Many wouldn’t agree with me when I call advertising a gift.
But in its purest form, it is a gift–a gift given to the viewer, reader, or conversationalist, a trade of time for emotion. That gift can be laughter, information, insight, even sorrow or joy. When executed properly, the brand can build trust with its audience.
As someone who runs their own business, helping others do the same, it’s clear to me that tides have shifted. Times have changed dramatically in the past ten years. Mostly due to the social revolution; I’m not referring to leggings as pants or acronyms becoming words. I’m referring to the distribution of information on web and over the mobile space, the new architecture of ideas and thoughts using technology undreamed of in the last century.
In growing a company with roots in digital production and content, it became clear that the evolution of our business was more well-suited as that of an agency. But the problem was that the old agency model, well…sucked.
Agencies traditionally exist in silos, branded in their own right, touting special sauces and executions that differentiated themselves from each other agency, while maintaining a vice-grip on their clients and brand. Communication was veiled, loaded, and insular. The public was left out of the creation of their experience.
Now the public owns brands to the point where excluding them from their experience creates too inauthentic a brand to be believed, let alone loved. Agencies pretending to understand that without believing in the core principle of mutual development fail. They fail out of largesse, they fail due to conservatism, and they fail because their work does not ring true.
The social business revolution is well underway. What that means is that the public and the consumer now play too large a role in a business–not only whether the products are purchased–to be ignored. This fact extends beyond mere objects: if you look back twenty years at user generated content, it was minimal and rudimentary–it amounted to a mere 5% of the conversation. Public access television, letters to the editor–these were the zenith of audience participation. Obviously this has changed. Now more than 50% of content around brands, products and services are open to the public. Yet nothing shifted inside the agencies. The money has become, if anything, more entrenched in old models and strategies, while outliers have picked up the scraps.
What I’ve learned is not enough has changed in the way we do things, but a lot has changed in the way consumers behave and interact. We are sorely lacking in our level of respect for consumers and their new ownership of our businesses. That’s what’s social. It’s not just the media that’s social. It’s the people clicking, wielding real-time power in every corner of the mobile and social space. But it’s not power they look for–it’s openness, trust, and respect.
Give it to them, and you’ll have their time and their trust.
Without that engagement? Time is running out.
