What is advertising? [by Knute Sands]

Editor’s note: We tasked our summer team to answer the question, “What is advertising?” This is the first of several responses.

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Conversation is not the new advertising.

Being a conduit for conversation is the new advertising.

Rapidly increasing consumer empowerment has created new rules in all of the spaces advertisers and marketers traditionally dominated. If advertising will succeed in the age of increasing consumer voice, it has to stop trying to talk to people, and start getting people to talk amongst themselves. As Freddie Laker of Sapient points out, successful campaigns create conversation which, “would exist with or without the brand.”

How we got here: From a few touch points to countless

Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship defines traditional advertising as “gaining customers, building more relationships… At its core growing business.” Lebowitz explains that in the television era, the limited number of consumer touch points allowed big players to control the messages consumers received through massive media purchasing. Most often, this meant brands could be confident their messaging strategy  created profit.

The scarcity of touch points in the television era exploded into an overwhelming abundance of communication channels over the last ten years. This gives consumers simple tools to compare products and escape from any form of advertising, making them harder to track down. So if consumers can, and will run screaming from advertising, is advertising useless?

Being a conversation channel and community advocate

As consumer-to-brand engagement continues to adapt and is increasingly hard to capture, brands are struggling to cope. Brand messaging is up against a plethora of rich media alternatives, most of which are online. The success of interactive online media (YouTube for example) have ignited a micro-evolution of interactive web design manifested most successfully through online social platforms.

What does this mean for marketers? More ad dollars are spent developing high-end websites and applications to make brands relevant in these new digital communities. In his blog Logic + Emotion, David Armano describes the engagement evolution in web development as one spanning from “Traditional, to Tradigital to Social engagement.” In the Tradigital phase, websites acted as a destination, where people could access information. Although they employ rich user experience or interactive features, consumers can’t own and customize tradigital sites. As interactive websites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter have gained popularity (considered the “social engagement” phase in Armano’s evolution), consumers increasingly have sought the unmatched personalization offered in these communities.

Most companies know they have to succeed in these spaces but fail to recognize the rules of engagement.  Treating them like traditional channels for their products, their messaging falls on deaf, and irritated ears. Lee Odden of TopRank writes, “There’s a tendency to want to treat social media participation like advertising where the ability to control messaging is the norm.”

The solution is seemingly obvious.  The most effective brand and advertising strategies in social spaces have provided a spillway for conversation as opposed to gushing to a target audience. The key isn’t starting conversation about a brand, it’s helping a target community develop and talk amongst themselves. Odden points out the importance of community saying, “Developing community on the web can facilitate buy in, provide invaluable feedback and crowdsourcing opportunities.”

The new rules of engagement hold true not just online, but in print, television and event marketing. Take Mediacom’s 2008 ‘To Shave or Not’ mixed media campaign for Gillette as an example. To convince young national Indians shaving was important, Mediacom commissioned a public Nielsen survey out of Mumbai about shaving. The survey explored whether women prefer a clean shaven versus scruffy man, hinging on the premonition that Indians love to debate.

The survey generated buzz in all the key news services, and was comprehensively adopted as a national argument. When the dust settled and the results fell decidedly on the clean side, Mach3 sales were up 38%, trial increased 400% and market share had increased by 35% in India. The conversation wasn’t about Gillette, but the brand ultimately was the conduit for the debate and sat readily positioned to sell when it was over. Procter & Gamble and the Gillette brand created a conversation that was worth everyone’s time. It was a conversation that easily could have existed without the brand.

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by Knute Sands :: knutes [at] helloviking [dot] com