Consumers have embraced the digital revolution, from cell phones to blogs, broadband to digital TV. But are marketers really in touch?
“I have always known that the only way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise. I never managed. Selecting a CD to exercise to often took so long, I only had a few minutes left to get ready for work. Or I would listen to the same CD over and over again until I was no longer motivated during my run. Then my iPod arrived. Now, with a full selection of 5,000 songs and the ability to download new music, I never get bored. I lost nearly 30 pounds and feel great.”
Like Michael, 89 percent of the 12,683 participants in a recent CNN International web poll claim that technology has changed their life for the better. The survey is full of examples of how digital media have allowed people to stay in touch with faraway friends, share everyday moments in words and images with their families, save marriages, make long trips so much more fun, keep track of their children, manage bank accounts, book dream trips, get new jobs, develop new business ideas and connections, find love, develop new hobbies and go shopping-crazy.
IT’S A DIGITAL ROLLER COASTER
So, all you digital immigrants, stop marveling at the digital future! The tools of the digital natives - the earlyadopting, hyperconnected, “all-ways on” teens and tweens who crawled alongside the PC and came of age with the internet - have now taken over and transformed our adult world. In the last three years, the pace at which people have been embracing digital ware - hard and soft - in every aspect of their lives has dramatically increased. While five years ago nearly 40 percent of Brits were apprehensive about technology, 81 percent are now enthusiastic about new innovations and are eager to surround themselves with them. In 2002, 10 million new pages were added to the internet every day. With a new blog now being created every second, we’ve simply lost track of how big the internet really is. Not so long ago, Apple iTunes was predicting sales of one million songs every month. Only 30 months after its launch, two million songs get downloaded not every month, but every day.
Skype, in its two-and-a-half year existence, has attracted over 60 million users, with voice over internet protocol (VoIP) minutes in Denmark now exceeding landline voice minutes. Hold on tight! It’s a digital roller coaster!
What really sets today’s youth apart is the expectation that they can customize and personalize everything in their world. Yahoo! has baptized them the “My Media Generation,” for whom everything should simply be on demand. Through podcasts, blogs, wikis and tags, they craft their own personal viewpoints, products, services and media, inventing from scratch or remixing public domain assets. Considering their peers’ online voices to be the most trusted source of imagination and information, they socialize digitally and seek out like-minded individuals to share their fabrications with. Sweden’s online community, Lunarstorm, claims to have a youth audience three times larger than MTV’s in Sweden, twice the readership of all Swedish evening newspapers combined and with more members logging on daily than the total number of young Swedes watching TV. It’s the country’s new media titan.
WATCH THE MEDIA GIANTS…AND LEARN
But the old media giants are catching on. They are, in fact, showing us the path from company- to consumer-led marketing, yielding carefully crafted marketing spin and control for real consumer participation. They are putting the consumer community at the heart of their marketing strategy, offering tools for consumers to engage in and share their brand experiences.
TV networks around the world have been tuning up their digital strategies with internet awareness campaigns that use video promotion, online and mobile voting and discussion, and digital merchandising in the shape of program ringtones, screensavers and wallpapers. Their interactive TV channels, sites, email and text messages offer bonus content to keep media-meshing viewers engaged during and between episodes. Deals are closed with their new media partners, the top portals, to have them host the official program site in an exchange of entertainment content for reach. Yahoo! in the U.S. was able to offer its members an Apprentice-branded IMvironment where fans could interact with a virtual Donald Trump.
TV networks also now often make existing and even exclusive programming available on mobile phones or for broadband. Since its launch in April 2005, MTV Overdrive - where visitors can pick their favorite clips out of a large gallery of short videos - has generated more than 125 million streams of unique MTV content.
The U.K.’s Channel 4 is determined to become truly multichannel and multiplatform. According to CEO Andy Duncan, Channel 4 is “moving away from a push system, where the content producers decided what you could watch and when, to a pull system, where viewers choose what to view, how, where and when.” Its latest initiative, a broadband documentary channel, invites anyone to make and contribute a “FourDoc,” a fourminute film. The site includes guides that offer directing, planning, shooting and editing tips, and a rushes library of free, cleared material to be reused.
Korea’s digital newspaper OhmyNews also makes this unique formula of “consumer participation with professional support” work. Only 10 percent of the articles are written by an editorial staff. The remaining 90 percent are contributed by 41,000 citizen reporters. Submit your story and you receive $20 and your name in print, but not before OhmyNews journalists have screened and edited it. Once it’s accepted, you can follow the status of your words in real time, observing the number of reader clicks and comments. Some diligent authors have contributed over 500 articles, and the difference in quality between their first and more recent writing is remarkable. Nearly 70 OhmyNews citizen reporters now have contracts to write books. In just four years, OhmyNews has become the sixth most important medium in Korea and a quite profitable one, thanks to online advertising, sales of news content to partners and a commission on the tipping service that allows readers to reward their favorite writers.
THE NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Over the past few months, more European marketers have been announcing reorganizations of their advertising budgets in favor of new media. The question remains, though, whether the advertising industry is ready to meet the full challenge of connecting with today’s consumer in today’s world. With media companies showing how to move beyond the tried and true, embracing digital opportunities to their advantage, it’s clear that the rules of engagement should change. Here are some essential ingredients used to screen our engagement or “in touch” ideas:
THE TEN INGREDIENTS OF “IN TOUCH”
Insight: Have we captured the single most important consumer insight that can truly engage our target audience with our brand?
Innovation: Are we using new media - email, web, mobile, instant messaging, blog, podcasts, games, interactive TV, widgets, etc. - at the heart of or to reinforce our approach? Have we used technology to increase our impact?
Interest: Are we offering our target audience value that matches their interests, through entertainment, informative content or utilities that capture their attention?
Involvement: Have we built interaction into the campaign, a way for our target audience not only to respond and give feedback, but to enjoy real dialogue? Have we explored all solutions that enable them to truly contribute or participate?
Influence: Are we stimulating word-of-mouth by giving our target audience a reason to talk about us to their network, and are we making it easy to share? Are we thinking about how to reach the community and its mavens, and influence connections?
Immediacy: Are we leveraging the opportunities of search, contextual and behavioral advertising to instantaneously reach consumers who demonstrate interest or potential?
Integration: Are we playing into our target audience’s multichannel, multitasking behavior, assuring campaign presence across all customer touchpoints? Are we assuring that we continue talking beyond the campaign to consumers we have engaged, especially the high-value ones?
Intelligence: Have we put tools in place - for example, testing - to gather consumer intelligence, as well as understanding about what works and what doesn’t?
Idea: “Unless your advertising is built on a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night.” -David Ogilvy
Investment:Recognizing the complexities and cost implications of engaging the “all-ways on” consumer, have we made sure our campaign has superior economics at heart? Are we measuring brand results, sales impact and ROI?
EUROPE’S DIGITAL FACTS
- Europe is the fastest-growing broadband market in the world, with the Netherlands and Denmark following Korea as the world’s most connected markets.
- By 2010, broadband household penetration in Western Europe will reach 63%; 93% of online households will use broadband to access the internet.
- The European blogosphere is growing rapidly. France leads the pack with at least 3.5 million blogs, followed by the U.K., Spain and Poland with 1.5 million blogs each.
- Of the 300 online music sites worldwide, 190 are in Europe. 52% of youth listens to music online instead of elsewhere.
- Europe is ahead of the curve when it comes to transitioning to digital TV. About 18% of households already have some form of DTV, expected to grow to 65% by 2010. The U.K. is the only true digital interactive TV market; 69% of U.K. adults are able to watch DTV at home and half of them have interacted with a program.
- DVRs are expected to be in 25% of the top European countries’ homes by 2007 and are already changing behavior: 90% of U.K. DVR owners fast-forward through ad breaks.
- Of European mobile phones in use today, 59% are enabled with GPRS (2.5G) and 3% are enabled with UMTS (3G), increasing respectively to 70% and 21% by 2008.
author: Patou Nuytemans ( Ogilvy & Mather EAME - London )
site: Ogilvy
May 23rd, 2008
