The rise of Donald Trump. The vote for Brexit. Invisible pens being shoved into imaginary pineapples. The world is becoming an increasingly strange place. But why?
The answer to this is simple. Deliver the right content and you’ll own the conversation. Own the conversation and you’ll influence the decision. When you influence the decision en masse, you understand the audience, which helps drive your ongoing content decisions and continue dictating the conversations. This is something that the political sphere has understood for years but brands have still struggled to grasp. If you stop selling a product and start selling a belief, you’ll win the hearts and minds of consumers with ease.
The rise of Donald Trump is explained by one thing: people would not stop talking about Donald Trump. Yes, he’s inflammatory; yes he’s ridiculous or even dangerous. But you could not turn the TV on without seeing him. He was in full control of the entire conversation. Whatever you think of his approach, there’s no denying that his wild remarks gave him column inches on a daily basis. And his column inches ultimately delivered votes.
So what can we, as marketers, learn from the last 12 months? We talk about shareability, buzz and engagement as the yardstick for digital success but we fail to invest in the data and research to truly understand if we are making a difference in people’s lives. On top of that, the importance of “big data” is muddying the waters even further.
Let me put it this way: you have a brief and you determine that the target audience is born in 1948, grew up in England, frequent international traveller, married twice, owns his own business, earns more than $1m a year and has a dog. As an advertiser, we’d say that is a very clear and concise target audience, right? Well, that demographic information applies to Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne. It just goes to show that data is essentially useless unless we really use it to understand what people value rather than what category they’re in.
The problem with data is that too much of it has the potential to make it all superfluous. We often don’t know which data we’re supposed to use or how we’re supposed to apply it. But if we get it right, we have
the potential to become essential parts of our customers’ lives. We understand their needs, their pain points and their view of the world and, in turn, they treat us like one of the family.
The key is relationships. You don’t become one of the family unless you have two-way communication, trust and intimacy. The new wave of advertising will move from delivering taglines and product benefits to all, and it will become an ecosystem that allows us to marry our brand ethos to our individual customers’ core values. It has to. People are just as tired of brands and advertising as they are of career politicians delivering soundbites. It’s time to change.
So how do we do it right? We need to have the right tools in order to feed the right data so that we really understand the consumer. We need to understand how creative execution, media choices and website experience all influence the consumer’s involvement in the stories we are trying to tell. This is why the full-service digital model is becoming increasingly important. At hug digital, we have all aspects of the digital ecosystem in-house from creative strategy to social content, website build, research, programmatic media and, most importantly, data management.
This essentially allows us to own the whole digital consumer decision-making journey and, in turn, control the conversation between brand and consumer. At the moment, there are different agencies with different agendas giving different ideas but nobody is taking ownership of housing and managing the data. Our customers are ever present across channels and agencies need to react quickly in order to keep up.
We can only start to drive conversation if we really treat the data properly and understand what it is our consumers want to have conversations about. We need to be consistently relevant and live in real time. If your brand was a politician, would it be the “admirable but unsuccessful” Sanders, the “out-of-touch” Clinton or the “unexpected man of the people” Trump? (The answer to that should depend on who it is you’re trying to talk to and where you want the conversation to be held).
Creative message and media placement have always been intrinsically interlinked – they are both core parts of the brand personality. With hug digital, we use real insights to drive real decisions in real time. If we really want to change our business, we need to start thinking with one mind and move in one direction. It’s time for our content, our designs, our media choices and our vision to be bold, wild and heard. We can’t afford to be safe anymore.
If we are, then we’ll be building a wall between ourselves and our customers and our business results will be the ones paying for it.
Tim Durgan, Head of media & innovation, Dubai, hug digital