Take the example of a manufacturer of food blenders that produced a humorous online video campaign to support its entry into the retail market. In its ongoing series of videos, a variety of oddities are placed in the blender to demonstrate its blending strength. The videos became a viral hit, drawing more than 60 million viewers during the first year of the campaign. But people weren't just "viewing" the video ads—they were providing feedback, sharing the video link with others and spreading the word through social networks. Retail sales rose 500 percent in the first year of that 2007 campaign.
Companies also must be attuned, in real time, to what is happening to their brand over digital experiences such as social networks. Consumers are much smarter and better informed than they were just a few years ago, and they are connected—all the time, anywhere and everywhere. One only needs to consider how social media helped build the "Obama" brand during the most recent US presidential election to under-stand how future brands will be built.
One-way marketing may live on in the marketplace for a time, but it has passed the stage of maturity. Pushing and controlling a message will not earn the trust needed to achieve high performance. Media and entertainment companies as well as marketers must therefore look to where their target consumers are across all the different modes of social interaction and engage those consumers in ways that are meaningful to them and that engender trust.
Monetizing the Consumer Experience by Staying Highly Relevant
Media companies as well as marketers must ensure that the digital experiences they offer across all channels are highly relevant to consumers' needs, pain points and interests. The good news is that consumers are increasingly willing to pay for relevant experiences that add value to their lives.
The Importance of Consumer Relevance
The other critical dimension of the new consumer engagement paradigm is relevance. Media companies and marketers as well, must be highly relevant to a consumer's interests and pain points.
Achieving that relevance is becoming exceedingly difficult, however, given the fragmentation of channels and the user experience in today's marketplace. It's becoming increasingly easy for users to take matters into their own hands (as with app stores), re-composing their overall end-to-end experience into something meaningful and relevant to them.
Relevance is the primary reason search-based advertising has become so profit-able. If a user is searching for "blenders," that's probably a fairly sound indicator of an intent to buy a blender. But other innovative ways to target users with relevant information must be developed if the industry is to succeed.
A significant challenge in this environment is that media consumption patterns are also highly fragmented. Companies are competing with almost innumerable platforms and channels. That means they must be highly relevant all the time, at every point of interaction, to gain significant user mindshare. If they fail to be relevant, companies risk negative brand associations which can then spread virally.
In spite of the challenges, there is also good news. If relevance to the consumer or user is high, we are finding that people are increasingly willing to pay for digital experiences (see Figure 3)—through subscriptions, for example, or on a pay- per-use model. We're also seeing that micropayments for virtual goods (buying assets in a virtual-world game, for example) is also finally catching on after a few failed early attempts.
Providing Increased Value to Marketers
In the age of "performance marketing," media and entertainment companies must increase their accountability, which means their ability to measure whether they have helped a marketer achieve its desired outcome—and then charge for results achieved.