Brands and media of the 21st Century | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore

Lessons for brands and media of the 21st Century

November 6th, 2009

FantaLife Beach

Getting out of the ad spot into the fabric of peoples lives, requires some rethinking on communication, and the panacea is not “social media”. Henry Jenkins in his 8 part investigation into what he and his researchers call Spreadable media, presents brands food for thought in how they construct their communication strategies. So I am pulling out some stuff that I think is important for brands to chew on.

For that reason, we are proposing an alternative terminology, one which we think allows us to construct a more effective model that might inform future strategies. Rather than speaking about “viral media,” we prefer to think of media as spreadable. Spreadability as a concept describes how the properties of the media environment, texts, audiences, and business models work together to enable easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a networked culture. Talking about spreadability invites us to ask four basic questions:

What aspects of the contemporary media environment support the spread of media across different communities?
How do consumers create value for themselves and for companies through their spread of media?
What properties of content make it more likely to be spread?
How do companies benefit from the spread of their content?

The concept of “spreadability” preserves much of what was useful about the earlier models — the idea that the movement of messages from person to person, from community to community, over time increases their effectiveness, and expands their impact.

Spreadability assumes a world where mass content gets repositioned as it enters into a range of different niche communities. When material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it necessarily imperfectly fits the needs of any given group of consumers. As content spreads, then, it gets remade — either literally through various forms of sampling and remixing — or figuratively via its insertion into ongoing conversations and interactions.

So then we need to introduce the idea of the Read & Write culture and Embedded Sociability. If your brand stories do not create engagement, if they are not premised in Read & Write, and if they do not embed sociability into their DNA – you are out of step and out of time.

Consumers in this model are not simply “hosts” or “carriers” of alien ideas, but rather grassroots advocates for materials which are personally and socially meaningful to them. They have filtered out content which they think has little relevance to their community, while focusing attention on material which they think has a special salience in this new context. Spreadability relies on the one true intelligent agent — the human mind — to cut through the clutter of a hyper-mediated culture and to facilitate the flow of valuable content across a fragmented marketplace. Under these conditions, media which remains fixed in its location and static in its form fails to generate sufficient public interest and thus drops out of these ongoing conversations.

Henry gets onto stickiness

Stickiness seeks to attract and hold the attention of site visitors; Spreadability seeks to motivate and facilitate the efforts of fans and enthusiasts to “spread” the word.
Stickiness depends on concentrating the attention of all interested parties on a specific site or through a specific channel; spreadability seeks to expand consumer awareness by dispersing the content across many potential points of contact.
Stickiness depends on creating a unified consumer experience as consumers enter into branded spaces; spreadability depends on creating a diversified experience as brands enter into the spaces where people already live and interact.
Stickiness depends on prestructured interactivity to shape visitor experiences; spreadability relies on open-ended participation as diversely motivated but deeply engaged consumers retrofit content to the contours of different niche communities.
Stickiness typically tracks the migrations of individual consumers within a site; Spreadability maps the flow of ideas through social networks.
Under stickiness, a sales force markets to consumers; under spreadability, grassroots intermediaries become advocates for brands.
Stickiness is a logical outgrowth of the shift from broadcasting’s push model to the web’s pull model; spreadability restores some aspects of the push model through relying on consumers to circulate the content within their own communities.
Under stickiness, producers, marketers, and consumers are separate and distinct roles; spreadability depends on increased collaboration across and even a blurring of the distinction between these roles.
Stickiness depends on a finite number of channels for communicating with consumers; spreadability takes for granted an almost infinite number of often localized and many times temporary networks through which media content circulates.

The focus on spreadable media requires greater attention be paid to the social relations between media producers and consumers. There are significant differences between what motivates consumers to spread content and what motivates producers to seek the circulation of their brands. These differences can be understood in terms of the contrast between commodity culture and the gift economy.

You can live a life or you can love a FantaLife

In Transmedia storytelling and the multi-dimensional brand the Coca-Cola Fanta story clearly illustrates Henry’s last point, ‘the need for greater attention to be paid to the social relations between media producers and consumers,’ something that Coke completely misunderstood. I wrote,

Would not such insight inspire brands and businesses to understand how to truly engage their; customers, audiences, stakeholders? From live events, to mobile communications, a TV series, to what we described as Fanta Beach: we created a world in which young people could have a great deal of fun. The premise and promise of Engagement is about deep context achieved through co-creation, collaboration and Transmedia storytelling. It has by default socialbility woven into the entire fabric of the marketing communications. But its not social media.

Fanta paid us handsomely for the work, then they made a couple of TV spots and some billboards and ran them internationally. I was somewhat bemused, and I still am, that companies on one level compete so aggressively, and must by law maximise shareholder value, are unable to innovate to do so. And, in so doing they hurt themselves. Social media now becomes another silo of the marketing silo bucket and the cycle continues. OK Fanta is an orange drink that Coke bought off the Germans after the Second World War – but in my view one we were proposing to imbue the brand with real meaning, based upon our deep insight of how young people want to engage, want to co-create, what to explore the world in a more existentialist way. TV ads, on their own, will not crack that code.

I quote Henry in Transmedia storytelling = Engagement

I would argue that the contemporary moment of transmedia has heightened our awareness of these earlier moments of authors unfolding stories across media, much as the rise of digital media more generally has led to a revitalization of the study of “old media when they were new” or the history of the book. We certainly want to understand what is new about our current push for transmedia entertainment, which to me has to do with the particular configuration of media systems and the push towards a more participatory culture.

Please get in touch if you would like more information about the engaged brand, and believe there is more to the future of marketing than Facebook and Social Media.

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