2008 Summit – Rebecca Lieb on the Decline of Advertising
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008On behalf of MIMA, welcome to the Feed! We kicked off the 2008 MIMA Summit this morning with a keynote presentation from Rebecca Lieb, former Editor-in-Chief for ClickZ, who promised to tell us a story about consumer adoption of digital media and the subsequent decline of traditional media consumption.
“Once upon a time, advertising was an exchange of content for time spent and exposure to advertiser messages.” This is no longer the case. Today, consumers create content and advertisers can too. Advertising agencies are now switching to a more marketing-focused model that depends upon viral content.
Lieb provided an excellent example of an advertiser creating content. The Great Schlep is an advetisement for Barack Obama presented as an extremely entertaining and viral video. The creator of this content knows how to reach her target audience; she presents her content in her audience’s voice. This example fits all three of the content criteria that Lieb focused on during her presentation:
- Educates and informs audience
- Amuses, engages, entertains
- Creates a story that consumers can spread (viral marketing)
Another example of content being used for advertising purposes is Pet Charts, a consumer-focused website that aggregates pet-focused content from other sources and invites consumers to vote for their favorite content (stories, photos, videos, etc). The beauty about content driven sites, such as this one, is that they also support organic search engine ranking. Search engines look favorably upon websites that constantly add fresh relevant content and raise rankings accordingly.
Lieb dubs this approach (advertising with little-to-no significant media buying) as the “Jerry Seinfeld” school of advertising. The recent Seinfeld and Gates commercials are successful in humanizing products to create viral momentum. Consumers are so engaged by these commercials that they voluntarily go online to subscribe to subsequent commercials. Note that the mention of the product in these ads is minimal. Instead, the ads focus on entertaining and engaging the audience rather than hitting them over the head with product mentions.
Brands are now dedicating their budget not to media buying, but to creative and spokespeople. Advertising is no longer about buying media placements that overtly promote products, but about finding a way to engage consumers via compelling content that gets consumers talking and only subtedly promotes a product. As Lieb concludes, advertisers are becoming “storytellers”. If you want to sell a product, you need a story. What’s your story?
