While I was watching a YouTube travel show about the way to travel through Uzbekistan (I’m planning a trip there soon but that’s entirely a different story), the clip was suddenly interrupted by a commercial break during which I was told about incomparable virtues of a toilet-cleaning product. I laughed.
Because I remembered a conversation I’d had many years ago when I was confidently told that advertising was dead because everything was going to be digital soon. Yet, here it was. Just like in the 1950s. Interrupting my YouTube viewing just like a commercial for Cadillac interrupting an episode of The Lone Ranger many decades before I was born.
The reality is that brands will always want to buy eyeballs, and that content producers will always want money, so the business will never die. It will only change. Ideas will always be needed by brands wanting to speak to consumers.
What consumers want
One of the real changes is that the digital age has opened eyes to the fact that effectively paying consumers to watch something they don’t want to watch (eg the two pieces of communication mentioned above) is not the only way of doing things. Marketers have realised that creating work that consumers actually WANT to watch is good business because it creates a far more powerful, and often lengthy, connection with the consumer.
But how does one start to create messages like this?
First, I think it requires a real shift in mindset — a shift in how we view the creative process. I think creatives and marketers who do this successfully do things differently. Instead of starting off SOLELY from looking at what the brand wants to say, they consider it EQUALLY or MORE important what the consumer wants to hear or engage with.
My YouTube viewing session gives further instruction on this point. After watching an informative clip about how to not get murdered in the hill country of Turkmenistan, YouTube considerately suggested that I might like to watch the Jude Law Johnnie Walker Blue Label online film “The Gentlemen’s Wager”. It was correct, and I watched it for probably the 20th time. That’s an actual consumer voluntarily watching branded content again and again and again and = again.
First lesson
And that’s a great first lesson for creating great ideas. Start with thinking about what the consumer wants to hear, not what the marketer wants to say. That’s how you get powerful engagement.
John Davenport was the founding partner of Ireland/Davenport. He is now CCO of Havas and a psychology student, traveller, unsuccessful artist and sculptor. In #IdeasAboutIdeas, he writes about ideas and where they (sometimes) come from.
Culled from MarkLive.com