Tuesday, November 25, 2008

What if brand entertainment took over?

As I was walking to work this morning, I had a thought.

What if every single brand in Australia that currently talks (or even shouts) at its audience with television advertising, turned to entertainment and conversation instead.

Does anyone know just how many advertisers that would be?

We'd be swamped with witty brand repartee and genuine responses to our gripes. We'd have games coming out of our ears and reality TV burning holes in our eyes. User generated content would be waking us up in the morning, and provenance documentaries would be sending us to sleep at night.

As brand entertainment further encroaches on marketing, ideas like Spreadable Media (thanks Faris) and the Natural Selection of Interesting (thanks Laith) will become increasingly important.

Ensuring you're delivering against a consumer need will be just as paramount.

And enabling your audience as curators, consumers, creators and conversationalists should be a no brainer.

5 comments:

Gavin Heaton said...

Another way of looking at it ... Gilmore and Pine ask what we would need to change about our offerings if we started charging people to experience it. How would this transform the way we engage with customers.

Anonymous said...

Was wondering about this the other day... How many 'conversations' can one person actually take part in? Assuming that their needs are being addressed and the companies are making the effort to be engaging and 'remarkable'...how will we pick?

Kate Richardson said...

Interesting point Gavin. At its most basic, this would require us to consistently create and deliver value that is recognised as such by consumers.

Katherine, this is maybe where Faris' discussion of ideas that are spreadable and Seth's Purple Cow theory make lots of sense.

Ben Shepherd said...

good observation katherineliew - i've had similar thoughts ... how much time/effort are people willing to put into having a dialogue with a brand(s)?

Anonymous said...

Interesting post Kate!

@katherineliew Maybe it's the difference between 'conversations' and conversations (ie, with or without the inverted commas).

One is a 'thing' that someone else (or even we) may (or may not) be having. The other, we just find ourselves joining...

I think relevance will be the decider.