Strategy Fuel Industries' Brady Gilchrist talks about the power of advertising accountability to enable companies to refine their message and continue high ROI even in a fluctuating economy, and the shift to decentralized advertising models.
Transcript: Strategy Fuel Industries' Brady Gilchrist
In the next 12 months its about continuing to grow credibility. As the dollars continue to shift, the measurement has to be there, the efficacy has to be there, all the tools that allow people to understand that they re making great investments have to be rock solid. So, in the next 12 months we re going to be continue to explore creative and also continue to show that what we do actually does make a big deal of difference for the people who are actually spending the money.
The big issue with the decentralization and syndication of content is that it changes the perspective from a top-down marketplace to a bottom-up marketplace. What happens is when you start to take away the…. Well the truth about the internet is that scarcity is dead, and scarcity is what predicated a lot of advertising for the last 20 years. So when you know what channels you are going to buy and you know where everybody is, It s easy to reach them, because if you buy enough reach and enough frequency you are bound to hit them. When you decentralize that, you have to get a lot smarter, because suddenly you are no longer looking at everything from the top down, and you are not looking at things from normal segmentations. You have to start thinking of segmentation from the perspective of …. Well, the reality is that the new segmentation is motivation. So you have to start looking from the bottom up, and figure out how you are going to use all these tools, to figure out how to reach people, who are now essentially a psychographic of one.
I think that a lot of the work that we do at Fuel is very innovative, for the simple reason that we are kind of playing a different game when we re trying to reach people. Everybody has a model of engagement. Ours is very simple, its Reach x Frequency x Interaction, and honestly we don t really care about frequency very much. But if we can get someone playing for 10 to 12 minutes…. It s a tough thing because people aren't really used to interacting with brands that long unless they have a real affinity. So if you are going to create content, anything that can grab someone s attention for that long has to be truly innovative and interesting. So anybody who can create cool stuff, whether it s games, or interactive experiences, or virtual tours, or just really neat things, or funny amusing interactive comedy things, anything like that is innovative. Anything that truly grabs your attention for twelve minutes, is innovative, especially in the 30-second spot world.
User-created content and user-generated advertising, that sort of thing, it changed the rule to mean essentially one thing: if you have a bad rep in the marketplace, if you re a corporate misbehaver, you will be vilified. If you re loved, you will be glorified. So consumer content and content creation can go hand in hand. Literally it s a big mirror. It's a reflection of what you are putting out there and how people are seeing you, so it can be your best ally or it will bring you down.
I think that what s going to happen to empowering consumers, I think that what s going to happen to media appliances, I think what s going to happen to content, how many more people are going to be able to ….. I think it s just incredible, what s going to happen. We haven t seen anything yet, to be honest.
It surprises me that more and more companies aren t adapting this rule of watch, do, watch, evolve. It s the same sort of thinking in many cases about the thirteen big flight mentality still exists where people don't tweak things in real time. I think that s what surprises me, that we have this incredible realtime feedback mechanism but very few organizations actually go wow, that s an opportunity to hone our message down, to make in meaningful for people and interesting.
What happens is you get a movement towards brand-casting, where you get companies taking more control of their message and trying different things. So when it starts to shrink down, you start to get a little bit more creative with how you are spending the money because you really want to create a few more baselines. So I think that everybody benefits a little bit because you are paying more attention to it, ultimately.
Even when you look at television ratings, things are plummeting. There are more and more stations. So you run into the same issue there, in terms of what are you buying out. Now smart online buys, or smart sponsorships or other types of things can take on an entirely different life. We haven t really explored all the different models. We still look at the world from a top down traditional segmentation perspective like I talked about. No-one s really starting to spend a whole bunch of time inventing what happens. Even though it s being bought and sold and it s got millions of people and if it was a country it would be a giant country, we are still in the infancy of the Myspace impact, we are still in the infancy of the Facebook impact. We talk about social media, which personally is a term that makes me cringe, because I don t think it s media at all, it s more like a concourse, the definition of a concourse is a gathering of people, we haven t really figured out what it means to market to gatherings of people. We've figured out what it means to market to people who stop here for a little while, but we haven t quite figured out these other things that may be more relevant.
