going to be more selective, and they’re probably going to go to more resources to find the best price and product information they can get,” he said. “My advice to brands is to be really convincing in that final three feet of retail, digital or mobile space. Help them get to that purchase decision more quickly, through story-telling or through a better purchase interface.”
Middleton warned brands not to be tempted to slip back to the old marketing standbys in times of low sales and tight budgets.
“Companies that feel under threat in a slowing economy may revert to doing things the way they used to,” she said. “That’s the wrong approach. The world has changed and we still need to embrace that. For example, you wouldn’t want to cut the budget around search [marketing], when that could be a key influencer in helping consumers research their buying choices.”
