I’m always a bit late with the hottest stuff. Not until today that I discovered Radiohead’s Online Video Contest they hosted at aniboom.com. It’s a classic, very well executed example of online marketing and UGC: They pitched their fans to create video animations for their favourite songs. More than 900 storyboards were submitted and the final results are more than impressive.
Okay, I’ve been a Radiohead-Fan for a couple of years now but if you are even slightly familiar with their experimental, mystic, sad but always beautiful songs you’ll recognize the mood that goes with these tunes in those animations.
Though I finished the whole thing pretty much two months ago, I haven’t had a chance to publish it since. Now here it is, though unfortunately written in German. I’d like to summarize the key points in English in the near future. So stay tuned for this abstract.
If you happen to download and read the attached German thesis, I’d very much appreciate dropping me a line or two and sharing your thoughts with me. Feel free to share my thesis but please adhere to creative-commons.
This presentation outlines a new approach to advertising that diverts from the old unidirectional communication modell. It not only concentrates on phenomena like the Web-2.0-hype, but tries to encompass the broad picture. Michael Zorn – S&F’s planning mastermind and advertising messiah – truly delivered a remarkable and insightful piece of work. Well done!
The fact that human communication cannot be explained as a one-way-street is commonly agreed upon. It is always mutual and therefore does not correspond to the technical transmission of information from a sender to a receiver. However classical advertising still largely pursues that very same strategy, when sending out a message via mass-media expecting that consumers will understand and accept it with no divergence. Advertising therefore takes a top-down-approach in almost all ATL-Media, that consumers increasingly oppose to. The discussion ranges from the hybrid to the unmanageable consumer, from the decline of interruptive marketing to the dawn of participation or engagement marketing.
In my master thesis I act on the assumption, that brands a largely owned by the consumers themselves and not by the big corporations: They possess the power of interpretation concerning the brand’s meaning which is largely defined in their everyday consumption practices and mutual conversations about the brand. In other words, brand advertising is noticed by the consumer (How could they not regarding the media pressure of big budget campaigns!), but decoded and understood in his life context as well as negotiated with other consumers. This collaboration between consumers leeds to brand meanings which sometimes drastically differ from the intended definitions. There are countless cases like communities professed with Barbie, that certainly do not discuss the brand in the sense of the all-america-girl intended by Mattel.With the rising of interactive media consumers are more and more getting involved with the construction of brand meaning. Crowd-sourcing and mass-customization are fields that are inspired by the open-source-phenomenon of the business world. Even in offline-media such consumer-involvement is feasible: Alex Wipperf??⬨¬?rth elaborates on the case of Red Bull, a brand that heavily relies on BTL-strategies and hardly uses any ATL-campaigns. In my opinion consumer involvement is a huge opportunity to get closer to customers and to regain brand relevance, as long as the collaboration is productively channeled and implies a real value for the consumers themselves.In the course of my master thesis I would like to develop a hands-on approach to collaborative branding that structures consumer-collaboration and that can be used as a tool-set for marketers. The following key-questions will be discussed:
How linking to the consumer’s life-world can replace or support the interruptive advertising approach. The techniques and mechanisms, that initiate and foster conversation between consumers themselves as well as consumers and companies.
The exploration of how networking phenomena bring about emergence and swarm intelligence and how those can be used by companies in branding strategies.
The difference between expert-knowledge (companies and agencies) about the brand and the individual fragmentary opinions of consumers. How is a handling of collaborative networks feasible, that productively channels network dynamics without pressurizing and destroying them.
How innovation and fresh ideas can be a result of collaboration when taking into account that those are commonly related to creative individuals.
(One last thing: The master thesis is explicitly not about user-generated-advertising. I regard this controversial subject as one facet of collaborative branding that has to be critically discussed.)
From what I can see, there are 3 forms of consumer-collaboration when it comes to branding resp. advertising. They are organized according to an increasing consumer-involvement.
Participation: The consumer participates within a clearly defined framework which is set and controlled by the company. Collaboration is initiated by the brand owner and channeled towards its goals. A subset of this category would be the idea of user-generated-advertising.
Commenting: The consumer reacts on the company’s branding and is actively involved in discussing the brand’s meaning.
Appropriation: In the sense of Alex Wipperf?ºrth’s concept of a “brand hijack” the brand’s meaning is actively constructed by the consumer, mostly without the company’s knowledge and sometimes even without the comapny’s approval. As Bernard Cova and the academic discussion of postmodern marketing showed, this process can be observed within communities that are either constructed around the brand itself or a joint field of interest.
Though I always considered user-generated-advertising as a rather desperate attempt to apply the user-generated-content-mechanism to marketing, Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day will air a tv-spot that started off as a student project in the U.K. It shows that collaboration between users and companies works as long as it is a controlled process. I think that the idea behind the Citizendium project reflects this notion: In an attempt to further improve the sometimes shallow and incorrect content of Wikipedia they are trying to excert some control over amateur collaboration. By introducing expert supervision they establish a controlling instance and quality management.
I think that the same principle applies to the Apple case: User generated advertising is not about solely putting the consumer in charge, but rather about collaborating with him so that both – the company’s and the user’s knowledge background and abilities – complement one another.
?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨¬? is a rather cool image bookmarking service. Just like del.icio.us is for ordinary bookmarks ffffound.com lets you share images that are linked from other places on the internet. As they are still in private beta registering is only by invation for the moment but I’m really looking forward for them opening up for the anxious public.
Right now the service only presents a limited but nevertheless impressive collection of pictures, that are perfect for the occasional metaphorical comic relief in presentations. I hope they can keep up the quality of bookmarked images: So far it’s mainly due to the fact that only a few selected people are allowd to post such as the folks from eBoy or Russell Davies.
A statement about the status quo of education at universities: What if studying meant collaboration? How can networking be applied to communicating knowledge and skills? What would be the education model for the next hundred years? A very timely statement on education and a fascinating visual presentation of the involved problems. Thumbs up!
Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
Charles Leadbeater just finished a user-edited book on collaboration. A comment on our increasingly participatory culture that presents a historical overview about co-innovation and shows countless examples. Leadbeater tries to develop underlying principles that foster user participation.
A speech on co-creation and collaborative innovation: Charles Leadbeater describes the rise of the so-called ProAms, who are highly passionate about a certain product, brand or more generally a certain cultural niche.
