The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

The decision by ICAAN on thursday 26th June 2008 will no doubt change the entire Internet in a fundamental way that perhaps you or your client have not yet even begun to consider. My advice would be to start thinking and acting on this decision right now before you even finish that lowfat mocha latte.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, what the ICAAN [Wikipedia link] decision means is that we are no longer limited to the existing top-level domain names (TLD’s) in use on the internet such as .com, .net, .org and .countryname (eg .us) when it comes to registering our domains either for ourselves or clients. From now on we’ll be able to conjur a new TLD that is relevant to us or our brand. What’s more, individuals/corporations will have the opportunity to purchase any new TLD’s outright and have complete control over it’s use. So theoretically, I could apply to ICAAN and say I want to control the domain .amos, which is my surname – theoretically that is, since they state that it could cost at least 6 figures to register any of the new TLD’s. And if I happen to not be rich enough or don’t register my chosen TLD in time I might even be at the mercy of our old enemies in the cybersquatting ‘business’. No doubt having such fine citizens lingering at the topmost level of our most desired domains is going to prove ‘interesting’ to say the least.

This isn’t like the time a bunch of geeks told you that www in a web address was deprecated - you can be forgiven for not realizing why the heck that matters and for the fact that you still type it into your addressbar every time you use a browser – but trust me, this new change in the internet domain space is one you won’t want to ignore.

Thankfully, according to a recent BBC article, ICAAN have stated that

“The costs of developing and implementing this policy will be borne by the applicants, but we’re certainly not setting this up for profit.”

That makes me feel better. Surely that will mean they will try their utmost to curtail what would otherwise turn into a stampede of crazed corporations hell-bent on securing their trademarks and brand terminology? Only they then go on to say:

“It will implement an arbitration process to oversee disputes and has said that if all else fails a domain would go the “highest bidder” in an auction.”

Cue stampede.

Only time will tell if this all results in utter madness. What seems inevitable is a goldrush of companies filling out their ICAAN applications and attempting to register everything they can get their hands on, from mcdonalds.hamburger, to gm.car, to steve.jobs, to microsoft.pc to nytimes.news – the sheer scope of how many TLD’s could spring into existence, how the domain registrars can possibly cope with managing the chaos, and what the heck all this could mean to entities like Google, and the millions of users – remains to be solidified into any kind of coherent fact.

What you might want to do if you’re a marketer/advertising agent is to start wondering how this affects your clients – at least be ready to answer their questions when they say ‘omg do I need to spend a million bucks to prevent someone registering ‘client-x’.sucks? (ICAAN say they have rules against such mis-use, just so you know).

Simple really. Here’s how to fail in just a few easy steps:

1. You want to spread awareness of your brand/product among tech savvy young persons on the internets. SO, of course your campaign must be centered around Youtube. Naturally.
2. Decide to throw little to no online advertising or any traditional media in the general direction of your awsome idea, because no doubt the whole thing will be totally VIRAL, and won’t require any money be spent on actually promoting it.
3. Set up your youtube channel, along with some totally cheesey/lame/fake looking ‘example’ of what you want users to post – as well as the default TV ad to kick things off.
4. Include a link to the insanely obtuse, boring, depressingly restrictive instructions, such as “Running Time: 5 minutes maximum, including any credits. If entry is longer than 5 minutes, entry may be disqualified”. Knowing full well, of course, that nobody in their right mind would actually read through all of the instructions – Heaven forbid that you would offer a more palatable version of the rules first, to entice people to enter without boring them stupid.
5. Totally forget to post videos sent in by users back to the channel, thus embracing the whole point of social media and the idea of video sharing/communication – or do you really still have zero entries even though the contest is already a month old?
6. Assume that anyone will actually take time out of their busy, busy lives to record these little DIY commercials in order to win ‘$15,000 big ones. Cash’ when in reality there is an already established benign movement of people posting this exact stuff for free already, regardless of the fat stack you’re offering.
7. But you don’t care about the content – this is all about increasing awareness and appreciation of the spikly spanky shiny new product, right? Which is…um, I forget?

I’m sorry Honda. I like you, generally, but in this particular instance, you fail.

This kind of thing should serve as yet another message to agencies to beware of slapping social media into their campaigns without putting a layer of ’science’ beneath the ‘creation’ of advertising that otherwise relies on some kind of magical WOM and a lot of bored teenagers in order to be successful.

Connecting to your potential customers through Youtube: brilliant idea. Not thinking like your audience or trying to give them something truly compelling or fun to bite into: disappointing.

My old friend Simon Kelly has a great article in this week’s Adweek about the power and imperative of brand storytelling. Simon and I have been advocates for this form of narrative marketing for more than a decade but as he notes in the article, the disruption caused by the internet provides a huge opportunity to tell brand stories in a new, engaging (multimedia) way.

The key according to Simon is ensuring that content falls within a brands’ “authority to publish”. In order to engage a consumer, content needs to be both authentic and credible. A bass fisherman in Texas telling the story of the Chevrolet Silverado whilst engaged in his life passion is authentic and credible (full disclosure: our work). Taco Bell telling its story using Sports Illustrated swimsuit models? Perhaps not so much.

I’d go one step further than Simon however. The fantastic promise of brand storytelling online is that it doesn’t have to be one-way. Once the story platform has been developed and is accepted by consumers as being credible and authentic, those consumers must be empowered to co-create the narrative - shape it, share it, live it, be part of it. Now that’s tasty.

One of the key internet trends we’ve been writing about here at the Next Engine has been the shift in the balance of power from companies to consumers. Across the board - and perhaps counter-intuitively - we’ve found that this shift can provide significant benefit to those companies who choose not the fight the inevitable.

Indeed the more that corporate strategists (be they designers, engineers, IT specialists or marketers) embrace the opportunity the web provides to interact, engage and co-create with people outside the corporation on a more or less level playing field, the greater the level of value realized for the company.

That’s also the major take-away from this McKinsey study. Across all kinds of industry sectors, and with all kinds of objectives in mind, companies, suppliers and consumers are behaving in new ways to create new value. And perhaps surprisingly consumer co-creators do not appear to be motivated primarily by financial reward. Rather McKinsey finds that they seek other benefits - community recognition being especially highly valued.

There are clear opportunities and implications here for marketers also. Providing a platform for consumers to engage with a brand in open forum, on a level playing field, with few or no restrictions and a genuine corporate commitment to listen and learn will yield new insights and new ideas that can be utilized to create value for the company. There are some great examples of this already in play.

And happily, as McKinsey finds, consumer participants find immense satisfaction in simply being heard and recognized as making a constructive difference - both by the company and their peers. As companies become more comfortable and reap tangible benefits from being more open, and as more consumers get comfortable with being participators and creators, this trend will soon reach a tipping-point.

Update: It’s not like consumers are shrinking violets

I’m kicking off the previously mentioned focus on Social Media Technology and Tools by introducing you to BrightKite.

Brightkite describes itself as a location-based social network that enables people to take their online profiles with them into the real-world and make real-world friends. Users can see where their friends are and what they’re up to all while maintaining comprehensive degrees of privacy to non-friends. This is a white hot category in the social network space. Location based services have been rapidly springing up. Their intent is to make it easier to let your friends know where you are, meet up with people in your area, or find out information about your location. One of the cooler things it does is that it easily lets you see what people around you are doing.

Brightkite is a really a marriage of micro-blogging and location-based features. It’s a slick tool that is broken down into the following:

Around Me - View users nearby your current location. See what they are up to. Make new friends.

Brightkite Universe - View all the public activity on Brightkite (note: the service is not limited to the US).

Live Friends Map - See where your friends are at a neighborhood, city, state and world zoom level.

Place Pages - See who visits your favorite places and what they post there, in real-time.

Visited Places - Keep track of all the places you go.

Sharing - Brightkite can share your content with Twitter & Fire Eagle

SMS Interface - Although this post shows BrightKite on a fancy phone, you can interact with Brightkite on any phone via text message (SMS) in addition to the mobile version of the site http://m.brightkite.com

Bkite also says they will soon be making an API available. This would be a fantastic change, as it would allow third party developers to innovate and build new applications and services on top of the BrightKite platform, much like what Facebook and Twitter have done.