THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

"No ads?" you say. "This boy has really gone off the deep end now."

Well, okay, Bear with me. Maybe the right statement would be "in a world where display ads are much less effective, how do marketers reach their customers?"

After all, we already have television ad skipping via Tivo, and there’s AdBlock Plus, which wipes text, display, Flash, and video ads from web pages. And, if you look at the latest studies on teen email use, you’d say that spam has killed email for anyone under 20.

Let’s not shy away from the conclusion: people don’t like ads.

They don’t like them because they interrupt, they obscure, and they confuse. Get sucked in by a good show, and bam, there’s someone yelling at you about toilet paper. Click on a website link from a friend to find a great article, and spend minutes scrolling up and down the page, trying to get past the ads. Open your inbox to see if you got a letter from a friend, and it’s lost among 84 ways to enlarge various body parts.

So the rules change. People go to YouTube, where they know they won’t see pre-roll ads. They rush to Facebook, where they can get more honest opinions. And they use IM and SMS, because only their friends can talk to them. And, as they talk more and more to each other, advertising messages are lost in the mix.

One thing is for sure, though: people are social. They’ll talk. They’ll share something they like. And they’ll complain about what they hate. And the social networks and social media are open to everyone. There’s no reason you can’t establish a brand outpost in a social space, whether it’s MySpace or a virtual world. And some brands are already doing that.

But it’s funny. Most of the times, these brand outposts are ads.

"Wait a minute!" you cry. "How is a Jolly Green Giant profile page on MySpace, a Coke Friends group on Facebook, a L’Oreal Contest on YouTube, or a racetrack in Second Life an ad?"

It’s an ad because there’s nothing personal about it. There’s no human being behind it. There’s no response. Send a message to a corporate profile on a social network, and what do you get? Echoing silence. Or, maybe in a few days, a canned response. And so it’s a new kind of interruption, a passive interruption. It’s the friend who never calls.

How do you take this out of ad-ville? By making it human. And maybe this is one of the new marketing models–assign some of your best people to be the full-time liason to the social spaces online. Listen to people. And respond.

"But if we staff it all the time, that takes a lot of time and resources!" a typical enterprise will cry. "And . . . and . . . it crosses the line between marketing and . . . well . . . customer service."

So?

I’ll repeat: So?

How much are you spending right now on conventional outreach and advertising? Will slicing a few print ads from the budget really change your marketing results?

On the other hand, how much could you gain by creating a new Social Relations group, with a charter is to interact, listen, and respond to your most engaged customers? You know, the ones who become brand evangelists. The ones who tell their friends, "You’ll never believe what happened to me on Facebook today." The ones who blog about you. The ones who tag their Flickr photos and YouTube videos of your products.

And no, this is not PR. And no, it’s not customer service. And yes, it takes quite a bit of smarts, energy, and drive to do this right. It’s a whole new model. One, we bet, we’ll be seeing a lot of over the next few years.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.