Who's Marketing Your Brand?
on iMediaConnection
by Mark Drosos, May 09, 2006
New, more engaging forms of media let audiences work as part of your marketing team. nFusion's biz dev VP tells you how your entertainment campaign can become a part of their world.
Who's marketing your brand? Your consumers, that's who. Today's consumers have more control over when and where and how they will be marketed to. With the recent surge in user-generated media, consumers now participate in what the message looks like, as well as influencing who receives it. So what should entertainment companies like yours do in order to engage these consumers and take advantage of this new marketing tool?
In this first article of the series, we will focus on driving users to your campaign.
In the not-so-old days, taking your message to your audience was simple: entertainment companies created entertaining content, advertising agencies helped market that content and users consumed it. But along comes user-generated media, a hybrid marketing tool that reverses the old, familiar method.
Some companies have embraced this reversal. Warner Home Video, Universal Pictures, Warner Music Group and Comedy Central have all realized the power user-generated media can provide their brands, and have molded their campaigns to take advantage of consumers' new-found ability to participate. There's a veritable traffic jam of other like-minded companies trying to figure out how best to incorporate user-generated media into their marketing strategies, entertaining users while getting those same users to help market their products.
If you want to take advantage of this eager-to-be-tapped new source of advertising energy as part of your marketing strategy, you'll need to provide opportunities for consumer participation, and that means designing plans to drive consumers to a user-generated media campaign. You could do this by integrating the message into your usual campaign media, which can be effective; but savvy marketers are honing in on a few other avenues to create buzz and reach audiences.
Take advantage of branded media partnerships
Creating partnerships with companies like iFilm, Revver and YouTube or with the multi-branded promotion like the one run by Zippo Hot Tours has started to emerge as an effective new way to reach the user-generated media target audience. For example, our company, nFusion, recently developed a user-generated media concept for WHV’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” DVD release called the "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Casting Call." WHV partnered with Revver to support and promote the campaign on their website starting this May.
With statistics like 30 million video streams a day at YouTube, it is clear that inter-media networking can give immediate lift to the audience you seek-- and the added media support is a great way to extend your media budget. If you have a product with a limited release and non-blockbuster-scale media budget, this type of partnership could prove a great way to reach millions of enthusiastic users while engaging them with your product.
Seeding a campaign
This is essentially an online PR campaign on steroids, and needs to be a part of every marketer's efforts. The simplest step is to create feeds of video content to VODcasting sites like iTunes, PodShow and Podcast.net. Developing brand pages on social network sites like MySpace has become standard. Finally, your user-generated media campaign is all about, of course, users generating the content, so provide them with the tools (video, photos, add to MySpace links, etc.) to create their own brand pages. "Slither" and "Corpse Bride" both did good jobs of incorporating seeding into their marketing strategies through social networks and podcasting sites.
Promotions, promotions, promotions
A successful user-generated media promotion is like American Idolizing your brand, and it's a natural for the entertainment industry. Fans clamor to collect memorabilia, win visits to studios and get the opportunity to meet the stars-- or even be discovered themselves. Use this to your advantage in promoting your product. By adding a voting mechanism to a promotion, marketers drastically improve participation. Comedy Central's Test Pilots contest offers users the chance to win a development deal to develop a show for Comedy Central's "Motherload," while Warner Music Group and AOL went a step further and partnered up to develop the online reality show and contest, "The Biz."
It is easy to focus narrowly on video-based user-generated media campaigns, but don't forget that user-generated media can encompass a range of other disciplines and forms such as creative writing, drawings and animation, photos or music. And, as always, encouraging users to customize provided content creates a valuable intersection where you and consumers can connect. "Corpse Bride" used a poem as part of its user-generated media to good effect.
Marketing control has shifted into consumers' hands, and there is no better way to take advantage of this shift than with user-generated media. The outlets to distribute control can create a "brand network" for your entertainment company, energizing new generations of brand advocates while leading to a deeper engagement with your consumer audience. Embracing user-generated media as part of your marketing strategy provides a unique opportunity you can't get with TV, print or online media -- or even on your own website.
Next week, in part 2 of "Who's Marketing Your Brand," we will focus on two ways you can create these audience-grabbing opportunities and how you should answer the call of your consumers.
by Mark Drosos, May 09, 2006
New, more engaging forms of media let audiences work as part of your marketing team. nFusion's biz dev VP tells you how your entertainment campaign can become a part of their world.
Who's marketing your brand? Your consumers, that's who. Today's consumers have more control over when and where and how they will be marketed to. With the recent surge in user-generated media, consumers now participate in what the message looks like, as well as influencing who receives it. So what should entertainment companies like yours do in order to engage these consumers and take advantage of this new marketing tool?
In this first article of the series, we will focus on driving users to your campaign.
In the not-so-old days, taking your message to your audience was simple: entertainment companies created entertaining content, advertising agencies helped market that content and users consumed it. But along comes user-generated media, a hybrid marketing tool that reverses the old, familiar method.
Some companies have embraced this reversal. Warner Home Video, Universal Pictures, Warner Music Group and Comedy Central have all realized the power user-generated media can provide their brands, and have molded their campaigns to take advantage of consumers' new-found ability to participate. There's a veritable traffic jam of other like-minded companies trying to figure out how best to incorporate user-generated media into their marketing strategies, entertaining users while getting those same users to help market their products.
If you want to take advantage of this eager-to-be-tapped new source of advertising energy as part of your marketing strategy, you'll need to provide opportunities for consumer participation, and that means designing plans to drive consumers to a user-generated media campaign. You could do this by integrating the message into your usual campaign media, which can be effective; but savvy marketers are honing in on a few other avenues to create buzz and reach audiences.
Take advantage of branded media partnerships
Creating partnerships with companies like iFilm, Revver and YouTube or with the multi-branded promotion like the one run by Zippo Hot Tours has started to emerge as an effective new way to reach the user-generated media target audience. For example, our company, nFusion, recently developed a user-generated media concept for WHV’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” DVD release called the "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Casting Call." WHV partnered with Revver to support and promote the campaign on their website starting this May.
With statistics like 30 million video streams a day at YouTube, it is clear that inter-media networking can give immediate lift to the audience you seek-- and the added media support is a great way to extend your media budget. If you have a product with a limited release and non-blockbuster-scale media budget, this type of partnership could prove a great way to reach millions of enthusiastic users while engaging them with your product.
Seeding a campaign
This is essentially an online PR campaign on steroids, and needs to be a part of every marketer's efforts. The simplest step is to create feeds of video content to VODcasting sites like iTunes, PodShow and Podcast.net. Developing brand pages on social network sites like MySpace has become standard. Finally, your user-generated media campaign is all about, of course, users generating the content, so provide them with the tools (video, photos, add to MySpace links, etc.) to create their own brand pages. "Slither" and "Corpse Bride" both did good jobs of incorporating seeding into their marketing strategies through social networks and podcasting sites.
Promotions, promotions, promotions
A successful user-generated media promotion is like American Idolizing your brand, and it's a natural for the entertainment industry. Fans clamor to collect memorabilia, win visits to studios and get the opportunity to meet the stars-- or even be discovered themselves. Use this to your advantage in promoting your product. By adding a voting mechanism to a promotion, marketers drastically improve participation. Comedy Central's Test Pilots contest offers users the chance to win a development deal to develop a show for Comedy Central's "Motherload," while Warner Music Group and AOL went a step further and partnered up to develop the online reality show and contest, "The Biz."
It is easy to focus narrowly on video-based user-generated media campaigns, but don't forget that user-generated media can encompass a range of other disciplines and forms such as creative writing, drawings and animation, photos or music. And, as always, encouraging users to customize provided content creates a valuable intersection where you and consumers can connect. "Corpse Bride" used a poem as part of its user-generated media to good effect.
Marketing control has shifted into consumers' hands, and there is no better way to take advantage of this shift than with user-generated media. The outlets to distribute control can create a "brand network" for your entertainment company, energizing new generations of brand advocates while leading to a deeper engagement with your consumer audience. Embracing user-generated media as part of your marketing strategy provides a unique opportunity you can't get with TV, print or online media -- or even on your own website.
Next week, in part 2 of "Who's Marketing Your Brand," we will focus on two ways you can create these audience-grabbing opportunities and how you should answer the call of your consumers.
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posted by Gripplly at
12:26
1 Comments:
eheheheheh....
:-)
By
Federico Perazzoni, at 12:43
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