Re: The consumer is STILL not a moron

Mr. Hunt over at I Noticed This and I regularly have conversations about the upheaval currently happening in marketing. They're fun, and a great way for us to share what each of us has recently learned. WOM. Hmmm. Sounds familiar for some reason.

Inspired by a presentation I shared (see previous post), he has weighed into the debate with a post The consumer is STILL not a moron in the way he normally reserves for our conversations. Boo hoo.

He curiously drew a connection between a Guinness ad from the 60's and how he feels about that pour of Irish pride. Basically, do intelligent advertising, and people will think you have an intelligent brand. I know; he made me realise it's so blindly obvious that it's mystifying why there aren't far more ads like it.

But that led him to touch on something that is really important to understand. That brands need to be useful. And that on the internet, that should be easier than it was pre-internet.

But once brands do something useful, it ceases to be advertising. Doing something useful is a service. To be sure, most often that service is entertainment, but the are many examples of brands at least trying to do this.

I recently saw a presentation about a brand who, in their research, realised that very few of the blogs about their area of expertise were actually connected to each other. And rather than attempt being the expert source, they're developing a hub to which all the other blogs, theirs included, will connect to. They're not forcing people to only listen to them; they're actually helping people find the information they want, at other sources.

And this is the reason I love working in digital so much. Much of what we can do, in theory, at least, is not really marketing. It's not particularly creative, but we have the opportunity to use digital tools to actually help people.

Sadly, most clients still don't understand this about digital. They're still using the old ways of doing things (talking at people), and using them on this 'new' medium (which really isn't a medium). But people on the internet aren't paying attention to them. The old ways don't work. And I'm not just talking about finding new ways to advertise. I'm talking about completely re-thinking (on the internet), what it means to advertise.

On the TV, which is a passive medium, ads tell people things (though sometimes they can entertain), in DM, you can have a one-on-one conversation, though those seem to be disappearing, with people. In digital, you can, but really shouldn't, shout at people, you can have one-on-one conversations, but you can also do something else that earns you kudos from your customers. You can help them have a conversation, not with you, but with someone else. And that's where brands should be.

In a lot of ways, the internet isn't a channel, or a medium (it's LOADS of them in itself). It can't really be defined in any of our advertising-friendly ways, as David Cushman points out for one simple reason:

The internet doesn't do anything new. It's still about human interaction. The internet just makes that cheaper and easier.

Like Word of Mouth.