Ponder the golden age of the advertising business for a moment, and what comes to mind are images of Madison Avenue creative types brainstorming, pitching and crafting high production value campaigns that leverage broadcast and print distribution media to reach a pliable, somewhat homogeneous audience.
But that era, lovingly thought of as Advertising 1.0, is slowly, irrevocably facing death by a thousand cuts, as advertisers no longer can justify economics predicated on the logic that “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don't know which half” and consumers increasingly are processing ads as the mental in-box equivalent of spam, and filtering them out.
By the same token, Advertising 2.0, the so-called Google-ification of the ad business, is a paper tiger that goes too far in the other direction.
While Advertising 2.0 ads have the benefit of being performance-based (meaning that you get what you pay for in terms of only paying when a consumer actually clicks), what they lack are satisfying definitions of what constitutes “performance” coupled with the limited context and undifferentiated actions they offered up. Clicks do not equal conversions without context.
What is needed is a 3.0 advertising model that looks more like direct mail in the sense that it provides a clear call to action, some basis for urgency, specific engagement parameters, relevant metrics of success around those same parameters and a transparent ROI model.
One 3.0 approach, known as a Social Media Marketing Promotion, starts with the concept of initiating an earnest online “event” with your constituency base; namely, some participatory reason for company and customer to have a structured conversation by providing a customized microsite "sand box" for consumers to plug in and engage.
The goodness of this approach is that you can rapidly build campaigns targeted at both Brand Advertising and Direct Response campaign outcome goals.
If brand advertising is the goal, then engagement parameters such as uploads, plays, shares, ratings, embedding, etc. are the metrics that matter and campaign goals should be defined accordingly.
If on the other hand, the goal is direct response, then metrics should be focused on actual leads -- how many people click on the call to action, how many register, request info and the like.
So who’s embracing this approach? Major brands (and their interactive agencies) such as Chevy, Vespa, Fosters Lager, US Army, TheKnot, Hallmark, UPS and Boston Acoustics, to name a few.
(disclaimer: my company, vSocial, is an industry leader in the social media marketing promotions space).
Related Links:
- Social Media: Breadcrumbs and Conversations: provides a well-formed construct for thinking about how social media works.
- Vespa GoGreen Campaign and Interactive Agencies: specific examples of different campaigns in action.
- Is Advertising Science or Art?: An exploration of the concepts in Claude Hopkins seminal read, "Scientific Advertising." Argues simple that advertising is measured by its effectiveness in generating sales. Period.
- Don't subordinate your Brand: on strategies to avoid losing control of your brand while embracing the managed chaos of social media.
