Advertisers need new tricks to meet digital media challenge
Story-telling, brand influencers help firms compete with ‘creative consumers’ and vie for eyeballs in crowded social media space. By Jesus Alcocer
Digital media has made succeeding in advertising harder because it has opened the market for creative content to a wider field. At the same time, it has made measuring impact a more precise process, essential for ad buyers who are increasingly focused on return on investment.
In the course of the week, Thipayachand Hasdin, chief client officer at BBDO Bangkok, and Sorada Sonprasit, chief executive and founder of Brilliant & Million, sat down with the Bangkok Post to discuss the latest trends in the advertising industry.
Ms Sorada and Ms Thipayachand were recognised as two up-and-coming women in the advertising industry in Campaign Asia’s Women to Watch ranking released this month.
Ms Sorada is a former flight attendant and had a stint at Citibank before founding Brilliant & Million eight years ago.
The company has offices in Singapore and Bangkok and has been named Digital Agency of the Year for five years in a row.
Ms Thipayachand, who has spent her entire career in advertising, now heads business development for the Bangkok office of New York-based BBDO, which has been named the most awarded agency of the year by The Gunn Report for six years straight.
STORIES PEOPLE WANT TO HEAR
Consumers are no longer reliant on the work of agencies because they can find creative content everywhere, Ms Thipayachand said.
“The nature of competition has changed. Before it used to be consumer, agency and buyer, but now agencies have to find a competitive advantage over these ‘creative consumers’.”
In the digital age agencies are competing for eyeballs with viral media companies like Buzzfeed “which can generate millions of likes overnight,” she said.
“The problem is people can’t see the difference between good content that builds the brand in the long term, and fast, quick content.”
Digital has pitted agencies against non-traditional competitors, but it has also given them the ability to experiment with different ad formats. In the past, advertisers were usually limited to 15 or 30-second TV spots.
Today they can post long format ads on social media that are more appropriate for storytelling, and which people are more likely to share organically in social media.
“As an example, we recently did a 15-minute advertisement for Visa called Tokyo Unexpected, which received more than 10 million likes in a week without a boost, which means the growth was organic,” said Ms Thipayachand.
A 15-minute ad flies against all accepted paradigms. “If you ask, Facebook and Google would say it’s a suicidal mission since no one wants to watch an ad more than three minutes long,” she added. As the media space opens, agencies have to compete with creative consumers who do not necessarily have a commercial purpose in mind.
Aside from promoting products, agencies must tell old slogans “Visa is accepted everywhere”, in ways that consumers appreciate and pass on, like Tokyo Unexpected.
“It’s a story about a broken-hearted Indonesian girl who is dumped by her boyfriend one day before their planned trip to Tokyo, and who finds herself alone and cashless in a strange city,” she said.
“It takes courage to make good ads, and also courage to buy them,” she said. Media companies have jumped ship on this trend.
Many, like the New York Times and Conde Nast, are offering companies the ability to tell their stories in a way that potential customers are more likely to consume.
Both these companies integrate products into editorial-style “branded content”, which consumers are more likely to share.
Ms Sorada said the most important trend for digital agencies is perhaps the use of influencers.
“In the past we hired brand ambassadors, but today the market is much more fragmented — there are thought leaders for very specific niches. There are Instagram or YouTube celebrities for the beauty sector which an agency can leverage to reach a very specific kind of consumer.”
The idea behind the use of influencers is essentially the same behind that of feature films: producing content that people want to watch even if it contains publicity, rather than content they are forced to watch because it contains publicity. Influencers are different in they can seamlessly integrate products into the narratives their Instagram followers want to see on their feeds.
According to a study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 2015, consumers’ least trusted sources of information are TV ads, brand emails, company posts in social media, and website ads. The advice of friends and family, experts and other consumers are the most trusted sources.
Consumers trust brands, but only when they are not overtly trying to sell. According to BCG “96% of US consumers say they trust brands to provide useful information without trying to sell them something.”
MEASURING IMPACT
Online media is forcing ad agencies to produce content that rivals anything on the web in terms of engagement and entertainment. At the same time, companies are pushing agencies to show evidence these new forms of advertisement are an effective use of their money.
Increasingly companies are seeking information on engagement across the whole “consumer journey, from the time the consumer first sees an advertisement on Facebook, to the time when he or she makes the purchase, for example, in a physical store of the brand,” Ms Sorada said.
The idea is to measure in which part of the journey a consumer drops and make improvements at that specific step, she added. The industry is still figuring out how to optimise measurement when a journey occurs in both physical and online channels. The company’s work is focused on creating identifications they can track like barcodes or coupons which a customer downloads online and the uses at the store.