It seems like the advertising sands have shifted again. Once upon a time, attention was the holy grail. Then it was engagement. And for some it still is. But for others – particularly many of the speakers at Advertising and Consumers 2008 - it’s now all about influence.

 

Leaving aside the semantics, here’s an account of what a really impressive roster of speakers currently think about how to get advertising to do what we’ve always tried to get it to do, albeit in a very different environment.

 

 

Getting to grips with social influences

 

Stephen Phillips (Spring Research) opened the day with a presentation on how marketers can understand and tap into the myriad of social influences (particularly word of mouth) that act on consumers’ purchase decisions.

 

Using a methodology of in-depth, regressive interviewing, his research findings challenged the traditional “purchase funnel” model of buying, typically based around the following linear – and rational – process:

• Consumer need
• Develop long list of brands
• Reduce to a shortlist of brands
• Test select brands from shortlist
• Purchase brand

The reality, he has found, is far more complex and unpredictable. “Sometimes people just find stuff they like and buy it, or hear negative stuff about a brand that they’ve used for 20 years and stop buying it”.

 

Need, he says, might funnel behaviour into a rational process, but often purchasing is driven by desire, which brings a different set of rules – or, seemingly, no rules at all. Comparative shortlists of brands often don’t exist; instead, people identify a brand that they might have an emotional reaction to and investigate further.

 

His resulting concept of “Snakes and Ladders” (adapted to “Snakes and Chutes” for US audiences) is used to illustrate how consumers are now often routinely missing out or reordering whole stages of the old purchase funnel.

Snakes and Ladders: how Stephen Phillips explains the purchasing process 
 
 

Moreover, within social networks, his research has found that relevancy of the traditional model of advocates and key influencers is declining. “The ‘friend moment’ and peer-to-peer learning”, he explained, “are replacing guru-led, top-down effects”.

 

And this wasn’t the last old truth to be challenged. For all the hype around eWOM over the last couple of years, Stephen’s research suggests that most online influences actually come from manufactures’ websites – 70% of consumers start their product research there, compared to 10% who use blogs and user-generated content (UGC).

 

This, however, is category dependent. For example, UGC plays an important role in the holiday and travel market (think tripadvisor.com), where we’re unlikely to have contacts in our personal networks from whom to draw prior experience.

 

 

New consumer, new idea

 

Naked Communications’ Faris Yakob used his keynote to give a lucid account of the new consumer and how communication needs to adapt if it’s to have influence.

 

What was particularly impressive, in a presentation from a self-styled “Digital Ninja” (he got to choose his own job title), was his accommodation of the old consumer as well.

Digital Ninja: "This is what happens when geeks get to choose their own job title", explained Faris Yakob

 

New consumers, he said, are the “digital natives” who’ve grown up knowing nothing else. On the flipside are the “digital immigrants” – or, as he calls them, the “passive massive” – who’ve experienced the transition.

 

And we shouldn’t forget the passive massive, he warns. Because this is the generation that has grown up accustomed to absorbing pre-made content, and it will be around for another 50 years, meaning that marketers will need to cater for a “functionally bi-modal consumer base for the rest of our careers”.

 

When it comes to brands, he said it was no longer enough for advertising to project a personality onto brands (an approach that came into being around the birth of account planning), because in the digital world brand communication can take on limitless forms.

 

At this point, he directed the audience to his blog for the rest of his originally-intended presentation on using content to engage people. He then turned to a new tack: how brands can influence consumers

 

If advertising enabled brands to talk like people, he said, brands now have to act like people because, in the words of Hugh Macleod, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.”

 

So how can brands win friends and influence people? To answer this, he drew on the 6 principles laid down in the best-selling self-help book of the same name (apart from the first principle, authority, which belongs in a previous era). And to illustrate, he used the recent launch of the new Coldplay album:

• Authority: n/a (too “old school”)
• Reciprocation: Coldplay gave away a free track prior to the album’s launch
• Commitment: To get the track, consumers had to sign up their details
• Scarcity: The free track was only available for one week
• Liking: Everyone who signed up for the track was emailed and thanked
• Social proof: In the email, they were told that the album had topped the charts worldwide.

 

Social Media: Innovation and earning attention

 

We all know we’re living through a digital/media/technological revolution. But this knowledge is only of limited help for two reasons: revolutions are impossible to make sense of whilst they are underway and they are impossible to predict before they finish.

 

It was into these choppy waters that Antony Mayfield of iCrossing launched himself, arguing that the best and only tools at our disposal through this revolution – which he did dare to predict would last at least as long as the careers of everyone in the room – were innovation and analogy.

 

Revolution, he said, brings innovation; and innovation comes from analogy (think of James Dyson’s adaptation of the principles of a sawmill to invent his vacuum-generating cyclone design).

 

But, he asked, have we got the right analogy for the new media world, considering that only 10 years ago web sites were seen as “electronic corporate brochures” and the web itself as the channel-centric “information superhighway”?

 

Some are now calling the web “a cloud”, but iCrossing prefers the analogy that the web is a place and, in that place, banner ads and microsites are just the posters and billboards.

 

He also said we should try to see the web the way Google does – as a network from which you divine human value. After all, its search logic is based on a website’s reputation, driven by the inbound links.

 

And in this new place, attention (and therefore influence) is earned, not bought. Cue the next analogy: the attention market.

 

Attention is now a scarce resource, and we’re all trying to grow it. So we’re essentially competing in the attention market. So iCrossing looks to the operation of brokers in the financial markets and asks: do we have the right data and do we gave it quickly enough, to compete for and grow our share of attention effectively?

 

Turning to examples, he said that dogster.com, the pet network site, was an object lesson in the need for speed. The owner constantly listened to the 500,000 site users for the changes they wanted and, if these took longer than 6-months to deliver, they usually failed because the community had moved on. Two months was the site’s benchmark now, and one month the aim.

dogster.com: the pet network site where speed is of the essence for successful innovation

 

His concluding advice for marketers wanting to be influential was three-fold:

• Understand your networks
• Be useful in your networks
• Be live in your networks.

 

Golden rules for UGC

I thought Toby Horry was overly self-effacing when, in reference to the Digital Ninja status of Faris, he introduced himself as a digital greenbelt.

 

Because his presentation on UGC provided a tidy, practical focus to an often woolly subject that people often assume just takes care of itself. These were his key points:

 

1. Interaction is key

Interaction with the brand is the important and resonant aspect of UGC, not content generation. He gave examples of iTunes and the Topshop fashion application on Facebook.

 

2. UGC should be the output, not the brief

UGC should be used as a means to an end. For example, Dell had poor reputation for customer service and response, so created a website where opinions could be posted and the best ideas implemented.

 

3. Know your audience

Accept that not everyone – and often only a minority – will get involved. And they may be your consumers, but UGC can also be utilised by larger companies to connect with their employees.

 

4. Be transparent and specific

Set clear parameters for participation, otherwise people can veer off-piste. He showed an example of when Chevy asked people to make an ad for the Tahoe model, which fell into the wrong hands. Regarding transparency, don’t masquerade as a consumer – you’ll be spotted (as Sony did when one of its agencies set up the “All I want for Xmas is a PS2” blog).

 

5. Embrace the negative

You can’t influence without getting involved - McDonald’s response to the Supersize Me debate is a case in point. Similarly, reevoo.com claims that retailers joining its review scheme enjoy a sales increase of 1.9 times.

 

7. UGC doesn’t run itself

It needs careful management. Wells Fargo bank – a conservative corporation – actually employs a team to run the bank’s social media.

 

8. You don’t have to be creative

It’s more about the output, not creativity. tripadvisor.com isn’t about being creative. Similarly, Facebook used its own community to translate the site into 5 languages in 6 weeks.

 

 

Online conversation measurement

 

When it comes to measuring conversations, Motivequest LLC’s Kirsten Recknagel said that forums and message boards were the best place to listen, more so than blogs and social networks.

 

But whatever you monitor, she explained there’s always a big difference between speakers and listeners; in a forum viewed by 15,000, only 5% might be active.

 

To capture the influence of conversations, she offered a three-step process:

• Measure how much buzz there is
• Assess the overall sentiment (positive vs negative)
• Calculate the net level of advocacy.

The case study of Mini in the USA was an instructive example of how to tap into a community of brand owners. The particular challenge was that Mini was not planning any new product launches in the 2006, but wanted to maintain buzz around the brand.

 

Analysis of the online Mini community found them not to be particularly interested in the car or brand per se, but more motivated on personalisation, customisation and social meetings (good news, given there was no launch in the offing).

 

So initiatives were run during 2006 to target existing owners, that included covert mailings that only customers could decode, the “Mini Takes the States” rally and a series of  billboard ads that triggered a personalised message via RFID when participating drivers passed them.

 

 

Influencing the swarm

 

In tune with the times, Andreas Moellmann announced that DDB’s focus in 2008 was on influence.

 

Why did people queue round the block for an iPhone, he asked, when the company launching it had never made a phone before? It’s because people talk – and not just on phones, but about phones and about the brand behind this phone, Apple.

 

We’ve reached, he said, the end of the “push” theory of marketing, and the end of the idea of consumers as a single herd. In its place, we’ve reached an age in which consumers are doing the pulling and, en mass, are more akin to an ever-morphing swarm that we can’t predict.

The swarm: Andreas Moellmann's analogy for understanding consumer networks

 

 

Influence within the swarm, he argued, comes in cascades. And marketers can affect influence in two broad ways:

• Horizontally: seeding and sustaining peer-to-peer conversations
  
  
  
• Vertically: by using mass media advertising (in a different way) and PR, to supercharge conversations.

DDB’s 4 principles of influence can be summarised as:

 

• Conviction: stand for something – Andreas said Al Gore’s credibility was much higher when he led the climate change debate than when he was a presidential candidate.

• Creativity: do remarkable things that are worth noticing, worth telling others about and worth adding to.

• Advocacy: cultivate advocates – for example, marmite realised it was a polarising brand and embraced it with its love/hate strategy.
  
  
• Co-creativity: open up to consumers, and not just digitally.

 

Global trends: the big blur

 

Sheila Byfield from Mindshare opened the afternoon session with a presentation that kept everyone’s feet on the ground. For example, she reminded us that for the last 40 years people had been saying there had never been a more exciting time to work in media.

 

But she conceded that was still the case, particularly in an age of converging global consumer trends that she labelled “the big blur”.

 

Mindshare keeps track of these consumer trends using a scout network of trend spotters, its MindRead and Snapshots of Youth surveys and desk research. From these, she reported that brands are blurring (for example, Courvoisier and Jaguar have both launched scents), companies are blurring (Marriott and Bulgari have established an exclusive hotel in Milan) and, for some time now, media and technology are blurring.

 

Consumers’ reaction to this change is several-fold:

• Advice: there’s a growing need for networks and communities
  
  
• Experience: people are spending more on experiences than material goods now
  
  
• Honesty: consumers demand that brands deliver what they promise
  
  
• Slowing down: as life becomes more frenetic, people value relaxation and a work-life balance.

When brands communicate to consumers, her key point was to ask this question: does my brand have permission to be here?  And if it does, remember that people want authentic, good content, that has substance, tells a story and is creative.

 

 

How stuff really spreads

 

Mark Earls of Herd fame and Alex Bentley, an anthropologist from Durham University, swung the agenda back to communities and patterns of influence.

 

Their paradoxical calling cry of “we’re all individuals” encapsulates Earls’ longstanding and well-documented position that, despite the importance that Anglo-Saxon culture places on the individual, our behaviour is driven by group (herd) dynamics. To get up to speed, WARC members can check out his paper that won top gong at the ESOMAR Congress last year.

 

Herd: "We are all individuals", says Mark Earls

 

Repurposing the “snakes and ladders” metaphor that Stephen Phillips used earlier in the day, he explained that it was this herd-driven world that explained how things could become very popular very quickly (for example, Croc shoes) and then drop off just as quickly (for example, UK prime minister Gordon Brown).

 

He added that most initiatives to change people’s behaviour don’t work, be it in management, marketing or government information campaigns. Moreover, even among people who accept the power of social networks, several myths persist:

• Word of mouth is a replacement for TV advertising
  
  
• Human networks are like media channels
                      
• You need to identify influencers and loyal users
  
  
• Stickiness means persuasion

But, he said, it doesn’t work like this – and Alex Bentley ran through a diverse range of examples that shows the complex and, essentially, random “pull forces” at work to explain “how stuff spreads”.

 

And from this analysis and the market data, their overwhelming conclusion was that, in the most part, stuff spreads though random copying. Networks do matter, but they change and depend on the specific activity in question.

 

So to understand a specific phenomenon, you need to know the kind of network it’s spreading in. And marketers can up their chances by making things easier to copy. The prime example here is amazon.com, which has 16 features on every page to let people know what others are thinking and doing.