Figure 14.1 Domino's customers text, tweet, and send emojis. So Domino's made Pizza Emojis to go where their customers are—mobile.
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How Customers become Customers in the Digital Age
Be Findable, Be Present, Be Everywhere
You've probably seen this diagram before (Figure 14.2). If you haven't, it's a “purchase funnel.” For years it's been the go-to visualization for how people moved from no brand awareness to consideration and finally to purchase.
Advertising worked primarily at the top of the funnel to generate awareness and building brand recognition. In-store sales help, point-of-purchase and, of course, recommendations from friends would inform consideration and close the deal. If everything aligned just right, reinforcing both emotional and rational purchase criteria, someone might buy your car or beer or widget or whatever else you were selling.
Figure 14.2 The old version of the purchase funnel vs. the new. In the digital age, the path from awareness to purchase is neither smooth nor linear.
The problem with the purchase funnel today is that the buying process is no longer this linear. Paid advertising isn't necessarily the first thing someone sees. The side view of the funnel leads you to assume that it's a smooth slide down from top to bottom. But if we could somehow look over the top of the funnel and see all the forces in play, we might see something more like an M.C. Escher labyrinth. Up is down, down is up, and there are entries and exits all over the place.
These days customers can find their way smack into the middle of the funnel's purchase process via search, a blog article, a link on Twitter, or a pin on Pinterest. Or they might see something a friend posts on Facebook or Instagram. Teenagers might follow a “hauler” on YouTube. (That would be the girl with way too much money who shares videos of her shopping “hauls” with her 200,000 YouTube followers.) Seriously, these haulers have subscribers. The point: There are many ways for customers to find out about brands and products.
Which means a brand has to be everywhere. That's not to suggest you slap your TV commercial on YouTube and Facebook and link to it from Twitter. Rather, we'll have to create different content for each medium with an understanding of what the customers are doing there, We have to engineer a brand's presence, so to speak, across the entire Web.
The starting point, of course, is with the customers. Where are they, what are they doing, what are they interested in, and how can we enhance their brand experience?
Take a look at Lowe's again, the big-box DIY store. Their website looks like any other big-box's site: tons of products, promotions, offers, plus the ability to shop online.
But in social media, they've got full-blown how-to videos on their YouTube page, which has 150,000 subscribers. On Pinterest they share organizing and decorating ideas with links to the products online. On Instagram they post images that make sense for anyone scanning the app for pretty pictures. And finally, in store, they offer shoppers their “Holoroom,” an augmented-reality showroom that lets customers create and visualize exactly what their renovations will look like. (Oh, and there's also Lowe's use of Vine—been there, talked about that.)
There are a number of brands doing a pretty good job “engineering their presence” with relevant, useful content across the Web. If you want more inspiration take a look at @generalelectric on Twitter, on Vine, or on Instagram. The once stodgy old company is everywhere with all kinds of interesting content, some of it designed to change public perceptions, some to engage with influencers, some to actually attract new customers.
Remember, it's no longer about delivering messages. It's about adding value, being relevant, and understanding how to best use each particular platform.
Yes, Content is King (But it Reports to Concept)
How many times have you clicked on a banner ad? Okay, subtract the number of times you clicked on one accidentally. Now how many times? You can probably count them on one hand. Arguably, banner ads have been a disaster for years. Click-through rates, abysmal. You're lucky if one out of a thousand people who sees your banner ad can muster the energy required to click. Which is why smart marketers are putting money and effort into creating content, not ads.
“Brands today have an unprecedented opportunity to engage with people in more meaningful ways,” says digital agency Huge on its blog. “Smart brands are realizing they can become content creators.”
There are at least three reasons why this makes sense.
First, people tend to be self-directed. They don't need to be advertised to. If they're looking to buy, they start with search or at least turn to search after getting a recommendation from a friend or a review. So it pays to make sure they can find useful, informative, and entertaining content when they do begin search. Even if someone is a customer already, you want them turning to your brand for information, even entertainment so they, too, can pass it on and inspire the next brand seeker.
Second, brands can tell richer stories with their own content. If those stories are interesting enough and people spend time with them, chances are they'll come back.1 This becomes particularly relevant for passion brands whose users always want more information and engagement. Red Bull, Nike, Dove, and Burberry are among the brands that have figured this out.
And third, while media companies are tripping over themselves to offer native advertising—paid content brands would either create or commission in order to add to a reader's experience rather than interrupt it—when a brand does buy native ad space, it's still renting someone else's real estate and audience. Instead of simply getting peripheral traffic from a media property's readers, why wouldn't brands develop their own content on channels and sites that they own?
This has ramifications for you as an individual. More and more marketers are eager to switch from the inefficiencies of online advertising and invest in owned video content instead.2 In fact research from Contently3 reveals that 74 percent of marketers believe they'd be better off with their own internal content team.4 Given that most agencies aren't organized to create content marketing, some clients are doing just that—bringing it in-house.5 This creates new opportunities for writers, art directors, and producers. It means you have opportunities to take your craft directly to companies that are building in-house groups, or to join content groups inside ad agencies that are smart enough to focus on this emerging segment.
It's good news for agencies, too. While a lot of clients are thinking about producing their own content, they still don't have it figured out, especially the creative side. “Most clients aren't experts at making stuff,” says Sleek Machine founder Tim Cawley. “They may have a couple of people who produce content for their social feeds, but you need some real creative chops if you're going to produce world beater stuff.” TrackMaven, a marketing analytics company that's analyzed more than 13 million pieces of brand content over the last two years agrees, writing on its blog: “Marketers are very good at distributing content, but not very good at creating content worth distributing.”6
So where do we start? Simple. By putting customers' needs, passions, and interests first, says Shane Snow, founder of Contently. “It's more collaboration than interruption, which requires a whole new way of doing things. The real opportunity for brands and agencies here is to build brand-owned publications that will provide exponential returns for years to come.”
Know Your Customers and What Matters to Them
In some ways, this is no different than what we do with paid advertising. We need a clear sense of whom we're connecting with: demographically and psychographically.
But with owned content you have to factor in what's called the “customer journey.” Are you creating content for someone who's just learning about your product or brand, or for someone who's already done their research and is on the verge of buying and just needs some confirmation that they're making a good decision? Maybe you're making something for existing customers who already love you and you just want to make them love you more?
When Chipotle launched its video Back to the Start or when Volvo created Epic Split (see all videos at bit.ly/whipple5), both brands were creating stimuli, or awareness-generating content. Same for “Hello Flo,” which launched its new brand with Camp Gyno, a hysterical long-form video about a preteen who anoints herself the expert after becoming the first in her cabin to get her period. They were pieces of long-form content that would cost a fortune to run on paid media. Instead it earned its online audience just by being entertaining.
On the other hand, when Nike and AKQA created “Your Year,” sending 100,000 custom films to users based on personal data extracted from Nike+, the marketer was creating content exclusively for existing customers, enticing them to stay loyal to a brand that served them with such useful content. It was Nike's new version of a “how-to” video, inspiring athletes onto even bigger and better things next year.
Align Your Content with Your Brand Mission
Whatever you do, stay true to your brand and relevant to your audience. In this new world where any brand can start publishing content, there are many brands that get a little unfocused.
A few years ago Pepsi launched an enormous initiative called Pepsi Refresh, a program designed to extend the refresh label to social programs that would improve local communities. It garnered lots of attention but failed as a marketing program. As the Harvard Business Review noted, “Nobody is going to believe that the CEO of Pepsi wakes up in the morning thinking about how she can build better after-school programs and bike trails, which is why Pepsi Refresh didn't [work].”7
Compare that with American Express's “Open Forum.” The financial giant built a hub to share insights, stories, and resources to help small businesses prosper. It made perfect sense as it reflected the brand's commitment to small business and delivered just what the customer needed. The same holds true for Marriott, which recently launched “Marriot Traveler,” an online travel magazine that has little to do with Marriott but a lot to do with travel. If Marriott can enhance both business and leisure travelers' overall experience, perhaps they'll become not only a reliable resource but also the preferred place to stay.
Think Like a Publisher
The explosion of digital channels has created many places to post content. But it's not simply about volume or trying to populate as many digital platforms as possible. It's about having a plan. It's important to map out an editorial calendar. Know what you're going to do by year, quarter, month, and week. Select key themes that align with both a client's business and a customer's interests. Combine short-form and long-form content. Determine what you can create that has lasting value, as well as what should be fast, simple, and temporary.
Purina, the pet food company, produces a never-ending stream of content to amuse, entertain, and help pet owners take better care of their animals. On PetCentric.com, a company-owned site that looks more like a Buzzfeed than a typical company blog, readers can scroll through for tips on health, pet adoption, and more. Content is both relevant and timely. For example, in July, you're likely to find a story about how to keep your dog cool. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Purina's PetCentric site can generate peak traffic of 38 million visitors in a single month. That's a readership that dwarfs many traditional online media properties. Purina is creating a media monster, attracting its own readership and rewarding them with content they care about.
General Electric, which produces a stream of content to showcase its inventions, celebrate its engineers, and embrace innovation, plans specific content for National Inventors Day every February 14, and for Pi Day, which as geeks know takes place on March 14. The maker of airplane engines and light bulbs identifies the days that matter to its audience and then contributes useful and entertaining content that gets magnified, modified, and shared further by attentive social media users, bloggers, and media outlets.
Tell Stories with Data and Data Visualization
There's a reason they made you take math in high school. Turns out it can come in quite handy in the world of advertising and content. Besides being able to fill out an expense report when you come back from watching focus groups in Cleveland, you can use it to tell interesting and compelling stories.
We live in an age of data proliferation. Every brand you ever work on will have tons of data, and buried in all that data will be, believe it or not, stories worth telling. If you're fortunate enough to work on a brand that is inherently data driven—Spotify, The Weather Channel, AirBNB—you have lots of content you can work with: what's most popular, what's most frequent, what's trending. As mentioned earlier, Nike did a brilliant job with Your Story. It took users' data from Nike+, turned it into personal films and goals for the next year, and sent it to 100,000 customers. Some advertisers and their agencies even make the effort to generate “story-inspiring data.” Customer data, whether it's likes on Facebook or past purchases on your site, can inspire more relevant stories.
Honest Tea recently conducted an experiment for just such a purpose. The beverage maker set up unattended stands in 60 locations across the country allowing passersby to pay a dollar for a cold bottle of tea using an honor-box…or take the less-honest approach, just grab the drink, and bounce. (It pleases us to report the majority of people are honest and pay.) But Honest Tea collected reams of useful data. They identified the most honest city in the United States, Honolulu; the most improved city year over year, Washington D.C.; and whether women were more honest than men. D'oh (Figure 14.3). The data they gathered became fun blog content, a microsite, and succeeded in generating millions of media impressions from the extensive press coverage.
Figure 14.3 For Honest Tea, their name isn't just a brand, it's their area of expertise.
If you need more motivation to start thinking data, note that in 2015, for the first time, Cannes added Creative Data Lions to the categories of entries, with a description that winners had to “be related to innovative uses of data that allow brands to tell better stories and drive more meaningful engagement.”
Data will continue to play a bigger and bigger role in both content and creativity. So dig out that old calculator. Or at least find that app that's buried somewhere on your phone.
Create Both Stock and Flow Content
Most brands need to create two kinds of content. First, they need to create content that is enduring and lasts for months, if not years. It probably lives on their website, blog, or YouTube channel. We call that stock content. On the other hand, they also need content that's more temporary, appearing daily in the feeds shared on social channels—we call that flow.
The term stock and flow comes from economics. Stock is your assets; flow is your income. Stock is always there; flow comes and goes. Stock is worth taking the time to make great. But the value of flow is that it is constant, flexible, and responsive.
Historically, brands and their agencies have been better at creating stock content—big-budget, high-quality TV, video, websites, and experiences. But in the digital age, a brand has to be present more often. That's not to say a brand should overpopulate people's social feeds—that'll just drive us away—but it needs to find a way to stay part of the conversation.
One way to create flow is to factor it into your editorial calendar. Another is to take the lead from existing conversations. And a third way is to learn how to curate and share useful information and links that make you a resource to customers. That means learning to consume content as well as produce it. “To create content in real time you have to consume content in real time,” argues Noah Brier, cofounder of Percolate. “Brands don't do that naturally, so they need to learn how to.” Brier believes that the better a brand becomes at consuming content, the sooner it can align with its customers' interests and find ways to stay culturally relevant with its own content.
Brands big and small are all getting into content. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Coca-Cola, a company that dominates in paid media channels, is moving more and more of its budget to owned content. Other big marketers are following. Chipotle, Volkswagen, Adidas, Nestle, Red Bull, and Go-Pro are all finding ways to eschew paid media. They're creating newsrooms (or working with agency newsrooms), writing long-form stories, and producing videos more interesting than their old 30-second TV commercials.
This trend is changing the face of advertising. We'll all have to become a bit more like journalists than salespeople. We'll have to get a lot faster at coming up with and executing ideas. And we'll have to learn what kind of content our customers and prospects expect from us.
As the Screen Gets Smaller, Mobile Gets Bigger
For a long time advertisers have referred to smartphones as the second screen, suggesting that the living room TV was the primary screen. We used iPhones and Androids to augment our viewing experiences, search for related content, or share our perspectives and opinions across the social Web.
But in the last couple of years there's been a rapid move toward mobile as the first screen. Smartphone owners are spending nearly three hours a day on their small screens, making mobile the dominant platform for accessing online content. Some studies show we spend more time on small screens than we do on the big one.8
Needless to say, where there are eyeballs, there will be advertising. Global spending on mobile advertising now exceeds the total of all media money spent in U.S. newspapers, magazines, and radio. And within another couple of years it will also take over the majority of all online advertising spending.9
The problem, of course, is that miniature screens aren't all that conducive to traditional online advertising. Tiny banner ads at the bottom of a screen look more like toothpicks than a convincing invitation to engage. Worse, they slow down load time for the content you actually want to see, which is the reason that ad blockers are starting to get popular.
But there are some great examples of creativity in the mobile space. One is Domino's Pizza Emoji (Figure 14.1). One tweet and the doorbell rings 30 minutes later. If you look at a few you'll notice the best tend to share certain characteristics: They're all contextual, interactive, and social. Let's explore an ad, an online application, and an immersive digital experience, all that involve a mobile phone. whipple5emoji
Use the Technology: Audi's “Perfect Day”
In an ad for its A3 Cabriolet, Audi tapped into native iPhone features, including compass, time of day, GPS, and gyroscope, then took advantage of The Weather Channel's API to create an ad that let users find the perfect day to test drive the convertible.
When users, already interested in an Audi or a car, came upon the ad, perhaps on The Weather Channel's app, they had an invitation to discover the perfect day to test drive the convertible. The Webby-winning mobile ad instantly tapped into the weather forecast and suggested an ideal day and time. Because the app knew where users were, it could point them to the nearest dealer. Since it could also connect to users' social profiles, it offered a feature to let them invite a friend along for the ride. It may have started as a banner-like ad, but it quickly turned into a richer and more useful experience by taking advantage of live data and all the technology in our phones.
Making In-Yo-Face! Social: The Giferator
EA Sports, maker of Madden NFL, knows most people watch football with a smartphone in hand. Fans use their phones to search for replays and updates and, of course, to add their own smack-talking voice to the social conversation.
So when it came time to remind people how exciting Madden NLF 15 could be, EA didn't run an ad. Instead, working with two of its agency partners, Heat and Grow, and the smart folks at Google, EA created the “Giferator,” an online app that let players quickly create a GIF of a juke or some cool move that just happened in the game (Figure 14.4). Users could then add their own taunt as a headline and post this digital smack-talk to friends and rivals on their social networks. The team that created Giferator understood how fans use their phones and recognized a great opportunity to tap into the popularity of GIFs. According to Daily Dot, the Giferator was 2014's most popular Internet meme.10 whipple5gif
Figure 14.4 EA uses GIFs to let users smack-talk and throw some serious digital shade.
Dissect the idea. You may agree it's another example of Do > Invite > Document > Share.
Design Cool Immersive Experiences Like Equinox's “The Pursuit”
Some of the best use of mobile technology and devices is less about advertising and more about doing something for the user, creating an experience that attracts customers and builds loyalty.
With the help of R/GA, the upscale urban gym Equinox achieved both with “The Pursuit,” an immersive studio cycling experience that motivated participants to train harder by combining gaming dynamics and some serious data visualization (Figure 14.5). The program integrated a rider's performance data, visible in real time on their smartphone screens, and projected it as both an individual rider and team member on a large screen. whipple5equinox
Figure 14.5 Gamifying a spinning class by adding data visualization and then making it social.
Using games, competitions, and individual and collective goals, Equinox data suggests that The Pursuit spurs on greater performance and improves training. While it's a service by Equinox and not an ad, it's a cool example of the possibilities of mobile and digital creativity.
Five Things That Make For a Good Mobile Idea
In all of these examples are characteristics that make for effective mobile advertising.
First, start with context and create something relevant to that context. Second, make the ad or the app interactive and immersive. Third, take advantage of all the technology smartphones offer. You have location awareness, photography, video, and the accelerometer (to name a few) as ingredients in your creative recipe. Fourth, make it social. If nothing else, the big advantage of carrying phones around is how they keep us connected to people. Fifth, use all the data that's out there. It can be flipped quickly into great content. And finally, as Google would say, “Don't make campaigns; be a companion.”
Bottom Line: Everything is Media
Tomorrow at work, it's not likely you're gonna get a job order asking you to announce the big sale on Saturday with an app, a print ad, some banners, a blog, a TV spot, a microsite, user-generated content, some outdoor, a gaming tie-in, a digital billboard and kiosk, a couple of radio spots, some texting and tweets, some mobile video, a little street theater, a rich media buy, a flash mob in Times Square, some video on demand, a widget, an i-ad, plus a video you hope goes viral.
The problem may require just an ad.
Then again, it may not. This sitting-down-to-make-an-ad thing is simply a much bigger deal than it once was. This isn't the future of advertising. It's what's happening today. (Well, at the more progressive agencies anyway.)