So Microsoft has entered the world of spoof ads. Charlie’s post earlier this week (here) showed one of the adverts they’ve made. Based on a ‘couple’ the ads parody the disconnect between brands (or rather advertisers) and consumers. Showing how the consumer has moved on, whilst the advertiser hasn’t. How the consumer thinks the relationship isn’t working any more, whilst the advertiser thinks it can.
They are funny ads but also they summarise the current situation quite well. Consumers have moved on; they are more informed and more empowered. Some brands and some advertising just hasn’t kept pace. The tensions show in places, things are changing and not everybody is moving at the same speed. These videos highlight that perfectly.
The guy leading the project at Microsoft is keeping a blog (here), and another of the videos is below.
I was at an interesting breakfast event earlier this week, organised by Rebecca Caroe discussing whether brands should be, could be or even are broadcasters. There were three presentations - one about how the BBC had started to think about their programmes more as events than just shows, one on how brands are personalising their conversations with customers and a final presentation on Honda.tv.
Andrew Howells from Zype talked through Honda’s development as a broadcaster and how they were using TV to create a further channel through which the brand could build the customer experience and engagement. How the brand moved from offering additional content during an advert (of the ‘press the red button to find out more’ variety) to having it’s own channel on some cable providers. The interruption model during adverts, it turned out, was not as successful as expected. The channel that people could view as suited them was more popular.
This observation was an interesting one to me. Before I went to the event I was concerned about the title: Should Brands be Broadcasters. In an environment where consumers have greater choice than ever over their exposure to and their discussion of brands, I think there is a danger of suggesting that they should adopt the purely one-way communication that broadcast suggests. The Honda example is good because they use a broadcast medium to allow and encourage two-way conversation and personalisation. Also, by having their own channel rather than pushing their messages to people at a time the brand chooses they are giving their customers the choice to engage when it suits them.
This is critical. As one other attendee at Wednesday’s breakfast commented - he is inundated with ‘personal’ messages to his email and phone. Brands that think they are his friend. He just deletes them all. This is an example of brands as spam. Something we have been seeing more and more of recently.
To combat this brands need to recognise that they are not automatically friends with their consumers. In fact they probable need to wait for consumers to want to be friends with the brand.
Brands also need to recognise that they can’t just push their messages out to consumers any more. They need to allow consumers to engage on their own terms so they avoid becoming brands as spam.
Watch Wednesday’s event
If you want to watch Wednesday’s event and see the discussion for yourself, you can see the Qiks here.
Earlier this week, whilst the Czech Republic were playing Turkey in Euro 2008, an advert aired in prime time on UK television that cost just £6.50 to make.
The ad was the winner of a competition that Doritos had been running, getting customers to create their own adverts: You make it, we play it. The winning ad, Tribe, was conceived, designed, filmed and edited by two Doritos fans. It cost less than £10 to make (although the slot in which is aired probably cost about £45,000 to buy) - just two packs of Doritos, two pots of salsa and some blu-tack.
Watch the ad below; it’s really rather good.
What interests me about this ad is the way Doritos successfully combined a campaign to engage customers with a real reward for their loyalty. They experimented with online engagement - getting people to visit a site and upload their own videos, and with a new form of advertising - showing a completely amateur-made ad. I love it when people try new things, the press they create is often huge and the potential of finding a real innovation is palpable.
In advertising at the moment, as in customer engagement there is a lot of innovation going on. As we’ve seen with Honda in the UK (see post here) and eBay in France (see post here) there are some great things being experimented with. In all of these instances what brands are doing is trying to turn adverts into events. Build up to the event by created activity online, and then provide a way for people to continue to engage with the brand and the advert after it has aired.
In the Doritos case, there is something else at play. Everybody who has submitted, viewed or commented upon a video during the competition feels invovled in the final outcome. They have built mass engagement, rather than just a mass of viewers. The ad, being part of this ongoing engagement process, will have a greater, lasting effect than a traditional advert would. They started to move the advert from just a push marketing message to customer engagement.
