Branded content and the consumer experience

Tomorrow evening I'm doing a little talk to branded content producers here. It's free to come, but you just have to register. Here's the script, but I promise there'll be pictures.

I’m a consumer planner – which means I sell guns and drugs to minors. Or that's what I tell my mum.

Really though, I’m supposed to know everything there is to know about a brand’s consumers and turn that insight into the basis of a great creative idea.

In other words, I should just know how you should sell guns and drugs to minors, rather than actually do it myself.

So I’d like to talk about the consumer perspective a little bit, and how it’s often at odds with that of the brand.

Let’s start with the brand managers’ view of the world.

They liken themselves to media owners – they pay for someone’s time and attention and fill that time and attention with content. Traditionally that content has been advertising.

I think traditional brands operate in an Attention Economy.

What is that, then?

Wikipedia defines it like this: Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity

And … "Attention economics today is primarily concerned with the problem of getting consumers to consume advertising. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Attention is therefore a crucial and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers is now sufficiently low that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated”.

There are advertising memes floating around regarding the attention economy, that consumers sell the right of brands to invade their privacy, based on how ‘important’ they are as consumers, and the amount of time they’re willing to give up to advertisers. How many of you would you be prepared to do that?

Here are some stats about the attention economy.

James Gleick says that each generation of consumers has 8000 times the amount of information available to them than the previous generation.

The Henley Centre says that 63% of us don’t have enough time to get things done in their daily lives – yet consumers in Western Europe are expected to see and somehow process 3500 ads a day.

The ad agency Leo Burnett have a study that people are only likely to engage with 3 of those 3500 messages a day.

So brands are obsessed with cutting through the clutter – and think that by re-forming content (ads) into new emerging media opportunities – like Advertiser Funded Programming – that they will be able to bypass the traditional channels and get their brand in front of people in new and exciting ways.

Audi set up the Audi TV channel to avoid clutter, and create advocacy (and presumably repeat purchase) among brand obsessives. It cost them £8m a year to run.

Land Rover do a similar thing on internet TV to the tune of £400,000 a year.

BBH, Audi’s ad agency, say that “Success won’t be defined by viewing figures or the number of sales generated, it will come down to how effectively the channel impacts on consumers’ perceptions of the Audi brand." But, just as a theoretical exercise, for a positive return on investment, Audi have to be sure to sell about 2100 extra cars because of Audi TV. I don’t know what their viewing figures are like but 2100 cars is about 4% of their total sales. Hmmm.

Here’s another stat from the attention economy. 92% of all email traffic is spam and open rates are plummeting. So, before you design another email campaign for your brand, think: does anyone care?

And another: only 1 in 10 people believe the ads on ITV are truthful

Another – and a media observation this time, so I defer to Jo to confirm or otherwise. But I was told recently by a media agency that we’ve reached a tipping point – the majority of terrestrial TV ads are now no longer seen, because of filters – such as timeshifting, view-on-demand, and ad-zapping on PVRs.

The advertising industry is at a crossroads of consumer confidence and trust

So I have a theory that branded content isn’t the new delivery mechanism of choice for media-savvy brand marketers, it’s just another form of invidious spam. It’s Ad-Voided by the consumer.

The consumer’s economy isn’t one of selling their attention to advertisers.

Here’s a ‘day-in-the-life’ of a medium web-savvy housewife, which I found on the web. The schedule, not the wife, that is. It’s from the US but I think it still holds true.

Morning:

Check e-mail on Hotmail

Searches on Google

Spend time responding to and e-mailing friends + family

Checks out links from friends (recommendations)

Browses real estate sites (it's a hobby)

Afternoon

Checks e-mail

Searches on Google

Watches a video on YouTube

Browses Ebay

Browses travel deals on Expedia

Checks Facebook

Browses Craigslist

Late Afternoon

Plays with kids on Webkinz, Noggin etc.

Checks e-mail

Searches on Google

Browses real-estate sites

Evening

Checks e-mail

Checks status on Facebook

Watches TV on DVR

Not one banner is clicked, or pop-up reacted to. People are using applications not branded content.

So I have a theory that the consumer’s economy is an Application Economy.

In an application economy, there are 3 key rules.

And my argument this evening is that by applying these 3 rules to Branded Content projects, you can create truly meaningful, original, and relevant solutions.

1. Stuff has to be USEFUL

2. Stuff has to be INTERESTING (and sometimes that means it shouldn’t try to have the brand all over it)

3. Stuff has to be UBIQUITOUS

1. USEFULNESS

As Darmano.typepad.com puts it: “Any experience is useful when it's meaningful and serves a purpose. Currently much of marketing still breaks down into self-serving gimmicks and interruptions that offer little value.”

Here’s a nice quote on the same theme: "For the same budget and energy as we expend on current forms of advertising, we could be making something more tangible, useful and reusable that plays a more integral part in the consumer's life.” Benjamin Palmer, Barbarian Productions (US)

So Usefulness means “Brand[-ed communications] being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch” Jonny Vulkan, Anomaly.

Rule 1 is Usefulness, and understanding what the brand’s consumers would find truly useful, not junky or poor quality.

2. INTERESTINGNESS

The challenge laid down by the Henley Centre, from the consumer perspective, is that consumers don’t put those 3500 ads in a box marked ‘advertising’.

Ads are competing against culture – movies, theatre, music and so on, and they’re competing with other things that demand our attention, like our work email and powerpoint.

So ads - branded content - has to be ‘worth’ people’s time and attention; worth reading, watching or interacting with. It has to be more interesting than the TV that surrounds it.

The problem is that brand marketers and their agencies see something interesting, like this and they think wow, that would be cool to recreate, but in a branded context, and then they have to film it and stick it on YouTube and behind the Red Button and do a microsite.

But being interesting might mean shutting up - being less branded, being intruiging, and letting the consumer work things out for themselves.

So, my 2^nd Rule is to make things Interesting, and to really understand, better than anyone else, what interesting means to the consumer in relation to the brand and the proposed form of content.

3. UBIQUITOUS

We live in a hugely fragmented media world. We’re consuming more media, but less of each, than ever before.

So advertisers have many more consumer touchpoints available to them, and the temptation is to fill those touchpoints, and with integrated or ‘matching luggage’ ads across all those touchpoints

This is like pushing messages at people in the vague hope that they’ll stick.

The consumer experience is one of pull, not push. That consumers will assemble their preferred view of a brand based on the experiences they want of it, that they find interesting and useful. They will seek out the building blocks – what Jeremy Bullmore called in the 1960’s the ‘sticks and straws of experience’ – they want, not the ones the advertiser wants.

The agency – and content producers’ – challenge is to divide up everything they want to say and distribute it in independent, bite sized nuggets across the available touchpoints. The media agency Naked call this transmedia planning.

The art of this approach lies in being able to let the consumer create a meaningful story, over a sustained period of time. This requires skills of narrative and storytelling – of plotting out consumer experiences and how to keep them gripped to your message. I think content producers will be better skilled than many ad agencies in this sort of area – in terms of plotline and serialisation. For instance When Shell wanted to create a 9 minute TV ad, their agency, JWT turned to film directors and producers to create an extended narrative that could be run in different timelengths and formats across a variety of screen based media.

And this narrative ability isn’t exclusive to film based media – BMW successfully ported their Films branded content campaign to iPods via audiobooks.

So my 3^rd Rule is Ubiquity – creating a story for the brand that unfolds over time and across different media, on the consumer’s terms, that harnesses the skills of programme and film makers.

Summing up then

I think the brand’s view of the world is usually one of competing for paid-for attention through new channels like branded content, AFP and sponsorship idents, but is often at odds with the consumers’ desire for branded content which is 1. useful, 2. interesting (that is, worth it), and 3. unfolds over time.

As the research and analyst company Forrester put it – “Marketers need to partner with agencies [and content producers] that listen instead of shout. It's about shifting from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating [stories]”

So when we’re presented with a brand challenge how would these rules apply, or work from your perspective?