We Are Social - Advertising 2.0

Robin Grant

Jason Oke, of Leo Burnett Toronto, on transmedia planning & brand communities:

Seeing the same thing executed across a bunch of channels isn't really the most interesting use of each medium, and the best ideas are often built to really leverage the strengths of a particular channel (like Bravia's gorgeous use of film, or using the social elements of blogs and Flickr and YouTube to tease the new ad). So talking about ideas as separate from the media they will exist in is a bit silly and can miss out on the most creative opportunities. Media-neutral leads to media-neutered.

But more importantly it's also missing a key factor: social relationships. I've been thinking about social relationships a lot recently, and how we tend to underestimate or miss them altogether. Marketing tends to think of people as individuals. We target individuals, trying to change individual minds and behaviours. Most of our models focus on individuals. And in research, when someone says "I don't like it but my sister would" we discount that. We say "thanks but today I'd just like to hear what you think." We make people write their answers down so they're not biased by what others think. But this is a problem because people don't exist as individuals, we are highly social beings. People form opinions and make decisions informed by what their friends / spouse / family / colleagues think about things. People talk about brands and media and yes, even sometimes ads with other people.

So fortunately Faris and Ivan suggest a new model, which they call transmedia planning. The gist of it is that rather than using different media channels to communicate the same idea, you can use each channel to communicate different things. Everything is still tied together by the same brand strategy or narrative, but each channel does what it does best, rather than bending to fit an idea that's not really built with any particular channel in mind. Each channel is strong and self-contained enough to live on its own, but can then be pulled together into a greater brand narrative. The most interesting part is that this pulling together doesn't necessarily have to be done by one person - social relationships can help forge those connections, forming a brand community that shares and builds on each others' experiences with the brand. I've seen the advertising, you've been to an event, she's tried the product, he's had a good experience with an employee, and we all compare notes. So the model looks like this

Faris mentions Jenkins' example of the media franchise spawned by The Matrix - the three films, the Animatrix series of short films, the video games, the comics. Each have different (but overlapping) parts of the story, different pieces of the puzzle, and each stand on their own, but you can put them all together to understand the whole Matrix universe better. Another media franchise that's done this well is the TV show Lost, and the various websites, wikis, conspiracy theories, and books that it has generated. In the world of brands, he uses the example of Audi's Art of the Heist campaign [an alternate reality game], but I think the big brands like Axe/Lynx, Nike, Dove, Apple, etc all work this way. They put lots of things out there, not necessarily expecting every person to see every piece, but creating enough interestingness that people will talk and eventually hear about pieces they haven't seen from someone else. And of course, social media means that these discussions are easier and do not necessarily have to be face-to-face or even in the same part of the world.

I really like the transmedia planning model, because I think it addresses those two weaknesses of media-neutral planning: ignoring that different media are better at different things, and that people are social beings. And by putting a brand community in the middle, it also forces us to think about whether we are in fact making brands and communications which are interesting enough for a community to form, and for people to want to talk about our communications.

The idea of brand communities solves one issue that we sometimes run into when attempting to create complex and layered communications - the pushback that we shouldn't put details that everyone (or at least most people) won't or can't get. This is often combined with research findings that indeed, "most people didn't get this reference you were trying to make." This kind of thinking dumbs down communication into the lowest common denominator. But with the brand community model, that ceases to apply - as long as someone, somewhere will get it, then lots of details and references can work. Whoever notices it will likely tell others about it, because the fact that they figured something out reinforces their ego, status and self-image, and because the tools to widely spread that knowledge are now readily available. So instead of talking down to everybody, we can talk up to everybody, by giving many different groups something that makes them feel intelligent for getting a subtle reference. And we give them a reason to have multiple conversations about the brand.

Still, the challenge for brands is to not just put in detail for detail's sake, but to use it to truly make the brand more interesting, to give brand users something they will enjoy noticing and talking about. So maybe that is a new starting point we should set out on our briefs: does a brand community already exist, or will this communication do something interesting enough to create and support one?