mediation

Sky-High Stakes in Hong Kong's Out of Home Arms Race

Mediation is on tour in Australasia for a few weeks.  whilst on it's first stop in Hong Kong it noticed this little poster for Calvin Klein's Steel range.  towering above the island's Central district, the building wrap dwarfs many of the surrounding buildings and can be seen not only from much of the island but also from Kowloon across the harbour.

it's typical of the predominance of outdoor in the territory...  from the biggest billboards to the depths of the underground, posters in a multitude of shapes and forms are everywhere.  in Mediation's native UK, shopfronts tell the story of what's available inside - but in the visual arms race of Hong Kong you need to shout a lot louder, and higher.

this prevalence of outdoor tells us much about media consumption in the area...  for a massively dense and highly mobile population it's no doubt a very effective medium.

but it also tells us much about the cultural differences between Hong Kong and the UK.  big building wraps like the above have occasionally been available in London - County Hall and Trafalgar Square's Nelson's column come to mind - but it's difficult to imagine a 50ft crotch being put on display; the applications in London were as much about the suitability of a brand to the city's culture and community as much as about how much a brand was prepared to pay for the space.  commercially is simply not as big a factor as sensitivity to conservative public tastes.

the above building wrap would cause a public outcry in London.  not so in Hong Kong...  where the bustling life of the city continues seemingly oblivious to the Calvin Klein model towering above them.  in the city's outdoor arms race, the stakes have been raised.  I'm not entirely sure how much further they could go...

There now follows a simple exercise in Building Brand Associations...

...courtesy of M&Ms.  this is quite old now but I just came across it today whilst browsing a post  by Jason Oke who writes on the Leo Burnett Toronto blog.

so you're M&Ms and you want people to know and remember that you have a new product in the form of Dark Chocolate.  you could invest in an ad that communicates this and deploy thru relevant and effective media, or

...you could get consumers to find out and then re-enforce (multiple times over) the association for themselves via an online game where you have to find 50 hidden movies - all of which have a 'dark' theme.

this is stand out for two reasons.  one, only the buffest of movie buffs will know all the answers, so you're compelled to pass it on and try to work out the answers amongst your mates.  it's very sociably-networkable.  which is good.

secondly this little piece stands out for the sheer elegant simplicity with which it has been put together.  using flash you navigate your way around the image, zooming in and out as you go.  and once you've spotted and noted a movie it blacks out, allowing you to focus on the remaining movies you haven't got yet.  infuriatingly addictive and of course very easy to pass on to others to inflict the same brand association building on them.

click here to play but be warned; it's addictive.

The Ecology of Engrams

en·gram [en-gram] – noun

encoding in neural tissue that provides a physical basis for the persistence of memory; a memory trace ⁽¹⁾

E·col·o·gy [i-kol-uh-jee] – noun

branch of biology dealing with relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms ⁽²⁾

I believe the concept of the individual brand engram for the purposes of marketing communications is redundant. I believe that a truer reflection of brands can be found by examining the dynamics of engram herds within a population.

1. The Myth of the Isolated Engram

The emergence of neuroscience has informed us that brands are not definitive established entities. Rather they are ideas. An ever-changing and dynamic concept of meanings and associations held – amongst millions of others (4) – within our minds. As Wendy Gordon puts it, “a brand in memory is a totality of stored synaptic connections between neurones … gradually built up through the combination of many past experiences and ongoing current encounters with a brand” (5). The term engram – coined originally by Richard Semon in 1904 – refers to this ‘memory trace’ (6) within which a brand is held.

Two key properties emerge from this concept:

First, the brand-as-engram is largely malleable and open to influence. Whilst marketers would hold that this gives them remit to leverage this set of associations thru advertising and other means, the reality is quite different;

The stimuli we receive don’t uniformly alter the engram. Daniel Schacter notes that; “our memory systems are built so that we are likely to remember what is most important to us” (7). Not all stimulus is created equal, as Willmott and Nelson observe; “ in a networked society, where people not only have more contacts but rely on them more for advice and support … personal recommendations, and recriminations, have more weight” (8). In other words brand engrams are – by their very nature – most open to influence by other people. Brand engrams are most open to influence by other engrams.

The second property to emerge from the brand-as-engram concept is that because engrams are formed from different experiences in different individual’s heads, no two engrams can be the identical. As Wendy Gordon puts it; “two people can never experience an identical set of encounters with a brand, and therefore their brand engrams will be different” (9).

So brand engrams are mostly open to influence by other engrams, each of which is unique; the concept of the isolated and definitive brand engram is therefore a myth.

Brands aren’t individual ideas, but herds of ideas, within a population. Herds that over time will grow or shrink, become more disparate or move more tightly together, or that become more or less consistent; all as a result of their environment that includes other engrams. It is this latter facet of the engram herd – consistency – upon which this submission will focus.

2. The Importance of the Consistent Herd

Key to successful marketing of a brand is to have a consistent engram herd, with consistent meanings and values associated with a brand. As Wendy Gordon points out, “new entrants to established product categories require an enormous financial investment to build these values, which ensure that a target group of consumers are able to share a similar pattern of specific belief system about a brand” (10).

There are several reasons why consistency of engram throughout a herd is crucial; as a shared language for word of mouth, as a consistent reference for self-identity, and within the concept of transactive memory:

2.1 The importance of consistent herd in Word of mouth epidemics

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes what he calls ‘the law of the few’ and describes how it was beneficial to the spreading of Hush Puppies from a few individuals in New York’s East Village to the mainstream American malls; “The law of the few says the answer is that one of these exceptional people [the few] found out about the trend and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm and personality spread the word about Hush Puppies” (11).

But what the malls of mainstream America depended upon, what made the spread of the idea commercial on a large scale, was the creation and existence of an engram herd which consistently adopted Hush Puppies as cool. Gladwell’s ‘exceptional people’ may spread a message, but once tipped, it requires consistency of an engram throughout the herd to hold, and maintain it.

And what any individual relies upon when receiving or transmitting messages within a word of mouth epidemic is a consistent frame of reference throughout that herd, a consistent language, a consistent engram on which to build.

The point is backed up by Caroline Whitehall who – in describing tactics to reduce marketing inertia – notes that “most of us are only likely to change behaviour if there is evidence of a larger movement emerging” (12). What this tactic relies upon is a consistent understanding throughout the herd of what that larger movement means; in order to create meaningful understanding of what adopting that group idea or behaviour entails.

2.2 The role of the consistent herd in communicating self-identity

Heath and Potter observe that “what we are all really after is not individuality, it is distinction, and distinction is achieved not by being different, but by being different in a way that makes us recognisable as members of an exclusive club” (13).

This construction of identity is achieved in various ways, the adoption and presentation of brands to others being one. We rely on the meanings and associations of the brands we choose to communicate something about ourselves, what Daniel Dennett calls ‘centres of narrative gravity’ (14).

The creation and communication of identity is wholly dependent on this centre of gravity, this consistency amongst the herd of what a brand means and the associations it therefore imparts to the individual who bears it. Only with consistency throughout the herd, other people carrying the engram are immediately aware of what – for example – wearing a t-shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch, or Armani, or Bathing Ape, imparts to the wearer.

Without consistency of meaning the message is at best diffused and at worst lost; the brand less effectively contributes to identity. Wendy Gordon notes that “A brand is metaphor for a complex pattern of associations” (15). Without consistency of engrams across the herd, that metaphor is meaningless.

2.3 The need for a consistent herd for a functioning transactive memory

A final example of the value of herd consistency is a concept developed by Daniel Wenger of the University of Virginia and described by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point; that of Transactive Memory. “When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored inside outside our brains … we store information with other people” (16).

This ‘outside’ information is encoded within and amongst engrams, many of which will be held within those of brand engrams. For example when we talk about Live Aid with people who also hold that engram, we may be reminded of information about the concert and the events surrounding it that we may have forgotten. We recall that the event happened as well as those specifics most pertinent to us within our own individual engrams, but we expect and require the herd engram to hold the greater body of information and detail of that brand.

It is in many ways a concept analogous to that of the Wisdom of Crowds, and idea James Surowiecki expounds in his book of the same name: “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them … chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd” (17).

 

The same could be said of a marketer wishing to understand how a brand is perceived; stop hunting a ‘typical’ individual engram; no such thing exists. Start by understanding the nature and dynamics of the engram herd as a whole, in which the greater and truer reflection of the brand can be found.

3. Case Study – Articulating eBay’s engram herd

One brand that has seen a chasm develop within its engram herd is eBay, a brand that is seeing its growth slow (18). Existing heavy users hold very positive associations – both with the complexity of the site and the community around it. But a great many of the engram herd have lapsed from use of eBay, citing that it’s too complicated and riskier than conventional online purchasing (19).

These are two very different centres of narrative gravity. And they’re in direct conflict. I’d suggest that it is partly this conflict within the herd that is resulting firstly in the slowed growth that eBay is currently experiencing, and secondly in decreasingly effective marketing communications. Put simply, communications are failing to reflect, and therefore resonate with, the herd engram footprint.

Saying ‘buy this on eBay’ (20) isn’t indicative of the heavy user positive engram gravity well; to heavy users it feels patronising. Nor does it address the negative engram gravity well typical of lapsed users who feel that eBay is complicated and risky.

To test this theory, I conducted some proprietary quantitative research amongst 88 randomly selected consumers (from my Facebook friends!) and asked them to indicate whether or not a range of words applied to eBay as well as three other brands within the online commerce space – Amazon, Play.com and HMV.co.uk.

Figure 1 shows the extent to which various associations were made with each of the four brands. So for example across the 88 respondents 70 connected the association ‘affordable’ with Amazon, 56 respondents with Play.com, 46 with eBay etc. By pooling the associations we get an indication of the herd engram footprint for these brands, indicating the extent to which these four brands overlap with each other.

Figure 1: herd engram associations by brand 21

But when each brand is examined individually, a much more distinct herd engram emerges. Figure 2 shows only the eBay data, ranked by association.

 

Figure 2: eBay herd engram associations ranked strongest first 21

Big, community, choice and affordable emerge top (reflecting the positive gravity well), as do time-consuming and risky (the negative gravity well). In an individual engram this picture wouldn’t have emerged, the gravity well of that individual would have dominated. Only by looking at the herd engram are the range of (in eBay’s case less consistent) associations observed.

But the real indication of the relative strength of herd consistency comes when the brand herd engrams are compared. Figure 3 shows each of the four brand herd engram footprints as ranked by each brand independently of association (i.e. the first point on the x-axis is the strongest association for each of the four brands).

Figure 3 brand herd engram footprints as ranked by each brand independently of association (21)

Amazon’s herd engram footprint has most connections concentrated across fewer associations. In short its herd is the most consistent. Amazon’s herd more easily and implicitly recognise what its individual members mean when they mention Amazon or when it is used as a display of self-identity.

The challenge for eBay is to use its marketing communications to help generate consistency across its herd engram. At present those carrying the engram are forming very different memory traces orientated around different experiences of the product, ensuring that broadcast communications resonate less well with the collective associations of eBay’s herd.

The challenge for all advertisers is to acknowledge the existence of the herd brand engram and accept its truer reflection of the brand as it exists across the memory traces of consumers. Articulate it. Measure its consistency. Identify the foci for the gravity wells that will influence the currents and eddies of the conversations and interactions – the ecology – of the herd engram.

Notes and References

1. Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006
2. American Psychological Association (APA): via Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved October 01, 2007
3. Wildebeest herd grazing on savannah, Masai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya, as seen on the 'Great Plains' episode of Planet Earth. http://tv.yahoo.com/planet-earth/show/39817/photos/14
4. Daniel L. Schacter. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. Basic Books. p59
5. Wendy Gordon. Brands on the brain: new scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking. Kogan Page. P112
6. Daniel L. Schacter. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. Basic Books. p57
7. Daniel L. Schacter. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. Basic Books. P46
8. Micahel Willmott & William Nelson. Complicated lives; sophisticated consumers, intricate lifestyles, simple solutions. Wiley. p221
9. Wendy Gordon. Brands on the brain: new scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking. Kogan Page. P115
10. Wendy Gordon. Understanding Brands, by 10 people who do. Chapter 2: Accessing the brand through research. Ed Don Cowley. Kogan Page. p36
11. Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point. Abacus. p21-22
12. Caroline Whitehall. Inertia is Good. Admap December 2005, Issue 467. p3
13. Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture. Capstone Publishing. p219
14. Daniel Dennett. ‘The Self as a Centre of Narrative Gravity’ in Self and Consciousness, ed F. Kessel, P. Cole, D.Johnson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992
15. Wendy Gordon. Brands on the brain: new scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking. Kogan Page. P112
16. Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point. Abacus. p188
17. James Surowiecki. The Wisdom of Crowds. Abacus. p xiv-xv
18. As reported by eBay, specific proprietary data is confidential.
19. The author. eBay proprietary qualitative research. June 2007
20. This was – amongst other specific messages eg Trust & Safety – the general message communicated by eBay from circa. 2005 until mid-2007
21. Independent proprietary quantitative research conducted by the author for the purposes of this paper. Sample on 88 respondents (recruited via Facebook – not nationally representative). September 2007

Making Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Ad

I caught this treat of a TV ad last night, and it is - for me - by far and away the best of this year's Chrimbo crop.  a simple and elegant piece that taps into our collective sense of Christmas spirit.  more celebrities than you know what to do with are on display, but none one of them is trying to sell us groceries or boost their own profile.  rather, they're all  doing exactly what they do best - laughing, hugging, loving, crying and - in the case of the Grinch - scowling their way through the festive season.

if I had one critisim, it's that this ad doesn't need an end line, or a tag line for that matter.  the suggestion that the montage featured movies 'for the people you love' is not only implicit, but negates against people drawing their own - and therefore more powerful - conclusions as the what the ad is conveying.  and as for 'get closer', well that doesn't mean anything at all!

but it's absolutely the right move for HMV, who are never going to compete with the online retailers on price.  instead they're reinforcing their associations with movies, the objective presumably being that over the next few weeks, as we all negotiate our ways down our respective frenetic highstreets, we see that Jack Russell and make a detour into it's store over others.  time will tell if with this effort HMV manage a Merry little Christmas themselves... I supsect it may just work!

Making Good Stuff: Creating Content in the Flight to Quality.

 X-Factor - great cross-platform content is in demand

Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at Buzz Machine writes in the Guardian today about fundamental changes at Dell, in which the company adopted digital behaviours to more actively engage with their customers.  as a result of investing in everything from their own blogs, Wikis and forums, to IdeaStorm - a website where customers can tell Dell what to do -  the company's new problem is "managing and spreading all this knowledge from consumers".  Jarvis comments that:

"Dell and its customers are collaborating on the creation of content, media and marketing - without content, media or marketing companies.  Advertising is no one's first choice as the basis of a relationship ... clearly, the direct relationship between a customer and a company is preferable.  but that direct connection cuts out the middlemen - that is the media."

now then, I'd be the last person to dispute the principle that marketers should invest in actively engaging with their customers, but whilst this may be the ideal for all brands its just not terribly feasible for many, if not most!

firstly, Dell - as a manufacturer of laptops - is an example of a brand with a product that requires active involvement on the part of it's owner.  laptops needs to be updated and managed, software upgraded or fixed.  moreover, laptops will for many customers occupy a central role within their lives; laptops keep our content and provide access to communications.  they enable us to work and play.  not all brands are in this fortunate position.  everything about Dell products make them amenable to being engaged with.  most brands will struggle to occupy such fortunate a position

secondly, if we all engaged 'hands-on' with all the brands we ever consumed there'd be little time for us to do anything else.  we may very well co-create with and contribute to a company, but it's only ever with a few of the brands that sit at the top of our trees.  there are hundreds of other brands with which we have 'hands-off' relationships; relationships that must be nurtured and evolve without the benefit of active hands-on consumer engagement.

our media model isn't broken.  it's just changing.  in the olden days there was lots of stuff - like TV shows or fashion shoots or a movie or the latest single from Spice Girls or Take That (first time round!)

consumers accessed all that stuff thru conduits called media channels - so advertisers invested in the media channels that were most able to deliver either lots of - or the most relevant - consumers at the end of them.  the bigger the conduit, or the fewer conduits reaching a consumer, the more the conduits were worth.

advertiser money rode the back of this content and attached their brands to it.

nowadays essentially three things have changed...  firstly, there's a lot more conduits - media fragmentation.  secondly, there's a load more stuff - mainly because of the increase in conduits, the largest of which has been the internet - a global library of stuff ready and waiting on demand.

but the third and most significant factor - and the one to which Jeff Jarvis refers - is the changing relationship between consumers and stuff...

what's not happening is the disintermediation of the conduits.  there is still relatively little stuff that consumers directly engage with - the majority of media time remains within the confines of the media conduits.  the real story is of conduit control...

PVRs, Google (thought I'd get thru a post without mentioning them but no luck!), Podcasting - all examples not of consumers abandoning the media conduits, but of consumers controlling them - accessing and organising them to their own ends.  why?  because of the explosion of more stuff thru more conduits.

more stuff via more conduits  >>>  more control over content  >>>  the inevitable result of which is that advertisers are looking to get closer to the stuff at the end.  and this is where it's getting fun!

a former associate who works at a London ad agency was explaining yesterday over lunch that one of the key strands of a campaign they're planning won't be a TV ad but a TV series.  they're pitching a 22 episode season in order to tell the brand story they wish to convey.  investment still goes into the media model - it's just into the 'stuff' bit as well as the 'conduit' stuff.  content still gets made, advertisers still spend to attach themselves to the stuff, and consumers still get great content that other people (brands) pay to make.

when viewed in this way the conventional ad takes on a whole new meaning.  it's a little bit of stuff in itself.  how can we as agencies help our clients make more and better use of these little content canapes?  how can they sit alongside their meat and two veg season-long siblings that we're increasingly looking to create?  but most importantly how can we make them stand out?

Emily Bell made reference to this in her MediaGuardian column today.

"In the world of web content, which has been fuelling the content innovation fire, there is a new trend called 'the flight to quality', which describes the process of refining something to the point where you are producing the best object, clip, article package, conversation on a theme or topic or object that the rest of the web wants to point at."

it won't be enough to create stuff.  it's got to be the best of stuff.  but we're fortunate on two fronts; one, London agencies are the best in the world at creating great content - they've just got to change their scope from 30" to 30 mins!  two, the production houses are waiting for our ideas.  Lorraine Heggessey, former controller of BBC1 and chief exec of talkbackThames in today's Independent media section explains that "as she grows the company, [she] is constantly searching for new formats that have the potential for export".  that sounds like a gauntlet being laid down.  I hope it is, and I hope more advertisers and agencies have the gumption to pick it up and run with it!

The Information R/evolution and it's consequences for Advertising and Brand Communications

this wonderful piece of content, entitled Information R/evolution, is by Michael Wesch of the Kansas State University.  it explores the basic tenants of information and how they have fundamentally changed as information has moved from paper to digital storage.

for more on this subject they point in the direction of Clay Shirky''s work, as well as David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous.

the principles of how consumers aggregate relevant information to their own ends is especially true for the business of brand communications.  it has become a given that the double revolutions challenging advertisers and their agencies are (1) a digitally driven explosion of content and (2) technologically-driven consumer control over that content.

advertisers hoping to push through this double whammy of virtually infinite (and expanding) content and consumer control over it by force of sheer strength (and budgets) will learn to their cost that information and its storage - no matter what its source - no longer permits such behaviour.

the role of many brand communications in the early 21st Century is to package brand messages in such a way that they not only avoid being filtered out, but are actively invited and aggregated by consumers around themselves (and each other).

what the above video communicates so well is a poignant reminder that underpinning much of the current change in the business of brand comms is the simple transfer of information to a digital realm.  whether it's an essay, blog, advert for a fizzy drink, CD single or TV episode; the fundamental rules of how they are delivered and consumed are being re-written.  some key questions then arise for those creating brand communications to ask themselves:

1. am I creating something people want to have or experience?
2. does it change or add benefit to their lives?
3. can it be easily found and consumed at any time?
4. does it articulate and reflect my brand?
5. could a competitor have made it?

advertising is information.  the nature of information is changing.  our advertising and brand communications must evolve in order to remain relevant and effective in a changing world.

Why Great Ads Are Great, But Not Great Enough

a strange thing has started happenning.  I've started watching ads.  Sky+ no longer gets to do it's thing...  it started a few weeks ago, with THAT gorilla ad.  we wanted to know what all the fuss was about, so we re-wound and watch it.  then we watched it again.  thats what seems to have started it all. then last Friday Ugly Bettty was interrupted by the spanking new effort from Fallon for Bravia...  if you haven't seen it, watch it now...

Play-Doh is a pleasure to watch.  repeatedly.  and thats a heck of a lot more important that how it compares to it's predecessors.  an argument was made to me yesterday that viewer expectations of the series are now so high that Bravia / Fallon can't hope to meet them.  that's unfair; I can't imagine a level on which Play-Doh doesn't engage and entertain the viewer.  this emerging trend of me watching ads continued more recently with eBay's effort.

knowingly retro, clean and fresh, and containing a wonderfully insightful moment where one of the characters looses a bid, this marks a strong start for what is hopefully set to become a long-running platform for the brand...  eBay has a world to play with, ads created in isolation should only be the first and shallowest expression of that world...  this is begging to be transmedia-planned.

another new effort comes from the Post-Office.  the ants - thank God - have gone and been replaced by a sitcom assortment of characters.  again there's knowingness in the derogatory reference to sub-standard carpets, and then Joan Collins crops up.  all very random but it works...  but it could be argued just making an ad is a very shallow window on this world and brand.  I would love to see what could be done with this concept extended into 5-8 min sitcom-style shorts online...  a Victoria Wood meets Gervais / Merchant approach could create some genuinely entertaining content (above and beyond which the ads could reference, again a nod to transmedia-ness)...

but the trend isn't restricted to TV.  a lovely press ad for the Peugeot 407 caught my eye recently too...

the flowchart on the left is genuinely fun and invites you - by playing thru a decision-making tree - to think about what's important when buying a car.  a simple idea that's entertaining whilst remaining embedded in the product...  and there's an intriguing url - http://www.407trustyourinstinct.co.uk/ - which depressingly is not a smarter deeper reflection of the ad but lots of pictures of cars, a product not a brand experience.

and I suppose that this is the nub of all this...  brands are ideas.  and ads are the multitudes of individual expressions of those ideas.  but to end there, with a great ad, is simply no longer enough.  media offers more, and brands deserve more.  the opportunity is not just to make great ads like the above, but to do the smart interesting stuff with and behind them that a 21st Century media landscape permits...

whether it's communicating the mythology of making the ad a la Play-Doh, or creating and bringing a world to life like eBay (storybooks, documentaries anyone?); or potentially making entertaining content (Post-Office sitcom please), or something as simple as taking that Gorilla ad that sparked this bout of ad-watching, and changing the smallest thing to make the biggest difference...  the below played out just before 8pm on Saturday 13th October, a few minutes before England played France.  if you didn't catch this watch the ad again - the gem crops up just at the end.  enjoy.

The Third Age of Branding

some musings on what I've termed the Third Age of branding...  to what extent could consumers become practical care-holders in the control of brands about which they are passionate about?  and how does that change the nature of what a brand is?

split into two parts, click below to view

Strong brand. Stretched. Better for it.

so you're Harvey Nichols and you want to communicate your food hall credentials.  tough one; you're known for fashionable garms, so just putting the HN badge on some nice food may just look bland - or worse, a flagrant imitation of the M&S food campaign.  what to do?

remember who you are is what!

apply the Harvey Nichols brand engram to food...  fabulous, fashionable, glamourous, elaborate, indulgent, self-aware...  and get a solution thats obvious once you've seen the punchline but surely required the neatest of thinking to get there as part of the planning process.

a nod too to the production values.  this is a concept that could have failed in execution.  it doesn't.  it's a knowing, elegant, high-value piece (implicitly - of course - affirming the existing HN brand engram).  this ad is everything good brand communications should be.  lovely.

Making Up Your Own Foreign Melodrama

one of the highlights in what has been a pretty gloomy year for Virgin Media has surely to be their sponsorship of BB, which has consistently outdone the programme it sponsors in terms of entertaining content.

but those clever people at GoodStuff communications haven't let Virgin stop there.  they've persuaded the sponsor (and the creative agency) to let consumers subtitle their own bumpers - the best ones will be played out in the BB final.

to take part you simply go to the Subtitle Superstar website where you can choose a clip and subtitle to your hearts content.

getting consumers to create their content is nothing new, but this has the double winner of 1. demanding creativity within the context of (in BB) a very highly-valued piece of scheduling real-estate, and 2. rewarding the best creations by showing it to an audience of millions during one of the few truly event TV occasions remaining in the TV calendar.

what makes this stand out isn't that it's asking consumers to create content; the sorely-missed Tony Hart's Gallery did that a long time ago, and the age of the internet has made this a staple of the comms planner's tool-kit.  what makes it stand out is the access it gives consumers to a highly-valued media brand.  like it or loathe it, BB retains a very high stock with 16-34s, and this kind of access isn't easily come by.  the fact that the access comes courtesy of Virgin Media can only do good stuff for the brand.

as an aside, it's worth noting that it comes in the wake of a pretty bad week for the BBC, GMTV and their bedfellows who were less than honest with viewings during TV competitions.  failing standards, plummeting levels of trust, a fundamental betrayal (if reports are to be believed) of the nation - and that's just page 2 of a full-colour supplement on the issue courtesy of the Mail!

...despite the fact that it's been massively over reported, the fact remains that the TV stations have genuinely been caught with the pants down.  why?  because they were so keen to give viewers the perception that they were involved in the programme, they forgot to make sure they were actually genuinely involved in the programme.  could they really have been surprised when viewers reacted not too happily about it not all being as it seemed.

and herein lies the rub...  the reaction of viewers and the media told us not about the lack of trust between consumers and brands, but about the absolute existence of trust between consumers and brands.  the extent of the reaction bears testimony to the high levels of trust that brands (the BBC it must be said in particular) have engendered.

because engaging with consumers and co-creating content with them has become such a staple of many brands' activities, consumers are spending more time than ever before engaging with them.  and when any brand asks consumers to engage with them, to spend precious time with them, to commit energy and creativity to them, they can't be surprised if - when this relationship is undermined - consumers get more pissed off than they would if they didn't particularly  like a 25x4 colour.

engaging with consumers is two-way relationship.  and if the comms planning and marketing community wants to continue to evolve the nature of brand communications, they better make sure that they live up to their end of the bargain.