Here are ways to avoid the trap of your unique platform or medium "becoming" the message instead of the right ad message "being" the message.
One of the toughest challenges facing emerging media platforms and new technologies in search of ad dollars is finding the right creative to fill them.
If you happen to be out there selling advertising for one of these nascent platforms, then you know your biggest challenge is ultimately to sell the media buyer. Then, if you're able to sell the media buyer, the assumption is that the creative unit for your amazing new platform (commercial, video, banner, logo, copy, widget, etc.) will magically appear from the "creative agency" in time to make both your sale and the consumer experience wildly successful.
Right? Wrong.
With media buyers physically cut off from their creative brethren, most sales people are content to take whatever creative they can get to complete the buy. But what smart interactive agencies and marketers must do more of is stop and consider how much more compelling some of these new platforms might be if we just had enough courage and a little more budget to start making creative assets designed for the platform, instead of repurposing the past.
Selling advertising for a nascent platform is no small feat for most emerging media companies. Even if they are able to sell the buyer or even the client, the task then becomes getting the right creative asset to truly demonstrate the power of the platform. Most simply, give up, take whatever asset they receive and "just run it."
Some platforms and technologies that are flush with VC money have gone to great lengths to staff internal creative departments within their platforms to make it easy for the media folks to buy: "We can do the creative." And some actually do it quite well. The truth is that any emerging media platform or new technology in search of ad dollars that's worth its salt probably requires a creative that's crafted for that platform -- not just a repurposing of existing assets.
As an executive creative director who is responsible for overseeing development of digital creative for many CPG, consumer electronics and healthcare brands, let me offer three tent poles. These should guide your logic in making the sale and making sure that you avoid the trap of your unique platform/medium becoming the message instead of the right ad message being the message. (My apologies to those for whom this is sales 101, but I assure you, maximizing the creative part is anything but easy.)
1) Distribution
The first question you're likely to encounter from any smart digital or marketing person is: "What's your consumer reach?" How many uniques, homes, subscribers, visitors, downloads, etc. do you reach? Any seasoned sales rep starts his pitch with the reach numbers of his platform/content. But the tough part for new and emerging platforms that haven't accumulated any significant reach is how to get past the junior media buyer who has been trained to simply "reject" based on lack of reach.
The answer in the digital age lies not in your "quantity of reach" but in the "quality of your reach." As the more enlightened agencies and marketers increasingly move from targeting the mass (via traditional television) to targeting the higher quality influential "somes" via the digital channel, the more you can tell them about the "quality" of your viewers, the better.
For starters, once you get the basic demographics of who you're reaching up on the screen, quickly move on to emphasize the lifestyle and affinities of your "viewser" (viewer/user). If you don't know, then it's wise to invest in the research that reveals how influential, maven-like, evangelistic or engaged your particular viewser is with your platform. Don't do the research yourself; it will come off as too biased. Hire an outside source with some currency in the marketplace to determine just how influential or affluent your limited reach just might be. Remember, smart interactive marketers are just as interested in 300,000 highly engaged and influential visitors as they are in three million lurkers who simply come and go.
The distribution message here? For smart interactive marketers in the digital age, it's the quality and influence of reach, not just the quantity of reach, that holds the key to smart buyers saying "yes" to new and emerging media deployments. Sure, there will always be advertisers seeking to bolster their TV awareness buys with horizontal portal buys chock full of rich media banners that try to spout exactly what the TV spot does. But for the more enlightened ones who have moved beyond impression-based metrics on effective frequency measures borrowed from television -- and into time spent/engagement metrics -- quality of reach is what sticks in their book.