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The consumer’s power grows online
So dramatically has the advertising landscape transformed in recent years that when Tracy Tuten, Ph.D., associate professor of advertising research at VCU, talks about “traditional advertising,” she could be referring not just to a full-page spread in a newspaper or a 30-second television commercial, but to the kind of display ads that have been seen on mainstream Web sites for little more than a decade.
Broadcast and print media continue to be influential homes for advertising, but the meteoric rise of online advertising cannot be denied. Companies are increasingly focusing their marketing dollars on multimedia advertising platforms that attempt to reach people where they spend more and more of their time — on computers and mobile screens. The still-untapped potential of online advertising is making for a period of almost frantic invention in the ways that consumers are targeted and persuaded. In fact, Tuten writes in a forthcoming book, “the very philosophy of advertising has changed.”
Tuten’s “Advertising 2.0: Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 World,” which will be published later this year, closely follows each new step in the online media marketplace and explains the best ways to take advantage of the Web’s burgeoning marketing impact. “Advertising 2.0” will examine such topics as consumer-generated advertising, social network advertising, viral video, leveraging opinion online, alternate reality games, behavioral targeting, and online television programming and “podvertising.”
These new marketing methods have combined to shake the long-established foundation of the advertising industry. Perhaps the most drastic philosophical change in the industry, which Tuten details in her book, is the shift away from the one-way monologue of a marketer speaking to a consumer toward a two-way, or even multi-way, interaction between marketer and consumer.
“Online, advertising becomes more about conversations, connections and shared control and less about passive consumption of packaged content,” Tuten wrote.
Social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, are prominent examples of this shift. Advertisers are flocking to the sites, despite widespread uncertainty about how to advertise effectively on them, because, simply, “that’s where the people are,” Tuten said. Social media represents a democratization of information, according to Tuten, and consumers enjoy newfound power because of it. Marketers who venture into social media must proceed accordingly.
She said marketers must labor to be a part of the online community they target — and not an interruption. Online media is littered with failed attempts to interact with consumers online, largely because marketers entered online communities not as fellow members but as intrusive interlopers — something akin to the unavoidable commercials that break up TV viewers’ favorite shows but that can simply be ignored in the social media world.
“It has to be authentic to work or people won’t be interested,” Tuten said. “And it has to offer value to the consumers.”
Social media’s potential for interaction with consumers has created new goals. Brand awareness no longer is enough; marketers now crave brand engagement, the process in which consumers absorb a brand’s message and subconsciously adopt and integrate it into their own personal “brand.” For this to happen, Tuten said, successful online marketers actively invite and encourage the consumer to participate in creating the brand’s meaning.
When brands make an appropriate entry into social media, consumers embrace roles, Tuten said, and “become content creators, storytellers, advocates and communication vehicles. They seek out opportunities to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds, social fiction and games which are fortified, sponsored and enhanced by brands. This is the promise of advertising in social media.”