Creative that Makes Friends with Social Networks
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 25, 2006 | Share This
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Welcome to OMMA New York, also known as the Online Media, Marketing & Advertising Conference. Despite intitial technical difficulties, I’ve finally managed to get online and start broadcasting the sessions.
So, though slightly delayed, here’s a recap of my first session: “Creative that Makes Friends with Social Networks.”
(This session was moderated by Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, with speakers: Brian Clark - GMD Studios, Frank Radice - the NBC Agency, Erik Martin - Palm Pictures, Sandy Marks - MSHC Partners, and Joe Crump - Avenue A | Razorfish.)
Joe Crump kicked off the session with some demographics. “There are eight types of people,” he reported, “Couch Potatotes, Traditionalists, Info Junkies, Culture Capitalists, Subversives, Originators, and Exhibitionists.” These 8 groups work together in an ecosystem of social media, from Creators to Distributors to Consumers. He went through the standard redefinition of advertising in social media: “it’s pull, not push,” “your audience is a moving target,” “you have to give consumers some control” and “let the edges of your brand become fuzzier.” His main point: Social Media is a Hungry Mouth, and if you get the audience on your side, you have to feed it. Nice breakdown of behavioral demographics, but nothing terribly new.
Sandy Marks began with a case study of a political women’s group. Her company launched a campaign on celebrity blogs to target “young, single women, not yet registered to vote.” They came up with a series of provocative ads, including a picture of a scantily clad female, an anorexic female, and a transgenered boxing female to read with the tagline, “use a different kind of power.” The messages, meant to be both eye-catching and empowering, got boldly rejected by the women’s group. In the end, Marks’ company ran a boring but traditional ad, per request of the client. Her main point: Not Everyone is Ready For Social Media.
Frank Radice presented a set of MSNBC blog ads that were “designed to grab the readers attention” and thereby encourage clickthroughs. His philosophy is that ads should provoke the click, but not necessarily communicate the entire message. For NBC, the “mysterious” ads seemed to generate the best results. His Point: “If they’re talking about the ad and engaged by the ad, that’s all that matters.”
Brian Clark followed up on Radice’s “mystery” theme by saying that the most successful ads “don’t tell the audience what they should believe, but they give them a question that they can fill in themselves.” For example – images that are evocative, that leave questions, and that feature humans to get a human response. “YouTube and Myspace clickthrough rates are worse than traditional online ads,” he said, “so creative content is even more important.” This seems obvious, but his message has important implications for contextual advertisers that might want to tap into highly trafficked social media sites, but aren’t considering how user behavior changes the value of that contexual ad. His point: Approach Creative as a publisher, not as an advertiser.
Erik Martin presented an interesting counterpoint to Radice and Clark. He posited that advertisers don’t always have to be mysterious, and that putting functional information in ads (a la publisher) is sometimes more successful than playing the “mystery” card. For example, his company ran a set of ads that listed concert tour dates (funcitonal information). Those tour dates linked to myspace pages (social networking), even though the myspace pages weren’t relevant beyond the ads. In the end, the ads generated ticket sales by informing viewers directly. Martin also noted that the best campaigns are based on “good research and starting early.” In other words, if you talk to fans at the start of the creative process, you come up with more successful ads. His Point: Take full advantage of ad real estate.
While Martin was discussing the benefits of functional ads, Mr. NBC cut in with the revelatory, “there’s no secret! There’s no formula!” The panelists all nodded and added their own support for this statement, which in my opinion, is not exactly ground breaking news. They concluded that whether your ads are mysterious or functional, they’ll engage atleast ONE of your niche audiences, and therefore, make a difference.
I’ll cut to the good stuff. The three most interesting points of the session were:
- Erik Martin said that his company includes an email address in every ad. This gives people a direct point of contact from the ad itself, which according to Martin, generates a very positive response from viewers. In a sense, Martin is thus integrating client services and online marketing. A very pertinent approach to “engaging the conversation” of social media.
- Sandy Marks said that video ads outperform static ads 4 to 1 (no surprise there), because her company uses a “click to continue” metric. Very interesting. Furthermore, she said that videos allowed a better window into user behavior, thanks to better tracking capabilities.
- Brian asked – Do we really want everyone coming to the website? His question provokes the notion that the Internet is no longer about creating destination points, but is increasingly about creating content for circulation. On this note, Mr. NBC said that advertisers should embrace both positive and negative buzz, because buzz itself is an indication of engagement. I wonder if that perspective works for industries beyond entertainment, such as in instances of bad press surrounding product recalls.
Two things I wish had been covered: 1. What measurement systems exactly are the panelists using to track buzz? (beyond Google Trends or Yahoo! Buzz Index) and, 2. How do they deal with copyright issues? All day, people have been dancing around the first subject and ignoring the second. Granted, these are questions that online marketers are universally struggling with, and for which viable answers may not emerge until social media has had time to mature.
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