How to learn to stop worrying and love losing control

At yesterday's AdTech, I moderated a panel that wrestled with the topic of "Has a Value Proposition Emerged for Consumer Generated and Social Media?". A great group of panelists began to crack the code on how marketing and media can thrive in this new world.

As I told the panelists, this was the best session I have been part of at any conference in years -- real examples and great insights into the early learning that leading companies have gained through innovative approaches.

I learned a lot at the session really stimulated my thinking. Today I will summarize the session; tomorrow I will share my thoughts on what it means for how marketing and branding need to evolve.

Defining the problem

The old media/marketing model (media companies create content, audiences flock to media companies, advertisers pay to get in front of the audience) breaks down when the audience is creating the content, aggregating their own audiences and come together not because they want to read expertly written content but because they want to socialize with other people.

After two years or so of experience, what have we learned about the important questions:

• Will brands even be allowed into these environments?
• If they are allowed in, will they be tolerated but ignored?
• If they are allowed in and under the right circumstances consumers will engage with brands, what new approaches must marketers learn in order to be successful? What must media companies do to help the marketers?
  

Summary of each speaker's key points

I'm vastly boiling down each speaker's comments to try to get what to me were the most compelling points. My apologies to them because I'm leaving out a lot of good stuff each one brought to the session.

Shane Steele, Coca-Cola's Director of Emerging Media got us right to the point: we have moved from the mass market one-way, lean-back model, past the Web 1.0 interactive model to the participatory model. Interactivity like click-throughs or time spent mousing over a rich media ad are fine, but now the audience wants even more involvement. But not everyone wants the same level or participation, so a campaign must give a range of participation opportunities to engage the maximum number of people at the level they are willing to engage. She showed a great chart of the process of Awareness -- Engagement -- Immersion -- Momentum that must be built into a social media effort. Her example of a Cherry Coke campaign on MySpace brought these ideas to life.

Heidi Browning, Fox Interactive's SVP of Client Solutions went deep into their Momentum Effect research. It shows that the ROI (in terms of increase in purchase intent) of letting go of control (by distributing brand assets that people can include in their profiles) for Adidas and Electronic Arts is 15  - 20 times that of online advertising in general. In other words, letting go of control has HUGE ROI. In addition, she showed an intriguing quote from the qualitative part of their study in which 27-year old Rob from Los Angeles said, "I don't want companies to advertise to me. I want them to be my friend." More on this later...

Jonathan Adams, VP Media Director of Digitas, brought more examples to bear. Delta, emerging  from bankruptcy this year, has done some great work to reengage travelers with the brand in their "Change" campaign. Videos of flight attendants giving tours of foreign cities give personality and demonstrate their caring attitude. Animated cartoons of some of the things people hate about travel show that Delta isn't oblivious to the stresses that passengers endure and show they can poke fun at themselves.

Matthew Liu, Product Manager at YouTube, nicely summarized many of the themes of the day as follows:

1. Create commercials that are content
2. Let users know that you understand the context (don't intrude where people are really deeply engaged with friends and ads aren't welcome)
3. Encourage engagement and participation
4. Have a thick skin and use the site as a huge focus group
5. Be authentic

His case study of the Heinz Top This TV Challenge made these points concrete.