Old School Media Principles ≠ New School Media

Lots of companies like to work with marketing, media and communication principles. It simplifies things and makes it easier for marketers to do their job. But there’s a risk.

The Tale wagging the Dog
The problem with principles is they can become the desired outcome in stead being a means to an end. Whilst actually one should not hesitate to go against them when they’re just not right.

Media vs. Production Principle
A principle quite some companies work with is the media vs. production split (example: 70% of the communication budget should go against media, 30% against production). Its goal is to make sure marketers don’t burn too much budget making pretty content but also think about how to scalify it once they’ve done that. This goal used to be sensible in the old days: when you needed to make sure the production cost of the TV commercial – shot on a beach in the Bahamas – needed to be worth the shoot, i.e. a number of consumers would actually see it.

Ham Sandwich
But how in the ham sandwich (thanks Kimmy!) does that work when you’re talking about influencer marketing for example? Is the influencer who creates content for you part of media or part of production? Production right? What about when he or she has 100.000 followers and 1 mio reach? You can definitely argue the influencer is part of the media. As social, content and influencer marketing is becoming more important the difference between media and production becomes more vague and therefore less useful.

So update your (old) media principles to this day & age and lead by example by challenging them yourself once in a while.

Here’s 5 to help you out a bit:

1. RENAME – Rename Principles into Guidelines, because they should give you guidance, not make you stop thinking.
2. DE-RIGIDIZE – Make your Guidelines less rigid. Create a broad enough bandwidth your people can operate within. Make sure your people think about the right balance between media and production for each specific piece of communication, fact based and well argumented.
3. OWNERSHIP – Create true brand owners; ownership is a two way street: it means the owner needs to have real power to do things (including being able to fail), and it means the manager needs to give him/her the space to act independently. It does not relieve the owner from learning from his/her mistakes of course.
4. CHALLENGER – Create a culture of challenging the principles. It’s key to make sure you don’t create a company of Yes (Wo)men. Make sure people do understand it’s about challenging when it’s functional, not because it’s fun.
5. INCENTIVIZE – Give your people an incentive when they challenge the principles, especially when there is success as a consequence. Make sure you don’t punish people who challenge the principles. A company or agency needs people who think outside them.

Brands have a moral obligation to be active on social media & digital

Forward to the Past?
Recently there’s been lots of discussion on whether or not (and often how much) brands should be active on digital and social media environments. The discussion of course is good, but there seems to be a tendency to more and more go for the safe and traditional route: TV. The key words in this last sentence being “more and more” .

Those words are actually pretty strange, because we know from research – and from our own personal experience – we’re watching television less and less in the dedicated way of bygone times.

TV back from the dead? (as per Everlast)

We still watch TV – people who say TV is dead are dead wrong – it’s just different: we use all kinds of devices and medium types in parallel (and of course on demand is booming). To look things up we just saw on the box, to surf the net because we thought about stuff, to chat to friends. Plus outside multi screening while watching TV we’re online almost all day as well: to kill time (waiting for the underground for example), save time (using an app to get a better connection), to read Blendle or an e-book, for gaming and entertainment, emailing, work, chatting, etc.

Now the question is: if we know all this, how come we are still hearing and seeing leading brands going on TV more in stead of less? Of course going for what is well established is the logical answer. We think things we have done for a long time are more proven than newer developments. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are right. Ask Gailileo.

To thrive meaningful relationships need growth

Brands often say they want meaningful relationships with their consumers, a way of thinking I support. But how can you have a meaningful relationship with your consumers if you only reach them in one directional media they are only using a limited period of time and during that time decreasingly dedicated? It’s like being that guy who still wants to keep going to the same bar with you and get thrashed while the other person actually moved on in his life and wants to have a proper dinner with you and talk. Yes you will spend time with him, but you’ll never get to really know him any longer, let alone engage with him/her.

I would like to call upon brands to keep developing their digital and social engagement activity. Both based on the numbers that show consumers are increasingly using these and confirmed by our own changing behavior. But most importantly: because it’s their moral responsibility towards their consumers and the brand itself. You have to move forward the relationship or separation at some point will inevitable.

 

Instagram vs. Vine? Social videolisation.

Last week the next phase of social videolisation became reality, when Instagram went video. Next thing you know out of nowhere blogs appear on who’s going to win: Instagram or Vine. Not sure that’s an interesting question, let alone the answer to it.

What about YouTube?
The importance of this step by Insta is that now all three big social parties have video. Three? Uh…, yes, cuz Google’s YouTube is the number three social media – right after Google+ itself, so maybe it’s a bit weird to only focus on the other two. However, this has a reason, because Instagram and Vine have been created as social platforms and you could argue YouTube started out more as a digital channel.

Social Videolisation
So what’s the implication of all this? It basically means consumers and brands now have even less of a threshold to make, share and watch video footage online wherever and whenever. We’ve got the hardware (smartphone*ph-/tablet), highspeed network (wifi/4G) and software (social video).

Differences for Brands

-VINE: owned by Twitter, introduced in the beginning of this year. Probably responsible for the super fast intro of video to Instagram (see below). Video’s are limited to 6″ and loop. These two features gives Vine a creative edge over the others, but also makes it harder for marketers to understand how to use it. Click here for more info.

-INSTAGRAM: owned by Facebook, started out as a photo sharing social platform, recently expanded with video functionality. Video’s can be up to 15″ long. From my own experience this is very interesting, because it’s within the comfort zone for marketers and ad agencies, as they feel in 15″ you actually can spread a brand message out there. Check some early examples here. The fact that Facebook and Instagram are very well integrated gives Instagram the best deck of cards.

–YOUTUBE: owned by Google, started out as an online video channel. World leader in video sharing with an unbelievable 72 hours of content uploaded every minute. Of course there’s no real limit to how long your video can be. Although this can be looked at as a plus from a brand point of view, it’s actually not necessarily a good thing, as brand(ed) video’s can easily be too long to be watched by consumers. YouTube does have a big plus over the other two because of better Googlebility.

You could say: they’re will be a tough competition, but another – more FMCG – way of looking at it would be all parties will profit from a category that has now been fully built and still has huge potential to expand.

So: Vine vs. Insta? Whatever, social videolisation has won and will keep on doing so for quite some time. Fantastic for consumers and brands.

You can also check out other video social media such as:
–Pinterest, one of the fastest growing social media ever that started out as an online visual scrapbook. Although the majority of content is pictures, video’s can also be pinned.
–Vimeo, big YouTube competitor, more music industry lead and fed, no advertising.
–Tumblr, created as a micro blogging website and developed into one of the world’s biggest visual social media platforms.