There will always be this thing we call “advertising” in some form or another. Sometimes it’s just the best way to persuade someone to buy a product, or sign up for a service you are trying to sell them. It is honest in its straightforwardness, simplistic. Perhaps even wholesome in a way.
Then there’s Marketing’s addiction to making ads, and a kind of laziness around just going for the sale. It seems easier than crafting some artful narrative and ethos around what you are trying to get someone to buy. At the end of the day, it is unlikely there will ever be an end to advertising.
Think about a person under the age of 35. Their TV has no ads. Their music, no ads. YouTube might have loads, but they skip most of them. Even cookies are going. However, in another way, so much of the classic advertising world is diminishing, too. In the 90’s, Young & The Restless delivered a 14 rating against a prime shopping demographic. It aired at 4:30 in the afternoon, and prime running shows like Seinfeld, Frasier, and a handful of others were pulling numbers in the 30’s on a regular basis. Without getting into the media math, TV had the power of reaching up to 90% of any demographic you wanted to go after. I can guarantee it is almost impossible to do that now, taking much longer and costing more. So it’s not too hard to build a case for the end of advertising as we know it.
Let’s pretend that advertising is over (!) Dying. Death rattle. Last gasp. Gone. How do we build a brand now?
Behaviours and Actions
Let’s pretend that advertising is over (!) Dying. Death rattle. Last gasp. Gone. How do we build a brand now?
Mike Power
In a world with less “talk” (ads), a brand needs to embody more action. Think about the way we get to know a person. It will be things they say, and how they talk about themselves and others. But a very large part of our getting to know them will be based on what they do – how they show up, little behaviours, big behaviours, how they conduct themselves etc.
This gets translated into marketing and brand building. What kinds of things does a brand do out there in the world? What’s their purpose, their mission? Are they helping? Contributing? What do they do to create fun? How do they interact with consumers? What events would you find them at?
Our minds can start to fill in the blanks of what this means in terms of disciplines and channels, everything from Sponsorship & XM to PR & Publicity. Partnerships, stunts, surprises and delights. But it should be different depending on what brand we are looking at. The core of a brand and what drives it should be the subjects and output of pure Brand Positioning & Strategy. Be sure to get that nailed down first (and if you’re not sure where to start, the team at Midfield can help!)
Culture: Borrow, Steal, Participate or Create
Patagonia sealed it’s brand culture when creator and founder Yvon Chouinard forfeited ownership and gave his profits to fight climate change.
Based on a brand’s beliefs, core personality, and what resonates with its most important customers, we can then start to poke around at culture.
What are the natural places where the brand wants to enter into culture? Where can it intersect? The most powerful impact a brand can have, is when it creates a new fold of culture. This is radical and important. It flavours everything that comes before and after, in how we market the brand. It writes its own plan and directs where to go from there.
Context
Remember when someone at the boardroom table would say “we want to own…”? What they meant was that they wanted the brand to dominate something by trying to surround it with ads or brand mentions. Sometimes it would be to “own an idea”, or to have the brand become synonymous with a certain area of thought or interest. “Our brand will own music” (good luck with that). The way it was expressed back then was nearly impossible to achieve, because no brand could own anything in an outright manner. Even those brands with the finances to scorch the earth would still run into difficulty when it comes to looking into the minds of their customers. However, there is a way to enter into a contextual relationship with consumers. This is an important choice to make when it comes to long-term planning for the brand.
Take a Beef Jerky brand. There is a temporal and spatial context; like road trips, filling up at the gas station, missed lunch, or that 3pm snack time. There might be a strong association with Sports; watching it with their friends, or a certain sports celebrity who has missing teeth – and it looks funny the way the meat-stick fits in there. Context can start to create texture, nuance, fun and involvement for the brand. And it is different for every category, but more importantly – for every product. There becomes that “ownable” association that starts to present itself as perfectly right for each brand.
Brand as Studio
A core idea for how a brand builds itself in an age of no ads, is to act as its own broadcaster, publisher, communicator and content engine. Content is still king, even if that expression meant something else when Bill Gates first said it.
In the world of branding against a backdrop of the death of advertising, it purely means content that people want, that serves some kind of purpose and creates value. This will be the only way for a brand to interact and communicate with the people it wants to have as customers.
You can see how the previous culture and context will drive precisely what shape this content takes. The brand literally becomes a studio that fires up a smart and well-conceived content engine. It might seem that the brand is just spitting out endless reams of different kinds of stuff, but that should only be true in that it finds what works (and what doesn’t).
The truth here is that we are not shotgunning a bunch of material, waiting to see what sticks. Rather, it should all be carefully and strategically designed in advance, in the capable hands of those who know how to do this (not to toot our own horn here but…) Your trusted agency become your best allies in this new world – at least the ones that have evolved past campaign-thinking and 30 second ads.
Strategy. Creative. Channels. Producers. Creators. Project Management. These are the show-runners of your new brand-as-studio concept.
Remember, you are not spending money on ads anymore. So spend at least as much on this new activity as you used to on that old “working dollars” mentality, and you’ll be moving in the right direction – building a brand in the age of No Advertising.
