@bmorrissey

Brands get in bed with micro-media

The media world is in upheaval. That makes it an interesting thing to cover, although strange because it directly affects me at the same time. Mass media is challenged and buffeted on many fronts. Often, like the auto industry, everything is pinned on the recession. If only that were true. In fact, the economic problems are just bring to the surface deep-seated problems with the media business in the face of digital delivery.

One of the big problems I'm preoccupied with is the ad model for content. I wrote a couple stories this week that look at how brands are tapping micro-media (is that a term?) for the kind of advertising they can't get from traditional media. This is something I covered before as "advertorial 2.0," a term some didn't like. An interesting phenomenon I finally got around to covering is the rise of mommy bloggers as belles of the ball in the eyes of brands. In both instances, content and advertising blur. This is a trend that directly runs counter to traditional media, or as a State Farm exec termed it to me "authority-driven" content. State Farm hired the creators of Mommycast to shoot a video series around insurance-related topics. The other story looks at how Sanyo got a group of popular YouTube creators to make videos about its news camera, crafting the content around the product attributes.

Brands feel they can get more from these "real" content creators. Part of it is they feel there's more of a connection with the audience than in regular content. Another big part of it is a willingness to embed brand messages directly into the content. This is the challenge for mainstream media. It can't rely solely on reach to carry ad messages cordoned off from the content. This will work for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (maybe) and some others. But as Wenda Harris Millard has pointed out, there's not enough advertising right now to support all the media outlets out there -- at least with their current cost structures. That means advertisers are going to demand a helluva a lot more from media.

That's where micro-media comes in. Innovation occurs at the fringes. For better or worse, we'll seem emerging ad models happen there. These two cases point to a marriage of content and advertising that's tighter. The YouTube artists have turned their hobbies into a living. Some make well over six figures, I was told. The videos they created for Sanyo aren't bad. Most branded entertainment is cringe-worthy, but I found the integrations they did pretty clever. Similarly, mommy bloggers have loyal audiences -- and a willingness to play ball with brands. That means reviews of free products, documenting trips provided by companies, etc. What amazed me about this world was the power some of these women have accrued. When I interviewed one of the Mommycast creators, there were two PR reps on the phone -- one from Google, which had a distribution deal with her, and another from Media Rights Capital. The woman and her partner, who just a few years ago began a podcast, now have a Hollywood agent. Even a mommy blogger with a modest audience could reasonably expect a Caribbean cruise on Disney's dime. It's more than a little crazy.

The type of deals Sanyo does with YouTubers and State Farm with Mommycast is money that isn't going to mainstream media. My bet is we'll see more brand attention shift to micro-media that offers not just focused audiences, but a willingness to do interesting integrations. The challenge for traditional media is keeping up without separating the needed separation between advertising and content.

Ads masquerading as content in the stream (con't)

Peter Kafka at MediaMemo has more evidence of ads aping content in the stream. He points to the efforts Conde Nast is using to make money off Reddit, the Digg-like social news site where users vote up and down headlines. The ads look just like the headlines users vote on. The result: Conde Nast says the placements are getting 5 percent click-through rates.

In the stream, ads masquerade as content

There’s part of the Google story that doesn’t get enough attention, believe it or not. Here it is: Google’s success is based, in part, on people not knowing its ads are ads. AdWords placement looks a hell of a lot like the other links that weren’t paid for. Google of course discretely labels the ads, although it wouldn’t use that term – sponsored sounds much more benign.

Switch over to display. Here, there’s a different story. Many display ads don’t fit with the environments the live. This is for many reasons, but it’s just a fact. And so they’re not only clicked but we actively avoid those areas. This kinda sucks for advertisers. So we’ve seen some taking a page from the old playbook and just making their ads bigger and “more impactful.” (This means LOUDER.)

Social media presents a different challenge. The adjacency model, built for editorial and entertainment content, isn't a great fit. Fred Wilson thinks marketers need to be part of “the stream,” the persistent ticker of information the flows by us daily in Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter.  When ads are part of the stream, they can’t look too much like ads. This can be obvious with the popularity of those pay per post, er “sponsored conversations,” programs. Brands will use other methods, I’m sure, including the cover of charities to get people to market them to their friends. Sometimes it’s a matter of subtle placement of regular ad units. The Facebook redesign is taking a step in this direction, I think. Facebook is dead set against having ads overwhelm the experience so they’re weaving them into the experience, which is centered around the news feed. They want to make advertisers part of the stream of conversations. Check out the new Facebook and look at the most prominent ad placement, the ad for a movie called I Love You, Man. That’s an ad? I had to look three times before I could tell.

Other changes at Facebook make this direction clear. Brand pages will imitate personal pages, so their actions can get into the news feed easily and (Facebook hopes) more naturally. My guess is any Twitter ad model will go this route, not banners. One company I know is working on a model to beam brand endorsements, on an opt-in basis, to a friend’s Twitter connections. The idea is these sponsor messages appear seamlessly with the stream of updates. Is this a good thing? I have no idea. I firmly believe advertising messages will get more integrated with content experiences. The adjacency model increasingly looks broken, from newspapers to magazines to display to broadcast TV. Ideally, marketers will earn their way into the stream be doing something remarkable, but they’ll still need to buy their way in sometimes. How this is done in a way that makes people comfortable is the big challenge.

The feel-good social marketing bribe

Time and again, studies show that people’s trust in advertising is going down while word of mouth goes up. Digital is accelerating that. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we can easily get recommendations from friends and networks. That’s great.

Where does that leave our advertiser friends? Well, if their product and service is wonderful, it’s great. People get to tell others about it – and it’s free. OK, so let’s talk about everyone else. Well, ads in Facebook do OK – better than a lot of what you read would make you think – but they’re clearly not enough. Twitter is full of advertising, only its mostly social media gurus, ninjas and black belts pimping their services or regular users marketing themselves. That’s where charities come in.

See, marketers have to get us to do the marketing for them. But that sounds a little too Amway for most people. After all, if I offered you $10 to send some marketing message to a bunch of friends, you probably wouldn’t do it. Ah, but what if I asked you to add a Facebook app and invite 10 friends to do the same? That works. This is what was going on last night at the P&G Digital Hack Night, when P&G got a bunch of agency types, media execs and others to troop to Cincy to perform for it. The idea: use social media to get people to buy Tide t-shirts –- some of the proceeds going to Feed America -- with an emphasis on "use." It was cooked up as a marketing exercise for the CPG giant’s army of brand managers to see the true power of social media.

It was really the corporate version of the #daniela cause David Armano took up last month. What quickly ensued can only be described as a social media telethon. People were encouraged to retweet the message, leading to a mess of Twitter activity around Tide. There were offers from popular bloggers and Twitterers to give links to those who bought t-shirts. Jerry Lewis, meet Twitter. It was all captured with a hashtag for bright-eyed brand managers to contemplate how to get their CPG marketing done through Twitter.  I’m sure the gerbils in their head were working overtime on the treadmill calculating the “earned media” value. I'm not sure if the use of Twitter qualifies as a success. The AdAge summarizes the lessons this way:

Fewer than 150 media and marketing people leaning heavily on their social-media friends and followers, resorting to big-name incentives and spending a total of about $4,000 on digital media can sell more than 2,000 T-shirts at $20 a pop for charity and hit the top 10 trending topics on Twitter in the process.

This was a marketing exercise, nothing more, yet I wonder if it’s going in the wrong direction. The optimistic view of all this is it’s a win-win-win for users, charities and marketers.  After all, users get to feel like they’re doing some good, charities get some needed cash and marketers get some nice buzz. Awesome. The problem is charities are being used to get people over the ickiness of marketing for gigantic corporations. As was pointed out yesterday, if people really want to help Feed America, they can donate to it directly. Why is P&G needed? (Only about $6 of the $20 for the t-shirt went to the charity, according to the Q&A on Logic + Emotion.) What's more, even as a marketing exercise, the lessons it is teaching the world's largest advertiser is social media is a great place to broadcast stuff, even if it's untargeted by going to people who couldn't  buy the t-shirts outside the U.S. Using charities as a guise for people to do marketing for enormous corporations gives me the creeps. Even among the tenuous relationship in Twitter, what happens when we commercialize those bonds? Do any of us want an avalanche of application requests and corporate-sponsored retweets? I take a dim view of these attempts to prey on people’s do-gooder instincts for some marketing exercise. Am I too cynical?

Finding the beauty in banners

Last week, IAB chief Randall Rothenberg promised to use a word with me that I probably never heard used in conjunction with online advertising: beauty. It's part of his effort to refocus the industry on creativity in digital marketing.

While I think creativity comes in many forms in digital media, I'm very interested in the future of display ads. On Monday, I wrote about an interesting effort by AKQA to pipe live video into banners -- and turn banners into actual utility. This kind of creative use of display units is admirable, yet I think we're entering into a time of more interruptive ads. Sure enough, NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and other top Web publishers are introducing bigger, "more impactful" units along the lines of the recent Apple executions. The idea: give advertisers more "share of voice." What this means in practicality is devoting more of the page to bigger, bolder ads. Nothing in life is free.

The solution to making display ads work better for brands is many things. Bigger and flashier is certainly going to be part of it. I wonder if people will be as open to these executions outside of Apple, which has led the charge in using display units in new ways. (Eric Reagan points to the iPod Touch integration with Pitchfork.) In addition to the live video, AKQA is doing some interesting stuff in making the display units actually helpful. The one area that will get a lot of attention soon, I think, is adding social media into the display space. Seth at SocialMedia is doing this and Mashable last week began an interesting experiment that is basically running brand Twitter feeds as as units.

As an aside, I sent a note to Crispin Porter + Bogusky asking if it had done any interesting banner creative recently. It got back to me too late for my story, but sent along a pretty smart creative media execution for the Alliance for Climate Protection that took over 404 pages. Clever.

Advertising’s innovation problem: fear of failure

Don’t be fooled by the talk in the ad industry: it is as deeply conservative as accounting. I’ve always found that odd, considering it’s a place where it’s OK, even expected, for 45-year-old men to dress (and often act) like 20-year-olds. Yet when push comes to shove, advertising refuses to take many chances. This isn’t just on the client side, either.

That’s my last takeaway from Skittlesgate. The commentary I’ve read, even from the self-appointed social media experts, is distressing, some of it just factually wrong. In advertising, everyone talks about trying new, different, even daring approaches. They rarely do them. They’re scared of failure. There's a stigma to it. This is diametrically opposite to the attitude of Silicon Valley, where failure is viewed as an important part of the innovation process.

And why not. Look at the commentary out there about the Skittles site. Mind you, this is a package goods Web site that a few thousand people would normally visit per month. I'm reminded of Allen Iverson's "practice" tirade. "We're talking about a candy Web site?" The story has been predictable. Agency.com got vilified for “stealing” from Modernista. Then some people thought it could have some value. Finally, the naysayers looked for holes. Look, some people wrote about putting Skittles up their asses! This is the worst thing to happen to social media! Skittles has “pulled the campaign” because it rotated the landing page from Twitter search to Facebook! Never mind that it rotated the page from Wikipedia to Twitter search originally. Oddly that didn’t warrant claiming the brand “pulled” the campaign. People are even debating whether this was “planned.” (It was.) But in digital, the magic is you try things, you see what works, you adapt. That’s how it works.

Skittlesgate reveals the underbelly of the advertising industry. It revels in failures, real and imagined. (I don’t think you can plausibly say Skittles.com has failed.) It loves nothing more than tearing others apart. This is not just a traditional advertising phenomenon. That would be amusing if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s corrosive to innovation. The way forward in reaching consumers in innovative, effective ways through digital media is trial and error. Is Skittles.com perfect? Far from it. Is it an attempt to do something very different? Yes, it is. Most would play it safe, as Agency.com and Skittles could easily have done. They could have created a Taste the Rainbow casual game, and add in a “viral” option for uploading your photo to a Skittle and emailing it to friends. Instead, it not only talked the conference talk (“consumers are in control”) but it walked it, albeit imperfectly.

There are some, like AKQA's Lars Bastholm, who have offered reasoned critiques of the site. Most, however, have just settled into the typical vitriol and deathwatch scenario. I’ve seen it before with Honeyshed and many other efforts to try something undeniably new. There’s a price to pay for this reflex to tear into anyone who dares cross the status quo. It's dangerous for what should be the most innovative part of the industry to ape the backbiting and navel-gazing of the traditional ad world. I’ve always thought the industry needs one more awards show, The Fails, which would award those who tried something new, came up short and learned from it.

Is Skittles onto something?

The remake of Skittles.com has provoked some predictable debate. When I first saw the site Friday afternoon, I knew immediately how it would go. It would enter the typical ad industry echo chamber: Did Agency.com rip off Modernista? Sure enough, immediately after I posted about the site on Twitter and Adfreak, that’s where it went.

Let’s put that to rest: Yes, it clearly got the idea of an “un-site” from Modernista’s innovative Web site makeover a year ago that points to the social Web to define the shop. Here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter. The ad world needs to get over the propriety of ideas. On the Web, as Ana points out, it’s about trying things, building on the existing, testing and adjusting.

What’s more interesting to me is what Skittles might mean for the future of the brand microsite. I confess that I have a long-held skepticism for nearly all microsites. They seem outdated and mostly pointless. Their shortcomings are made all the more obvious at a time of social media. For the past several weeks, I’ve been neck-deep in submissions for digital agency report cards. The product microsites are nearly uniformly terrible. I keep asking myself why I’d want to go there to play that Flash advergame, upload my photo on a snowflake, get immersive with rum. I simply don’t get it.

The old playbook for Skittles would be to make a Flash microsite that matches up to its “Taste the Rainbow” tagline created by TBWA. Agency.com could have and truth be told, usually does that. Instead, it borrowed the Modernista idea to let others define what you're about. The crucial difference is this isn’t an agency but a candy product owned by Mars. Skittles did a small thing in aggregating the conversation out there on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, et al. The statement, however, is quite interesting. As someone from Agency.com mentioned to me about the they-stole-the-idea hubbub: “More companies should learn: It's not about them, but about what their customers are saying about them.”

People are, in fact, talking about Skittles out there. Check it out for yourself. It’s true what Gary Vaynerchuk says: Twitter.com isn’t nearly as interesting as search.twitter.com. I spent the weekend monitoring the conversation about the site at search.twitter.com. What amazed me was not just how many people were talking about the site, but how much other Skittles conversation is out there. Quite a few people put Skittles in vodka, for instance. That’s a pretty interesting trend for Mars to know. Also, it seems chocolate Skittles are disgusting.

Earlier in the week, I spoke with one of the top digital strategists at a major holding company. He told me social media is incredibly important for brands, especially packaged goods. There’s no reason for people to go to their sites, he said, but the conversations are happening out there. “There’s a business model for CPGs there,” he said. The idea is that all that conversation provides an opportunity for brands to listen, troubleshoot, reach out to fans, maybe even come up with product and marketing ideas. The execution of Skittles.com can be quibbled with. It would be nice to see the brand do more than just aggregate conversation. It might not even be the ideal product for this approach. Yet I think Agency.com and Skittles are onto something with it, “ripoff” or not.