It offers fantastic perspectives on creation and consumption patterns of culture, and digital’s weighty role in the changes being wrought. The limited ‘spotlight’ options of an earlier era (mainstream media) now have to co-exist with platforms and mechanisms that are open to most. ’Scale is no longer a guarantee of stability.‘ Consequently, attention is the more coveted prize. Another related phenomenon is that ’Change no longer happens all at once for everyone‘. I remembered ‘IsItOld‘ when I read this.  I sense quite a few concepts agglomerating here. Small ideas, which I haven’t written about for a while now, and transmedia storytelling, for starters, and a reversal of polarity. (the last via Neil Perkins post, linked to earlier)

Brands have always been using popular culture. One brand that I can immediately think of is Amul, and yet, I almost missed their Kolaveri ad. (via) Yes, not the greatest, but decent. The point here is that while they got the creation right, the distribution is still iffy. And that’s another challenge. Popular culture is more complex than ever before. With the abundance of content and platforms, keeping a watch on the long tail of culture, prioritising according to the audience-fit and then distributing it is not going to be an easy task.

I have always liked (and hence, borrowed with credit in presentations) the analogy of bonfires and fireworks to social media and advertising. (respectively) The implications of this are not just in standard brand advertising but also in branded content. Brands now have to think of how the long-term story and the spikes can work together and ideally, complement each other, even while figuring out what role advertising and branded content play in each. Despite the seeming fit of social media to spikes, I wonder whether we will, in the medium term, see a role reversal – ‘mass’ media providing spikes and the internet dealing with the long term story, before settling into shared roles.

until next time, get a spike mike

I read his latest work Revolution 2020, and though it wasn’t quite the ‘Revulsion 2020′ that many made it out to be, I didn’t think it was a great piece of work either. (my review) But that’s not the story here. On page 108, a Cafe Coffee Day wove itself into the story, as the protagonist tells his father, “There is a Cafe Coffee Day opening in Sigra. It is a high-class coffee chain…..” I wouldn’t have thought more about it if I hadn’t remembered a story last year on how Chetan Bhagat had become CCD’s special friend, as part of their rebranding strategy. CCD makes another appearance in Page 116, and then several more later, as it becomes a routine rendezvous.

Inserting a product into a story is not a new thing. Product placements in movies are now taken for granted. I still remember the time I worked on a project in the early days of this phenomenon – WorldSpace (my employer then) and Lage Raho Munnabhai. But these days they are mostly a force fit and all the brands involved try to one-up each other through their own promos. No one wins.

But I haven’t seen a product placement in a book yet. To be fair, a few other brands like Frankfinn, Ramada, Taj also make appearances, but CCD gets top billing in Revolution 2020. Ah, billing. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, and it’s the author’s way of making the reader identify a little more with the story. CCDs are now, after all, ubiquitous. But if this is indeed an official tie-up, I think it’s quite a neat job by CCD. In the era of storytelling, when every brand tries to engage their audience via everything from TVCs to social media platforms, getting themselves into a guaranteed bestseller is a coup. CCD has always relied on its own stores than media campaigns for its storytelling, so this fits in. But if it’s indeed an official tie-up, and not a “what’s a few mentions between friends” arrangement, I’d have liked a disclosure from the author. It would’ve done his brand story’s credibility a world of good.

until next time, a plot can happen over coffee…

When I read the announcement, I immediately thought of brand identity. In the initial days of Google+ launch, the circles feature that allowed users to compartmentalise their different identities created a little flutter. It helped that, at that point, Facebook’s options for achieving the same ends were pretty well concealed. The visual identities of the brands on Google+ remain consistent with other online and offline platforms and so far, so do the tone and activities.

I have a different identity for different sets of people I deal with. Work, Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Twitter connections etc. How I behave with them and what I share with them varies too. (though there are overlaps)  I thought about this from a brand’s perspective. My relationship with a brand is different from the one that another person has. (use cases, context etc) And if I do have to share this relationship, what I’d share and the way I would share it would also vary among my own different audience sets.  In a world where the consumers are moving towards a fluid identity, do brands have to consider one too?

In the real world, brands sometimes tweak their identity according to geography. This was reasonable and worked fine in an era of mass media. With the internet, the whole world would easily see the changes across geography. And the end consumer could ask questions too. He/she even expects the brand to communicate like a human. If we consider different networks as different geographies, with peculiar consumption patterns (of information, for starters), does the consistency that brand currently focuses on become a constraint? Considering that different platforms have different advantages and are used for different objectives, how fluid can the brand and its communication be, on the web and off it?

until next time, identity crises

The first is this seemingly simple, but excellent post at HBR titled ‘A Logo is Not a Brand‘ which (to really summarise) explains how the brand is its strategy, the stories that its products tell, its calls to action, its customer service, its tone, attitude, its people, communication tools and its logo and visuals are all part of the brand. And he asks a very pertinent question in the end

Whether you know it or not, whether you have a swanky logo or not, you do have a brand. The question is whether or not it’s the brand you really want.

With social platforms and user voices that become more effective than the brand’s own, the likelihood of different perceptions is indeed high, but the good news is these very same tools also offer brands the opportunity to bridge the chasm.

The second post titled ‘Brand Building: Is Function the new Emotion‘ builds on the view (that I also subscribe to) that the best advertisement for a brand is its product. But the twist in the end is that “the functional integration into a consumer’s life creates an emotional bond” and sustaining it requires “superior performance and meaningful, empathetic innovation”. Completely agree, because it does tie into the idea of social business and identifying a workforce and processes that will help build and sustain it.

A brand’s purpose is something I have written about many times earlier on this blog. I found a very elegant brand framework – part of Leo Burnett’s Human Brands concept – in one of the Cannes 2011 decks. According to Mark Tutssel, Chief Creative Officer, “Brands which have a purpose, but don’t act dreamy, while brands which act without a purpose are noisy. And, for brands which lack both, they are lazy.” (via) The top right quadrant belongs to  ‘HumanKind’, and that’s where successful brands are.

So what prevents other brands from occupying it? One interesting answer I read was ‘Fear‘. As the post says, to build a leading brand, “organizational thinking must be on the creative plane (possibility and potential) not the competitive plane (hard bargains and discount pricing)”, and marketers are frightened of what this entails. The post even outlines a six step transformational cycle. Metrics are mentioned as a strong deterrent.

I have always felt that most advertising have not been measurable from an actual sales perspective. Parameters like TOM, salience in brand advertising are a no-brainer, but even in ‘performance’ advertising, there are so many factors that remain unaccounted for and unmeasured. But most brands go through the loops. We come back to the first reference about brands being a collection of various parts, a sentiment that is echoed in the last reference too, as the author defines leadership as “the quality of one’s presence in every aspect of life”. When organisations learn to do that, brand utopia will be nearer.

until next time, contrabrand

A couple of weeks back, I had remarked on the role of agencies in future in the context of brands and curation. I found this post titled ‘ Why Ad Agencies Should Act More Like Tech Startups‘ very interesting. The contention was that in these dynamic times, with new services appearing/disappearing faster than ever, the definition of the ‘idea’ needs to go beyond the traditional creative domains and start looking at technology as a major player, ‘leveraging it in creative ways’. Mashable had a post couple of days back on how the advertising industry is preparing for a digital future.

Despite the slice-and-dice that marketing functions have gone through, I still have quite some affection for full service agencies especially if they adapt to changing scenarios and pick up specialised skills and knowledge that would help them tell brand stories better. But I’d agree that understanding not just specific technology, but the landscape itself is indeed something agencies should look at as a priority.

And then I happened to read another post on a blog that I have recently discovered, but is one of my favourites now. The post, titled 3 Blind Marketers, (based on the blind men-elephant tale) is on the subject of marketing shifting from the earlier dichotomies of ATL/BTL and analog/digital to the paid, owned and earned media model, and is essentially about how specialists corresponding to each ‘silo’ have few perspectives outside of it. Later in the article, he makes a case for the full service agency, as succinctly as “When you’re trying to make sense of an elephant in the dark, it helps to have extra hands around.”

I think that the biggest advantage that incumbent agencies can have with a client is trust, and the reason why many clients seem to bring aboard new specialist agencies is because they are losing the trust in their agencies to deliver on those fronts. But what that also means is that if agencies can build and leverage their understanding of the client’s brand figure out a platform/domain agnostic process to generate ideas, and find the best ways to execute them from the diverse options that this dynamic era provides, they can still be of much value to the client.

until next time, a case for briefs, but that’s a different post

Bonus Reads: David Ogilvy on Creating The Ideal Agency Culture

and The future of Advertising Technology (via) (click on image to enlarge)

I thought the choice was platform was in itself a great step. Tumblr, for now, seems completely clued in on how networks, sharing and community work and as MTV notes, is focused on web culture, which can be seen in the way they have designed the service. It also explains why there’s nothing new about everyone from media companies to fashion brands hopping on to it.

Brands as storytellers is also nothing new though new and interesting stories are hard to come by. That’s where a crowd can help. Mostly, when brands say they’ve tried crowdsourcing, it means asking for a caption or a photo or a video that has something to do with their current campaign. There are exceptions like IdeaStorm, Dewmocracy, My Starbucks Idea etc but that’s a small list in the large set of attempts.

What I liked about MTV’s approach was that it is not asking for anything specific. It is establishing a culture of conversation around its domain and with its trademark edgy approach (F*ck yeah!) – internally and externally, making it comfortable for a community to develop. Once that happens generating interesting stories (content) will slowly stop being a constraint. Brands can then chose to play curator, aiding discovery, surfacing interesting ideas, starting a line of thought, and streamlining conversations. And when it feels there’s sufficient excitement, scale these up to a larger audience via other distribution channels. Right now, the reverse is how it works – a “come one, come all and quickly contribute to our newly launched endeavour” shout out on traditional media, instead of an organic approach.

On a different track, this doesn’t mean that if the crowd generates everything the agencies will be defunct. On the contrary, and in addition to the implementation, the agencies are probably best suited to play the role of meta curators, moving beyond one way advertising platforms and processes, and using their understanding of the brand to explore new platforms and communication protocols being developed, so that they can advise the brand on every frontier that comes up.

until next time, tumble along

Update: Just read that Tumblr hosts more blogs than WordPress now. (via)

Apparently, there is another reason to click it too, going by the response to this tweet

But since the face isn’t much to look at, I’m hoping you’ll focus on the article

I would estimate that only about 25% (or less) of the ads carried these logos, so I can understand why brands would want to use this as a differentiation tactic, but doing so with just buttons (sometimes without a url/handle/name) and no worthwhile presence to showcase, defeats the purpose. Or maybe we can wait for the day when Augmented Reality will allow me to use that button and automatically go to the url. Meanwhile, I await the introduction of the Foursquare button into the mix.

until next time, button up for the social media ride

P.S: I’d like to make this an infographic, if you know someone who can volunteer, please pass the word.

The themes here from the real world experiences to virtual ones are homogeneity, and of a user’s preference (in many cases) for familiarity. Which makes me turn back the question on balkanisation. Despite the balkanisation, do new platforms accelerate a homogeneity within a certain demographic?  The rate of upward mobility notwithstanding, do you think, at some point, popular culture and preferences will become homogenous globally? eg. say Angry Birds, Dexter, Bieber hatred…

Meanwhile, since the time I switched to Android – a few months ago, I have noticed that services like Facebook, Twitter, 4sq and the Google range, are working hard to ensure that users can move seamlessly across different platforms – web, mobile web, apps, tablets. While that doesn’t absolve the brands from having to understand the workings of different platforms, consumption patterns and how they could provide the user an interesting experience in these contexts, it does provide some relief.

Few brands have been known to get regional nuances right in communication. Now, along with location and location based marketing becoming center-stage, there is an added challenge. Not only do they have to get the nuances right in their communication, but they also have to provide consistency in the value offering (not the same as being static) in experiences across platforms. That is a long stretch from blasting messages across traditional media platforms.

until next time, brand-owned platforms?