4 Digital Media principles

Do we throw a load of money buying up banner space and build a website? Or do we go ‘viral’ and get people to talk about us through Twitter and facebook?

These questions can leave even the big ad agencies head-scratching and for every well executed digital campaign there are dozens left wanting with even the best budgets, creatives, and intentions behind them. This blog post sets out some principles for the ultimate campaign.

1. Think Engagement, not impressions

Digital Media is massively engaging. It’s function is not to give people an impression of your brand, rather to let them play with it, interact with it, share it, and talk about it. The online environment rewards creativity and great ideas, it doesn’t reward pushing your message under people’s noses.

It may sound obvious, but people will only engage and talk about something they like.

Two simple examples

1. Ausoina Yo Ilevo brackets – the engaging microsite

Ausonia’s microsite gets people to upload their photograph and select which brackets they’d like. It’s a simple idea (and definately done before), but incredibly engaging and fun.

2: Vodaphone myukhols – the viral campaign

A website with info on your awesome new mobile roaming rates won’t get you far, but a microsite getting people to share their next holiday location has been incredibly successful for Vodaphone.

2. Look beyond the humble web banner

Read this Study showing web users eye patterns

We’re constantly barraged by website owners claiming that putting your banner on their site will yield so many hundreds of thousands of impressions every month and likewise there’s an impression out there that the more money you through at online above-the-line advertising, the higher your ROI will be.

The web’s engaging nature means people are reading the content and engaging with the message, they’re not looking at the blinking banner at the corner.

And that’s the problem with banner advertising. It’s impression-based nature turns internet users off because they’re not there to be barraged with your message (the dot com bubble in the 90’s taught us that). Instead, web users pick and choose their media. It’s news, content, games, videos, and friends that I choose to interact with – not what you tell me to.

3. Don’t hold back

We’ve found that agencies and clients alike have a profound fear of the unknown with the internet. And it’s true; it does have risks that can far outstrip any other platform out there. Misjudge an on-the-ground campaign and you won’t get any ROI, but misjudge a massively viral online campaign and you can shift an entire demographic from loving you to hating you. Instantly.

That’s perhaps a bit extreme, but it has happened in the past. The ‘get out of jail free’ card has always been to play it safe by taking digital further away from the strategic core, rationalizing that if the message goes down badly online at least it’s not high profile enough to make a huge dent. What a way to destroy a perfectly good campaign and that thinking misses the point of the internet.

Digital Media has revolutionized communication from the traditional ‘this is who we are, read it’ approach used in the mainstream to people creating their own content about you, comparing you with other brands, and exchanging their opinions instantly and virally in unprecedented volumes. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of searches, blog posts, tweets, and facebook posts made every day. Do a quick search on Twitter for any major brand and you’ll see thousands of people exchanging their experiences and thoughts about it.

Whether you like it or not, chances are people are already talking about you. The internet gives you the opportunity to be a part of that dialogue; avoid engaging with consumers at your peril.

4. Work with the mainstream

Engagement, the holy grail of advertising and the key benefit of the online environment is only the final step of a large pyramid. It’s the icing on the cake that converts impressions into the done-deal but you still need to drive people to engage. The hits have to come from somewhere, and internet advertising is only a part of the picture. Despite the enormous internet penetration growth in asia, it’ll be a while before the internet overtakes the mainstream for above-the-line advertising.

Take a quick look at all the successful digital campaigns out there and one thing is apparent; digital forms a hugely important part of their campaigns-at-large with mainstream media used to generate the much needed impressions.

The diagram below from our What We Do section shows the relationship clearly:

On-the-ground campaigns help to seed the idea, concept, or message with consumers. In the online environment those impressions are converted into engagements which in turn are converted into conversations, chatter, and mass sharing that build brand value or sell more products.

Conclusion

What is a brand? It’s not what you say it is, It’s what your customers say it is.Brands are defined by individuals not companies. When enough individuals have the same, or approximately the same, feeling about a product or service it becomes a brand.

- Marty Neumeier

And that my friends, is digital media.