One digital divide seldom discussed is the gap between brands and their consumers. Jeffrey Rayport offers some advice on how to narrow the chasm.

Jeffrey Rayport, founder and chairman of Marketspace, could have stuck to the bad news -- that today's media landscape is far more complex and fluid than most brands and advertisers can cope with. Instead, the former Harvard Business School professor made his keynote presentation at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point, Fla. a classroom for marketers struggling to find ways to connect with consumers.

Jeffrey Rayport is the founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, a specialized strategic advisory practice that helps major media and non-media brands reinvent how they interact with customers and markets.

Before offering what he called five strategies that will make a brand successful in the digital space, Rayport began with some staggering statistics.

"This is the year when there will be more than 1 billion PCs or desktops on the planet," Rayport said. "But even more mind-boggling than that is the fact that within the next 12 or 18 months, there will be 3.5 billion handsets in use around the globe."

According to Rayport, the proliferation of digital channels means a first in human history.

"We are looking at a wired world," Rayport said.

But the rate at which users are connecting to the world via digital doesn't tell the whole story, according to Rayport, who took time to emphasize that brands now must work through an oligopoly created by the likes of Microsoft and Google to gain access to their consumers. At the same, that oligopoly is no longer selling space but rather the users themselves, who in turn have leveraged the explosion in social media to create what Rayport called their own context reality.

According to Rayport, the challenge for brands is to reclaim the relationship in a world where users are making their own media reality and those users are in turn being sold by a massive oligopoly where the top 10 companies control 99 percent of the total ad dollars flowing into the web.

As Rayport sees it, a successful brand will be one that employs five strategies for driving consumer engagement online.

Target the core
TMZ and the Toyota Scion may not seem like they have much in common. But according to Rayport, both brands do at least one thing the same: overwhelm the microcosm.

For Rayport, that means embracing hardcore users. In the case of the Scion, it meant making and marketing a car around young people who like to define themselves by the customization work they do on their automobiles. By comparison, TMZ has beaten its celebrity gossip rivals in the digital space by crafting content for what Rayport called the hardcore user.

Activate the community
Not all credit cards are plastic representations of a banking relationship, according to Rayport, who praised American Express for energizing a community of affluent individuals around its Black card. While Rayport pointed out that the services of the card could be found with any bank, American Express had used the exclusivity of the financial instrument to create a virtual country club.

In another example, Rayport praised Pfizer for sponsoring sermo, a community for doctors. According to Rayport, the forum for 35,000 medical professionals helps Pfizer develop and market its products simply by listening to physicians.

Work the web
Putting potential consumers in touch with competitors may seem foolish, but according to Rayport, that's been the strength of an insurer like Progressive, which quotes rates for competing firms before users make a purchase.

"Your consumer is going to get that information anyway," Rayport said. "You need to adopt open source thinking while embracing network effects."

Searching for a familiar example of a company that had done a good job of exploiting network effects, Rayport pointed to YouTube.

"When Google spent more than a billion dollars on YouTube, there were hundreds of video players in Silicon Valley, and the question was why was this one worth so much," Rayport said. "The answer was that YouTube was everywhere, and was the dominant player because the company was forward thinking enough to let anyone use its player. It was a widget before anyone started using that word."

Design for occasion
Readers of DailyCandy, a female-focused fashion blog, know something many marketers haven't quite gotten the hang of, according to Rayport. What they know is that context matters, which is why Rayport thinks DailyCandy's email newsletter boasts a 90 percent open rate.

"It's a fashion publication like a lot of fashion publications, but DailyCandy understands that its readers use it in a rich media email format, so the design is well crafted to that medium."

Integrate the experience
While Rayport offered four strategies for helping brands connect with users, his last piece of advice took the form of an order: "Mandate a unified field theory," Rayport said. "It is no longer an option to ignore integration."

According to Rayport, digital is a patchwork of hundreds of channels, and successful brands will be the ones that figure out how to work comfortably in all of those networks.

Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.