Why digital is the 'new black'

Over the last few years, we have seen consumers embrace the vast changes within the digital realm. Broadband has become affordable and widely available, banking, shopping and the way we research and invest in brands have rapidly become online hobbies. The web is now a central hub for consumers to interact with their chosen brands and the rise of the web 2.0 age has seen brands using imaginative digital strategies to engage and communicate.

Most brands now host a website, but are the current offerings making the web work hard enough for them? Is a flash animation, contact page and novel interface really going to project and differentiate the brand? The online consumer has become savvy to the digital world and expects technologies such as interactive rich media, User Generated Content, RSS news alerts, wiki’s, podcasts, blogging, and mobile applications as standard. Brands must keep up and ensure their proposition delivers to consumer demand and expectation.

Digital media is not just about a great website – it’s about an holistic online presence. As consumers, we all use digital services throughout our personal and professional lives. Online activity such as social networking has become an everyday channel to communicate with family, friends and colleagues. The door of opportunity is currently wide open for brands to heighten their online presence. By embracing social sites such as Last.FM, Twitter, Second Life, My Space, Facebook, brands and companies can reach audiences in their millions. If the right strategy and emotional charge is present, brand awareness will be maximised, encouraging adoption, association and interaction.

The smart brands (not necessarily the biggest players) have led the way, and just around the corner is an army of followers kitted out in the right uniform and speaking the lingo. Make sure your brand doesn’t get left behind.

Words are still sexy

Words are disappearing fast in ‘adland’. The world is getting smaller and now a brand can be represented from Birmingham to Bombay by means of a simple swoosh. Britain has led the way creatively for years in advertising as much as in music and fashion, but homegrown campaigns for homegrown audiences are failing to use the most powerful (and cheapest) tool in the box. The cost of producing a piece of copy that arouses the buying instinct is infinitely lower than that of a two week shoot in Tobago but trying to find a stand-alone lyrical ad is as tough as finding an account director under thirty who can spell ‘expenses’.

There are of course exceptions; the iconic Guinness ads, M&S food porn and more recently Trident Gum’s banned “Mastication” campaign – but even here the words, honed as they are, still play the role of understudy to the high maintenance lead of visual imagery in two out of three. It seems that confidence has been lost in the strength of written persuasion alone.

Even outside creative disciplines the use of language to sell ideas is declining. Investment in media exposure rather than creative impact (quantity over quality) seems to be in the ascendant and selling simple strategies to clients has become a minefield of overcomplicated science
and technology. Planning departments have been replaced by ‘Intelligence Units’ and advertising agencies are hiring econometricians (you heard
it here first). The endgame is a display of PowerPoint plausibility gilded with equations which bamboozle the audience (clients) into submission. Again, the cost seems disproportionate to the goal when a well-informed and eloquent professional could bring you round to their way of thinking with wit, humour and a handful of killer facts.

Words can surprise and seduce. From SMS text to Harry Potter we still crave them. Whether your inspiration comes from Winston Churchill or Kanye West it’s the language that gets you. The legal profession reveres the barrister who can trounce the impact of hard evidence with a skillful summing up. Book publishers and women’s weekly magazines are laughing all the way to the bank. The written word is here to stay and it’s time there was a re-awakening in the advertising industry of how to use it.

And if this piece of Soapbox literature has not managed to persuade, then consider this: A recent survey for Penguin books revealed that 85% of women would be more attracted to a man if he could talk about literature. Words are sexy and sex still sells.

Branding and the individual

At no time since the First Amendment has the cult of self-expression been so venerated. Individuality reigns and the evidence is everywhere: blogs are the new black, unripe 20-somethings write autobiographies (presumably the first of many) and fame-obsessed parlimentarians allow duties to their constituents to play second fiddle in order to parade themselves on national reality TV programmes.

‘Memoirs of a Geisha’, both fascinated and appalled with the notion of suppressing the real self behind a full-time mask of perfection, leading us to speculate that it’s not who you are, but how you express yourself that counts and wonder what that could mean for brands?

As consumers dig deeper for a sense of self, vintage is a fashion failsafe: overcome product parity with product rarity and individual status is assured. In other categories and services the solution is less clear-cut but all boils down to customisation. Lifestyle and mindsets have replaced ‘target groups’. Only those brands that authentically relate to how we live and think as individuals will have the future credibility needed to engage the 21st century consumer.

Nice in the noughties

With the zeitgeist turning towards caring, sharing and social responsibility, today’s brand guardians do well to remember the old joke about finding a maggot in your apple and how it’s much worse to find half of one. Should consumers discover an element of rot in a brand they’ve already bitten into, the turn-off is utter and complete.

The Noughties consumer is into soul-searching and expects to find squeaky-clean ethics and a healthy provenance at the heart of a brand. Cause marketing is back on the right side of holier-than-thou and brands have to be seen to stand for something and care a bit about the world we live in.

This might be the Noughty trend but don’t mistake it for Nice: despite every outward appearance of altruism, we believe the trend stems in part from the seismic shift in value perception where high prices no longer directly relate to high quality and cheap has never been so chic. If you can get the label for less, or wing it with a more affordable equivalent it makes you savvy. Paying over the odds for the real thing, well that’s more chavvy.

So back to those shining ethics and worthy causes.
In many ways they’re simply added value: something extra to justify the price tag for a product or service.
But undeniably, good is the new bad and brands must look right to the very core of their offer and infrastructure to make sure they stay on top.’