Rob Norman is running a mile a minute. As CEO of WPP's GroupM Interaction Worldwide, Norman helps manage $3 billion a year in interactive media billings -- the largest budget of its kind in the interactive media space. As he prepares to deliver a keynote at the iMedia Brand Summit in June, Norman talked with iMedia about social relevance as the No. 1 priority of brand communication.
GroupM is the umbrella under which Mindshare, Mediacom, and Mediaedge:cia operate. As the head of the group, Norman works with staff and clients to re-think marketing opportunities that address the massive and rapidly shifting changes in consumer behavior. Old rules don't apply, and Norman is tasked with explaining and knowing why.
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iMedia Connection: How can digital advertising cement its place as an innovative and thoughtful component of the marketing industry?
Rob Norman: There are two components to advertising in the broader sense as I see it. One is the content that you manufacture, and the second is the channel and method you use to distribute that content. My sense is that the issue here is one of distribution and manufacture. So from a manufacturing point of view, I think the messaging that sums up the message of brands and even creates them is in a state of very, very rapid evolution. It's in a state of evolution in a number of dimensions -- in terms of the duration of messages, the formats of messages, and everything that goes with that. And I actually think that the world is not doing badly in terms of involving that manufacture. So that's a good thing. And the good thing for the agency business and the creative community, if you like, is that there has never been a bigger demand for more granular messaging to go in different formats.
The purpose of brand communication -- pretty much above everything else -- is to create social relevance for brands. In my mind, what social relevance means is having a substantial cohort of the population, or certainly a big enough cohort of the population that justifies the cost of whatever it is you were planning to do in the first place -- that knows what the brand is, like it, feel it's relevant, and that is suitably exposed to it. That's what social relevance is. You still need to do that. So the question is: Has the bar for social relevance gone up? And my sense is that yes, it has, and so the way you do that is to create a platform of some description, and you build social relevance around that platform.
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