A guest post from Dennis Peters, my partner here at Heavybag Media:
The recent purchase of youtube.com by Google has everyone talking about the future of television advertising and the shift toward the Internet for ad spending. In a recent article in Wired magazine the quthor talks about the end of TV as we know it. That advertisers will begin to bail out of this dying medium. Big changes are happening; seismic shifts in money and strategy are changing the ad landscape. It seems the attitude toward youtube.com ranges from it being a fad that will fade, to the new form of mass media. The one channel concept, your channel. Pirated material aside, most of the user generated content sucks and is so boring that I can’t stand to watch it. However, I don’t think it stay this way. Google will turn this mish mash of content into something more search friendly, more organized and this will foster better content from more qualified users. Now, the 1.65 billion dollar question: How do you monetize this traffic? In the wired article they danced around where to place the ads. A short commercial before the video plays? That might alienate the current audience (the real value of youtube is that audience). An ad after the video plays? Really? I don’t think so. Next to the video? It reminds me of the brilliant ides by the big agencies when they decided to put :30 sec spots on the websites. Wow, revolutionary. The template is already created for how the advertising will work in this medium. The advertising has to be the entertainment. Not product placement, come on, please stop that whole thing, who do you think you are fooling? The creative challenge is to develop programming where the brand is integral to the story line. The audience will accept that it is being advertised to if we create content that entertains them, however you define entertainment. This new channel is the missing link to the concept behind branded entertainment, which got hijacked by the boring, intrusive and ineffective product placement business. User generated content doesn’t have to be millions of videos of college kids drunk, dancing in their dorm rooms. It is an opportunity for advertisers to be creative and to reach a mass audience once again.
- Dennis Peters
CCO
Heavybag Media
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May 4th, 2007 1:12 am
Alex Wipperfürth, author of Brand Hijack: marketing without marketing believes today’s most successful marketers are able to foster an ongoing dialogue between engaged consumers and the brand.
From Wipperfürth’s perspective, companies are starting to wrap their heads around this notion. He’s seen much more interest in “co-created brand hijack,” a term he defines as “the act of inviting subcultures to co-create a brand’s ideology, use and persona, and pave the road for adoption by the mainstream.”
The reason of course, is that thanks to media proliferation, not to mention commoditization, the consumer is in control. And “technology has made everything more democratic, people have more of a voice, and they’ve also brought transparency to the whole thing,” says Wipperfürth. In other words, marketers almost have no choice but to embrace co-created hijack.
Just a little taste from what I believe is the most powerful marketing book ever written!!
“Marketing managers aren’t in charge anymore. Consumers are. Across the globe, millions of insightful, passionate, and creative people are helping optimize and endorse breakthrough products and services-sometimes without the companies’ buy-in. What exactly is going on? Let’s call it Brand hijacking. This approach is the most complex sort of marketing possible, as well as the least understood.”
“don’t define your audience, create them”
“Next,complexity makes people get deeper into the experience and make them feel that the brand truely belongs to them”
Buckle your seatbelt Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
-Cypher, The Matrix