Advertising used to be all about media. Media is all about buying and selling consumer attention. Consumer attention used to be a more or less passive player in the game of media.
Think of a bowling alley, with the alley as a channel, the ball as a brand; the skittles at the end of the alley, waiting to be knocked over and racked up again, are … consumers!
The bowler – just like an agency managing a campaign – hurls the big heavy ball again and again down the alley, scoring points by knocking over as many skittles as possible.
This is how the traditional eyeball/impression-based media planning and buying business of reach and frequency works. And when we’re looking for large-scale brand awareness, there’s still no better way to achieve our goals.
And let’s not imagine that it doesn’t take considerable skill and size to knock over lots of skittles, and do so repeatably. It certainly does.
The problems for bowling alley-style advertising begin, however, when the hitherto passive skittles wake up, start chatting to each other, and moving about.
With the Internet, an entirely new and disruptive type of dynamic appeared in media. If Media 1.0 is best summarised with our bowling alley analogy, then Media 2.0 resembles nothing so much as a pinball machine.
We fire the ball (which again stands in for the brand) – with perhaps an illusion of control – up onto the board.
Note that the board is sealed in glass: we can see exactly what’s happening, but can do more or less nothing about it (we’ll come back to flippers and nudging …) after launching the brand/ball into play.
And what does happen to the ball?
It’s the bumpers at the top of the board that produce the high scores. With all the flashing lights, pumping and thumping noises and bells, our brand/ball is bashed back and forth around and between the bumpers.
And note: each of these bumpers has what our skittle consumer entirely lacked – an energy of their own.
They push back.
This is what today’s active, tribal consumers do with information, with brand communications, with media of any kind.
With the new control and energy provided by the web - also by increasingly rich-featured mobile – they, not we, determine the flow of the game and the score.
We do in pinball have access to those feeble digits, the board’s flippers: in the course of a campaign, we have the occasional opportunity to step into the game.
To do what? One thing only: to use the “flippers” to drive the ball back to that high-scoring cluster of rambunctious bumpers: to keep the brand in the new game of tribal media.
When all else fails, perhaps we can try a frustrated “nudge” of the pin table. But when we push our 21st century consumer too hard, most of the time the machine just tilts, and it’s game over.
This is dramatically different from what went before.
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