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Audio:
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Slides: The Future’s Bright, the Future’s Social.
Transcript:
Well, um, it’s not surprising that this gathering of social media experts or digital natives. But someone like me who’s obviously a digital immigrant is invited to open the <inaudible>. Most of you weren’t even born when I set out as a copyrighter over forty years ago in the market, simpler communication world than the one that faces us today. But the best ads from that era demonstrate that engagement isn’t just an invention of the new media world.
The principle of involving your audience with wit, humor and emotion so it becomes a virtual, two-way communication has always been present, even with one-way media. But the explosion of media technology in the span of my career has clearly transformed so many things, though advertising agencies have themselves stayed stuck in their thirty-second silos for far longer than they should have done. And the one reason why we set up an engine where <inaudible> is no more than a quarter of our business. And there’s fourteen companies covering virtually all aspects of the media spectrum.
And in the US, the social media experts working in at least five of our companies is our attempt to respond to this new world. If we move forward to 1994, now we got two babies in the room. And if we move forward, ah, move forward or back, in fact, in 1994 that, which is when the future started to be bright for Orange. And the campaign that built a business were 29 billion pounds when it sold five years later. We still find that it was essentially an old media campaign.
How different would it be if Orange was launched in 2009. And one slide that dramatically demonstrates how the communication world has changed is this one, which some of you may be familiar with if you’ve worked on the interesting five-minute [inaudible] on YouTube on how the future is changing. It says, more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, NBC, and CBS have been airing new content twenty four seven, 365 days of the year, since 1948, which is when ABC started broadcasting.
User-generated content which is the driver behind the explosion of social media, clearly, it’s still transforming our communication world. Does that mean the brand should cancel their off-line spend and give it all to the likes of many of you in this room? Well, that would be in my view as unbalanced as neglecting the social media itself, as too many brands today do. What I want to do in my remaining minutes is begin to sketch the outline of a communication model.
It starts to fuse from a consumer standpoint the best of the old and the best of the new. From a consumer standpoint, it’s worth recognizing why brands exist in the first place. Brands exist because they help consumers make buying decisions without using too much brain energy. Brands don’t exist because they can help me [inaudible] like Orange [inaudible] 29 billion. That only happens because a brand like Orange is useful to them, partly by signaling status for their owners and partly by helping them to choose with, less, less effort.
According to a professor at Southhampton University with nothing better to do, if you spend ten minutes of valuating each mobile phone tower, it will take you six years to evaluate all of them. Now, the brain has actually got better things to do. It runs on what is called a cognitive miser system, because the brain uses twenty times as much energy per ounce as any other part of your body. It wants to save brain energy for the important things.
Who are you gonna fall in love with? Who are you gonna have lunch with? Not what new paper or even sometimes what mobile phone you are going to buy. An old-fashion television advertising act as best have served brands pretty well by embedding their slogan and their imagery in the brain, the thinkbox, which is the body that most television advertising recently shown in a television commercial which had a patient [inaudible] shouting out [inaudible] slogans.
But, at some stage, the brain needs more help than a TV ad can offer. For a mobile phone perhaps, and certainly for a car like BMW, the consumer needs more than the ultimate driving machine that we launched about thirty years ago embedded in the drain, the brain, with lots of, ah, status-linked imagery. That’s why over 50 percent of people buying a BMW go to the website, help get information to make their choice from, obviously, a huge range of models.
So, here is new media coming to help old media. And that’s all fine, until we come, ah, to the biggest problem face, facing marketing 40 years ago and still facing marketing today. The biggest problem is that once your brain has made up its mind, it doesn’t like changing it. And the reason for that, as you can see from this next slide derived from a brain scanner is that it takes twice as much brain energy to perform a new task, like trying a new brand, than repeating a practice task, like buying the same brand you bought before.
Our brains are wired-up on a same-again please program. And there’s a mechanism called cognitive dissonance indented in this book over fifty years ago which explains how this happens. Anything that doesn’t fit in with your existing belief system tends to be re-processed until it does. So, ten years ago, when Audi did this film attacking BMW by implication, if not by name, it was re-processed by the brain. I’ve speed it up at the same time.
[05:48]
<inaudible – sped-up sound effects from a film>
[05:56]< On film >
Man1: Wow. What do you think.
[05:58]
Man2: Nah. It’s not really my style. You know what I mean?
[06:06]
Man1: Gabby, tell Charles I’m on my way. Taxi …
[06:10]<End of film>
Robin: Let me ask people then, what car that nasty customer normally drove? The answer showed how the brain had re-processed the information, cause it then didn’t like an attack on a brand it valued, such as BMW. As you can see, almost as many people fought with a guy normally drove an Audi that normally drove a BMW. It wasn’t a good intent on my good friend Johnny <inaudible> at PBH. And this is where new media can start to come to the rescue of old media.
Old media always preached that attitude change leads to behavior change. But, as I just demonstrated, the brain resists the new attitude change which can stop the new behavior occuring. Brain scientists taught us that it’s normally the other way around, behavior change leads to attitude change. If you can get a consumer to do a small behavior change, for example, like smoking in a different hand the day before you start to give up.
This starts to re-wire the brain to be open to a change of attitude, I can give up smoking, which can lead to a bigger change in behavior, I give up smoking. And this object, familiar with all of you, can be the doorway into precisely the small behavior change that can open the brain to changing its mind about brands. Just by clicking a mouse, and then by managing a flow of pages on a website, a flow which is of course chosen by you, not a brand, maybe enough to start the brain changing its mind, was certainly to open its mind to the possibility of change.
Now this is an area which needs further research and investigation, but I think it’s a plausible hypothesis. Brands discovered how new media, especially social media, can change consumers’ minds, when they found themselves being attacked online by consumers. Dell were famously torn apart by blogger Jeff [inaudible] in 2005. But Dell’s final response to create the idea-stored website where Dell customers can suggest improvements that are then voted on by online visitors to the site, is a way of changing peoples’ minds positively towards Dell.
So, even if companies start using social media as a defensive tactic, they’re learning both engagement and transparency in social media can build reputation and not just protecting against attack. Brand websites are now almost old media, but here’s an example of how that mouse-clicking engagement for [inaudible] led to doubling of positive measures towards the brand. As few of you are in the target audience, we might have just one. I will play a little bit more of the ad at normal speed.
[08:58]< Beginning of film>
Woman1: I give up.
[09:00]
Man3: So, here at the <inaudible> mini factory, we take huge whole grain wheat <inaudible – sped up film speed>.
[09:14]
Man4: Oh. No. Not again.
[09:17]
Man5: Please help us find Nigel, Nigel dot com.
[09:21]< Break in film>
Robin: As you can see, the viewer is asked to visit a website to find Nigel.
[09:27]< Film resumes>
Man6: Welcome. I suppose you probably can’t find Nigel.
<09:35]< Film ends >
Robin: <inaudible> through all that. Now, here’s the interesting bit. Evidence that mouse clicking engagement changes minds better than even a good television commercial. So, look at this slide. The ad alone, as you can see from the center white box, had a bid, big impact. But, look at how both taste and health scores were boosted by the eight minutes the average kid spent playing the game, compared to the two and a half minutes of TV advertising that he or she typically had.
Of course an, an online game is not user-generated content, but the level of mind changing prompted by a mouse click means that maybe we should all be working harder to get consumers to make these finger clicks going from television ads to websites. Here’s an example from our new [inaudible] campaign that’s going online today. If you type in a question and enter your football score which usually comes out in mirror writing, and then you see the hard-working Google person rushing around to give you the answer, demonstrating that someone’s had their [inaudible].
Of course, in a world of 100 percent user-generated content, it’s harder. The risks are greater for a brand that is no longer in control of all of its marketing. But this one chart from Digital Buzz shows the way the world is moving. If you look on the left, you can see that brand website visits are going down and social media site, media site visits are going up. The end of destination web creates huge challenges for brands, and I’m sure that will be discussed in later sessions.
But, if we understand how mouse clicking opens the brain to mind changing, and if we remember why consumers need brands, and that it is much harder work for the brain to browse information from blogs about a brand, we will probably be able to get the right mixture of new media and old media. And I look forward to hearing from others today about achieving that balance. Thank you very much for your continuous part of attention.