Interaction in Advertising – New White Paper from eModeration

We’ve just published our latest white paper, Interaction in Advertising, which is summarised below. The paper examines how advertising is evolving from a one-way communicative process (the advertiser telling the consumer what they should be thinking), to a more collaborative, engaging format where brand and consumer communicate with an open dialogue.

The paper discusses examples of campaigns that are putting interaction in advertising into practice and highlights the risks and benefits of the developing trend.

Included in the paper:

From ‘interactive’ to ‘interaction’

• Brands are switching from paid display advertising to promoting themselves through branded online communities, virtual worlds/games and social media.
• Advertising campaigns are evolving into an interaction between brand and consumer, rather than the traditional one-sided communication.

Opening the dialogue

• Engagement is all about basic human behaviour. People don’t want to be talked at. They want to interact, share opinions, be heard.
• Advertisers are naturally gravitating to where their audience can be found, in communities and social networks. But the way that they engage has to change. It’s not enough to buy buttons on Facebook – research by Uvizz has shown how poorly people respond to this. They don’t want to interact with advertisers on social networks, but with friends.

Engaging, not interrupting

• Online display advertising can be viewed as an ‘interruption method’ – stopping the user from doing something that s/he wants to do.
• Brands are starting to move towards engagement to deliver their messages: asking users to get involved in activity that they can enjoy, whilst at the same time helping to get the word out about the brand, and contributing to the campaign.
• Brands need a launch plan which will create a base of fans/early adopters as the basis of their community.
• To create interaction within the community a brand has to participate, listen to feedback and adapt to it if necessary.
• Brands need to consider what will happen with the community they have helped to create, once their campaign is over.

Who’s doing it, and how?

Five ways to engage consumers in ad campaigns:

1. Engage with people individually. By showing the individual what the company can do for them, the brand is taking the ‘background noise’ out of the campaign and highlighting its relevancy. Making people more likely to listen and participate. Such as the campaign by Vitaminwater, where passersby were addressed directly from giant screens “Hey you in the pink top yeah you taking my photo, say cheeese!”
   
2. Provide incentives for participation (for example the extremely successful campaign by fast food brand Chick Fil-A, which offered the first 250,000 participants a free chicken sandwich in reward for uploading photos of their faces - which then take part in a grandstand ‘chicken wave’.)
   
3. Involve the consumer in the creative process by asking them to hep you create an ad or develop a product – such Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign.
   
4. Create a community that is the campaign. Pet owners came together to form the Cesar’s ‘I promise’ community.
   
5. Develop a community around an existing campaign. Brands that have developed an entertaining traditional television advert are starting to capitalise on the popularity of their creation by bringing its fans together with the creation of online communities – here, we need look no further than comparethemeerkat.com.

Brand reputation

• By opening up the brand and the campaign to input from the audience, brands are effectively handing over control of content and messages to users.
• This is correctly seen as a risky strategy. But the rewards are huge, and the risks largely mitigated by effective moderation and response.
• If brands are going to create online communities, they have a duty of care to the participants to protect them from harmful or malicious content by means of moderation.

Moderated, not censored

• Whilst interactive advertising does give brands insight into what the consumer really thinks about their product, the brand needs to respond to the feedback, and do so in the right way. Brands should not try to manipulate responses.

How should you approach interaction with consumers through advertising?

Advertisers should consider:

• What they are trying to achieve
• Who they are targeting
• How they will encourage people to participate
• If they have the right level/kind of incentives
• What success looks like to them
• Whether they are able to respond quickly
• If they are willing to listen to both positive and negative feedback
• Their approach to the moderation of user-generated content

In Summary

Advertising is a no longer about the brand trying to make the consumer hear their message; it’s about engaging the consumer in debate, finding out their opinions and responding to them.
Whilst this is something that some brands may find difficult, feeling it leaves their brand vulnerable to attack, the rewards in the form of engagement and loyalty can be huge. Engaging consumers has a positive financial impact. according to the Engagementdb Report, which states:

“... this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.”

The Interaction in Advertising white paper can be downloaded for free from the eModeration website. Do leave comments below to let us know what you think of it.