On 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?

“Everything is based on the Burden of Interactivity,” Juan Antonio stated during the August, 13th MIMA event on video marketing.  As interactive marketers, this is where the rubber meets the road.  New and creative ways to attract and ultimately engage users with our online brand(s) is what we all strive to achieve and are held responsible for.  Video marketing is one force pushing that boundary of interactivity as video viewing and sharing continues to become increasingly popular.  This surge of online viewership is evident in the statistics discussed during the event.  Ciceron CEO and MIMA presenter Andrew Eklund states that nearly 33.7 percent of males age 18-24 view a video at least once per day.  Even more impressive is nearly 75 percent of people receive links to videos.  Even large brands such as Minnesota based 3M are looking for new and creative ways to take advantage of this surge.  For this they turn to video marketing creative firms such as Jake Nyberg’s Threevolts, who was responsible for 3M’s Protect Your Walls campaign, a viral spoof on NBC’s The More You Know campaign.   

As if video marketing isn’t cutting edge enough, video pioneers such as Christina Cordova are taking it one step further.  She is working on an interactive product placement video that would allow users to interact with the video and actually click on the product.  Chuck Olsen, a video journalist and MIMA presenter, is learning to embrace new video technologies that allow him to break news simply using his laptop web camera.  Video bloggers and journalists are learning to take advantage of new technologies such as Quik.  Quik is a piece of software that integrates into certain Nokia phones transforming your mobile phone into a streaming mobile phone camcorder.

As we all can appreciate, it is difficult to forecast/monetize the results of a particular viral video campaign. However, firms’ ROI expectations are still present.  With the surge of video creation, viewing and sharing the “Burden of Interactivity” already felt by interactive marketers is rapidly shifting to video marketers.  Firms such as 3M are becoming more understanding of the potential power of video marketing, but still strive to track and expect to achieve results.  Video marketers such as Juan, Jake and Christina are facing the “Burden of Interactivity” head-on, and their solutions are changing the face of marketing as we know it.

Hey everybody,

I started a little game for some Friday fun in the internet marketing realm. It’s called Guess the Internet Marketing Site and you guess by looking at a covered image of a home page with a few cutouts revealed. The winner wins a short post about them and their site with a link.

Come by and play, it’s at the MIMA Search Marketing site mimasm.com.

Cheers,
Chris

I recently returned from an amazing trip to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive and Film festival in Austin, Texas. Despite the perfect 80 degree weather, I was able to suffer through and enjoy my time there. I was completely inspired by the experience and was lucky to be among the best and brightest minds in the interactive space – enjoying sessions from viral videos to designing on a grid. For a net.geek like myself, this was Internet-Mecca. If anyone else is considering a pilgrimage next year, I highly recommend it.

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