To create engagement, the advertisers need to get into the content, the same way TV commercials get into the middle of a show and 2 page spreads get into a magazine. The problem is that web users won’t stand for that.

I think the next step is ads as content. Giving users something do and think about. The recent Starbucks campaign is great example. So is the car campaign John just linked to. It will be interesting to see how many of those user generated ideas become real. I’ll be interested to see the next experiment that FM tries. They are clearly the cutting edge ad network.

And I’ve been thinking about the comment by Search Engines Web above:

>> Submitted your post to Mixx – lets see how that does; they seem to have a more intelligent readership.

Perhaps the community of mixx.com is not actually more intelligent than the digg.com community — maybe they are differently intelligent… — and maybe it is such differences that will lead some people to engage at mixx.com vs. at digg.com or at buzz.yahoo.com or at youtube.com or at viddler.com or at twitter.com or at jaiku.com or at facebook.com or at openspace.com or at hotels.com or at movies.com or at baby.com or ….

Here’s one: maybe the web needs a different KIND of engagement than print or tv — and I for one think indeed it’s comparatively strong on “pull” rather than “push”.

And (as I mentioned above) there is the “specter of interactive”…

I think the main thing is that this fundamental shift (from “one-way” media) to completely distributed media is really a HUGE thing (like I said above — I feel it is as big as the printing press itself) — and maybe it’s simply that “old habits die hard”.

When the media landscape is so flattened out, how will it become possible to create community engagement? I think the old media model was “engage EVERYONE” — but somehow I think that model doesn’t fit today. This is (btw) also a problem I have with the “Cluetrain Manifesto” — it is simply not possible to be “connected to everything” (being “connected” to everything would result in the term “connected” becoming meaningless).

So perhaps TARGETING (selecting an “appropriate” community from the global population) is the way to go. In earlier decades and centuries there were more / less crude approaches to this (e.g. demographics). One thing the web adds to this is a way to select community by topic….

One property that deftly turns the advertising model on its head is honeyshed.com. Rather than cloaking the sale in entertainment, Honeyshed turns the sale itself into entertainment. (I don’t work on that, either, alas.)

So I wait with enthusiasm for Part 3, John.

http://www.mixx.com/users/google

So many of the Diggs or non existent for these posts

Back in the old days of Digg, this quality, detailed post would have gotten dozens of Diggs – but now everything has to be extremely simple and gimmicky OR submitted and voted on by many Top members to get to the homepage.

Submitted your post to Mixx – lets see how that does; they seem to have a more intelligent readership.

Maybe othes will help get this good post noticed.

Now THAT is a blog post!

(Successful) Conversational marketing is hard for brands – because it requires human interaction and a commitment to a relationship over time – it is not a campaign.

But this is where the gold is – and brands that figure out how be participate and be relevant and helpful in a conversational world will take over.

TO’B
MotiveQuest LLC

Brian,

great post — and I think we are in TOTAL AGREEMENT.

And the “traditional” 30 second spot needs to be put in context: I think TV programming is about 2/3 “content” and about 1/3 “advertising” (note, however, that I have alot of difficulty distinguishing those 2 data types — some of the first widely distributed “newspapers” were in fact close to 100% “advertisements” [IMHO] ;P ).

I feel that perhaps the greatest misconception arises from the view that a computer is simply a “media” technology — i.e., simply transferring data en masse. As people become more and more aware that computers actually process incoming as well as outgoing data, they will probably begin to focus more and more on the reading data off of the lips of card-carrying consumers (instead of indiscriminately trying to “load” their “data sets” into each and every CPU, regardless of “hardware configuration”).

Perhaps Esther Dyson is most well known for this view / analysis of how computers are an “interactive” technology unlike traditional “publishing” media — but I do also believe that number (and “language”) crunching was not just “discovered” yesterday (perhaps it “started” a little over a century ago with Gottlob Frege, or perhaps it started several millenia ago when farmers counted the stones they carried which represented the livestock which they owned)…

I feel the least far-fetched analogy for such popular information retrieval systems are the telephone directories referred to as “yellow pages” (or “business listings”). However: not that such directories use a vocabulary that is “controlled” — each directory’s publisher decides on which terms to use, and the “user” can only choose the terms (and directory configuration / supplier) they find suit their purpose best.

The really successful marketers will focus on the terms that “regular people” use — their so-called “ordinary language” approach to the world (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy ). And this is a world in which brand-names (such as “Google”) mean virtually nothing.