Let me play devil’s advocate here… Where exactly is the evidence that the relationship between brands and consumers is changing so radically? Yes, much more diverse media inventory is available and gets populated than used to be the case, but mostly it’s filled with regurgitation of ideas and affinity to brands that has been generated through quite traditional marketing and PR. Social media offer countless new tools with which to reach consumers, but I’m not sure that means the relationship itself has fundamentally changed.
No offence to those who work in ad agencies (been there myself), but so much of the talk about fostering authentic user-generated advertising is about ad agencies finding excuses to do new things with social media. Usually these things are fun, but completely ineffectual, or quite simply tactical. Then initiatives such as the Campaign for Real Beauty are referenced as evidence to support the long tail / user-generated cause, when in truth Dove is slotting user stories into a very carefully managed and narrow brand promise. The success of the campaign can be attributed primarily to the core idea, not to the carefully managed ‘community’ that followed.
Where is the long tail here? In the user forums on the campaignforrealbeauty websites? The uploading of the commercials to YouTube? If anyone seriously believes the impact of this campaign will be felt long after Dove has ceased funding it, they are drunk on kool-aid. The point is that it’s not an authentic movement but an engineered one, in which the participants are, mostly with the best of intentions, doing virtually nothing that is alien to traditional marketing. It’s a good idea focused on building affinity to the Dove brand around a quite singular message. It’s significant that aspects of social media have been leveraged in the execution, but we’re back to that same point about a new set of tools rather than a revolution.
It seems to me that the long tail is more revealing of the relationship between advertising and PR than anything more profound. Really good PR is about subtly shaping consumer sentiment, and it should have a synergistic relationship with more obvious brand advertising. The truth revealed in advertising consolidates beliefs you feel you arrived at organically. PR is all about the long tail in the sense that it leverages small actions and opinions into large ones, but let’s not forget that it’s about manipulation; it’s about a core idea being disseminated, not a million individual ideas organically coalescing.
What is wrong with simply acknowledging that marketing’s primary objective continues to be to drive sales, and that many of those sales are frankly quite unnecessary acts of consumption that won’t happen unless they’re pushed? And if there is such a radical change afoot in marketing, relating to more authentic engagement with brands, I’d love to know why we’re buying more of the same stuff from the same companies than we are fracturing our attention across a brave new world of micro-brands. To me it feels like many of the marketers and pundits who think advertising should be organically user-generated simply have a fear of getting their hands dirty.
In many ways the recent debacle around social networks and how to monetize them with advertising has highlighted the extent to which disguising advertising as something it’s not simply doesn’t work. My friends will naturally recommend things to me that they like, so the solution to cracking that nut is the difficult path of building good products, not using some slight of hand to deliver pseudo-recommendations in my Facebook news feed. And similarly, for marketers seeking to generate positive long tail sentiment about their products and brands, well they just need to do their jobs well with the tools available, not see themselves as benevolent participants in an egalitarian community.
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