Engagement Begins at Home
This week, two stories on the front page of Digg.com caught my attention:
“Games 4 Girls” What an INSULT to Female Gamers!
Ready to Get Annoyed: The NYT is throwing around the term Web 3.0 already.
Then there is the recent announcement that one of the largest communities in Second Life has decided to ban PR and Marketing firms who insult the community by declaring some kind of “first” in Second Life, disregarding all the people and business who were actually there first.
Everyone in advertising is talking about engagement these days, but engagement starts at home. Marketers, especially creatives and planners, need to engage themselves in the very communities and cultures they are marketing towards. They need to understand the environment, the people, and the social rules of the community in order to be effective. Anyone truly engaged in net culture would know that “Web 2.0″ is a universally despised term and avoid “Web 3.0″ like the plague.
Reading a “cool hunting” brief isn’t going to suffice, either. Sure, you can understand the basic functions of a community like Second Life or MySpace just by reading a brief, but unless you really engage you won’t understand how frustrating it is to get pinged with excessive friend requests from bogus MySpace profiles, or how obnoxious it is when someone astroturfs your blog, or how female gamers hate, HATE being stereotyped as only interested in Bratz and Disney games.
You have to join the conversation before you can have any affect on it.
November 17th, 2006 at 10:30 am
Hey, I obviously agree with what you say here, particularly because I am your partner. And I have an 8 year old daughter who wouldn’t be caught dead with a Barbie and is on-line exploring Neopet nightly (http://www.neopets.com/ — Second Life for the under 10 set.)
What’s endlessly fascinating is our ongoing Campfire efforts to explain and quantify the difference between spot engagement (which may be an oxymoron these days) and a New Marketing (branded entertainment or immersive) engagement.
For instance take an advertiser who buys a 30 second slot on “Deal or No Deal” and compare that buy with the same advertiser’s participation in a New Marketing campaign, like our current Pontiac campaign (see http://www.motoratilife.com).
Let’s say that in the New Marketing campaign a particant spends 20 minutes following a mystery or engaging in a debate during one week.
Now you could say that the branded effort was 40 times more effective based on a single participant (20 mins versus 30 secs). But to measure true effectiveness you”d really have to compare the number of people reached and the cost of each approach (CPM/ROI, etc).
What’s not taken being into account however is the vastly different behavioral experiences provided by the two competing approaches.
Imagine the extraordinary difference between my perhaps “catching” a spot on the air — not filtering it out (studies show we don’t need Tivo to skip spots any longer, we automatically stop paying attention when they come on) — and my actively engaging in an New Marketing campaign.
In the New Marketing example I seek out the latest music performance, story turn, audience post, puzzle element, etc., sharing my enthusiasm with friends using free media, returning repeatedly. So much more powerful for a brand’s marketing, but also so much more difficult to accurately quantify.
What we know is we can far more effectively measure the participation in the world of New Marketing. And that the data is so attractive to advertisers that they are shifting millions of ad dollars to non-TV spot centric New Marketing.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:09 am
You are spot on. The marketing community needs to stop the hype and just execute better campaigns that build and unite communities that they are so desperately trying to engage with a 30 sec. ad.
Furthermore, female gamers do not want to be talk down to, or blatantly advertised to. As a female gamer and marketer, I want you to engage me in a story that I can follow, contribute to and make my own.
December 1st, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Joanna, you are also spot on. Hopefully agencies, like your new home at TracyLocke, will listen to the advanced troops: creative people like yourself, and work via a new process, building teams that include account, media and planning, and firmly engage the New Marketing. Fingers crossed.
February 18th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Hey folks,
Being the dad of a couple of tween-aged girls, I totally get where you both are coming from. This stuff is old school “broadcast” generalized crap. My kids are definitely girls and proud to be girls. They like stuff and this includes girl stuff. Amusingly, things that are “lame,” according to them, is just generally poorly designed in a variety of ways (be that game design, instructional design, graphic design…) What I find interesting as well, is the fact that if something is very compelling, other aspects of that thing is overlooked. For example, my kids are quite taken with Webkinz. They love the engagement of being able to play with the digital equivalent of their stuffy. They overlook the poor design that is “too little kid-ish” because the interactions and customizations and challenges have them engaged. Ideally, stuff should be cool and look cool too, but it MUST be cool first. Cool looking junk is still junk.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Owen, re your comment about girls and design. My 8 year old daughter is a big fan of Club Penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/), which is way below her Brooklyn media girl level in design, but has totally captivated her crowd. It offers many of the elements of Second Life, avatars, creating your home, chat, prizes, etc. but looks like kiddie crap. Doesn’t matter to them, they love the community experience.
Meanwhile my middle kid, 14 year old boy, is all over X-Box 360 and X-Box Live via Gears of War (he can beat the shit out of any teenage gamer you got in your house by the way). Gears of War looks fantastic, but again what captivates him and his friends is the on-line experiece, the sophistication of the game play and the fact that they can all talk with eachother while playing.