DIGITAL DOWNLOADED: Put your faith in humankind

Spend less, grow more? As many brands and organisations consider tightening their belts for the uncertain ride that might be coming their way in 2013, the comfortable truth is the cautious environment marks an important watershed in digital marketing. A shift so potentially great that the very structures and tenets of marketing are having to transform fundamentally to not just keep pace, but to remain relevant and deliver success.

Throughout 2012, brands from P&G and Samsung to Symantec and Ikea have been calling for and considering increasing their commitment to digital media spend, as they look to maximise their ROI across media and establish truly relevant engagement strategies with a new, constantly evolving type of consumer. This in itself requires a revolutionary shift in the way brands budget for and define success. The old school KPIs that include users and campaign reach, have been supplanted by voices and conversations, as brands increasingly focus on the need to have a dialogue with their consumers and provide value-added experiences. 

The internet and its technologies, once referred to as New Media, have given birth to new economies of scale, new business models, and ultimately new consumer expectations. This has also radically changed the way we work, live, love, learn, communicate, create, shop, socialise, educate and explore (and almost anything else we humans do). Anything and everything about anything at all, from a product and a service to a place or a person, is immediately accessible. It has made us smarter and braver consumers with infinitely more control. Control over not just what we consume, but what we create, support and love (or Like), and what we chose to destroy and manipulate.

We live in a world where everything is predominantly in the present tense, where everything in the past or future is less relevant. And with over 60 per cent of our internet population in Asia-Pacific accessing via a mobile device of some sort, people have learnt to trust nothing, and debate everything in ‘real time’. This means we get to reverse our positions, argue all sides of a debate, influence or overturn a purchase decision, and even test products. But within this multichannel, multi-device, content driven world that exists as an ecosystem of stories, chat and chatter, punctuated by real time experiences, people struggle to decipher the brand-babble and manipulation, and seek ways to avoid intrusion as the information and connection storm bombards them constantly. People retreat into their own social network havens, where they seek the truth. 

It is in these social ecosystems that brands need to succeed if they are to leverage the new world for their own gain, and that of their consumers. They need to provide people with the ability to tell their own stories to other people, rather than force-feed their own brand stories. The opportunities and impli-cations are challen-ging, and the million-dollar question that all brands should be asking themselves and their agencies, is: “How do I monetise my social and integrated ecosystems?” While many brands are learning to adapt to this new world, just as many struggle to balance investments in always-on ‘owned’ media, influential ‘earned’ media, and the old bastion of display and ‘bought’ media.

The answer to monetisation is not a simple one, though. It often requires a transfor-mational change on the client side, in conjunction with engagement strategies on the agency side that put consumer participation and story telling, purchase and ampli-fication at the heart. We call this ‘Play, Buy, Share. Encourage people to participate in something they find fulfilling, fun, worthy, rewarding or educa-tional, and one immediately has a consumer hope-fully inspired to consider a purchase decision, and eager to share their experiences. If done correctly, this will provide the catalyst for populism. These participatory ‘acts’ rather than ‘ads’ are the sign of the new age, and something we call Humankind, an ideology and methodology we created to exact participation ideas from core consumer insights to deliver measurable solutions to business problems. These solutions need to be monetised around an orchestrated ecosystem of integrated touch points on and offline with social media at the heart.

So, rather than spend less, grow more, I suggest spend smarter, grow faster. 

Neil Hudspeth is chief digital officer, Asia-Pacific at Leo Burnett