Advertisers Should Act More Like Newsrooms

by Baba Shetty and Jerry Wind  |  10:00 AM February 15, 2013   

A  fascinating thing happened at the Super Bowl this year. Typically, Super Bowl advertisers meticulously plan every aspect of their presence months in advance of the big game. But this time, Coca-Cola, Audi, and Oreo didn't just limit themselves to pre-packaged creative — they also had in place rapid response teams that adapted to events as they happened. So when the rest of America was reacting to the power outage in the stadium, the brands were, too — appropriately and in their own brand voice.

Recently, the Wharton Future of Advertising Program asked more than 175 industry leaders to describe their vision of what advertising would be like in the year 2020. Based on our analysis of the responses to the 2020 Project, the Super Bowl case isn't just a once-a-year stunt — it's a preview of a model that will scale and become a foundational characteristic of major brand advertising.

The industry experts had a varied take, but a remarkably consistent theme emerged: the rigid campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction.

For messages to be heard in 2020, brands will need to create an enormous amount of useful, appealing, and timely content. To get there, brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that's prolific, agile and audience-centric.

Prolific

The campaign model, relatively speaking, is miserly. Ad units like TV spots are produced in small batches and doled out across channels. Even digital advertising is versioned with relatively minor variations that most people would have a hard time evaluating as "different".

As Jacques Bughin and David Edelman of McKinsey & Company predict in their submission to the 2020 project, "The need for relevance will drive consumer demand and shape advertising supply. There will be billions of interaction points that will place enormous demands on brands to create and deliver just the right piece of content."

This previously unimagined scale of content production will require brands to adopt every option available to them to increase their content output — from building internal content teams (like Red Bull Media House), to extensive media company partnerships (like the Intel Creators Project with Vice, to large-scale agency initiatives (like the Responsibility Project from Liberty Mutual and Hill Holliday).

Agile

The traditional campaign model is rigid. Ad units are created at a point in time and don't generally adapt to emerging themes in culture. In contrast, the newsroom metaphor suggests that content has to be produced and delivered in a continuous stream rather than through a ponderous, slow-moving process of months of campaign development. Wieden+Kennedy understood this when they produced 200 Old Spice YouTube videos in 48 hours. Calle Sjoenell, Chief Creative Office O&M, predicts that by 2020 at least half of the production budget will be spent while the campaign is running to adapt it in real time instead of blowing it all in one go, before the campaign runs.

Ad agencies and creatives will need to work more like a news organization, constantly adapting existing material and creating new content across all media. As Ian Schaeffer of digital agency Deep Focus puts it: "The process of arriving at the best social content looks more like 'Newsroom' than 'The Pitch'. Creative and social staffers merge the zeitgeist with the brand ethos all day, every day."

Audience-centric

The campaign model has for decades been decidedly brand-oriented. Typically, brands tell stories about themselves. In the shift to a newsroom model, we'll ask "what will our user be interested in?" And then we'll check that expectation with evidence: in a modern newsroom, data circulates continuously about the relative performance of each unit of content produced, from tweets to text-based stories, to images and video served — and future editorial content decisions reflect consumers' response to previous content. Just as the news content that meets the audience's needs rises to the top according to various performance metrics — think of news organizations' "most emailed" lists — brand-publishing content that meets consumers' needs will similarly get top performance ratings.

Getting There

Consumers have new expectations. Social media and digital news offer a continuously-updated reflection of the culture consumers live within.The overwhelming consensus from the Wharton Future of Advertising panel is that the current campaign-based model is ill-equipped to deal with this new reality. We believe the newsroom metaphor offers a powerful way to rethink the way advertising content is being developed and delivered, the roles of the advertiser, agencies, the users and other content generators, and the entire organizational architecture of advertising and marketing.

The road ahead certainly won't be smooth — we know the transition will be culturally and operationally difficult. If your brand, agency or media company has useful insight for the marketing community on your experiments with a newsroom model, we invite you to share them with us in the comments below and at the Wharton Future of Advertising Project. Contact cathays@wharton.upenn.edu.

Social Media and the 'F' word

I wrote this article on evil effects of social media for a youth magazine 'The Lantern'.

With the advent of new media in the form of social networking sites like Facebook, video sharing sites such as YouTube, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), WhatsApp, and microblogging platforms like Twitter; social media has become a hub of social connections. The growth of social media and its penetration into our life has become undeniable.  It indeed has redefined communication and is setting new set of social norms and mannerisms.

People use this media to meet long lost schoolmates, college mates, meet new like-minded friends and online dating. They discuss on different topics, share information, and exchange files and pictures. Marketers use it to promote their products and services and professionals use it for business networking and get noticed.

Critics keep stating about the dark or rather evil side of social media. Now the question arises, do social media really have one? Well, to some extent yes. Parents, teachers and bosses are frightful on the usage of the ‘F’ word. I am talking about Facebook here.

The fast paced technology driven 21st century youth have become totally addicted to the social media. My personal experiences in the classroom regarding mobile usage are annoying. Most of the students spend their class time even during lectures checking, updating and communicating on social media sites. Students have become obsessed regarding their online presence. They spend hours on these sites even during exam period failing to realise the importance of high priority tasks.

Employees at work have been said to be equally distracted by social media sites, particularly BBM. Even if they keep the mobile phones on silent profiles during meeting, one has the tendency to check them regularly. The focus on work is easily lost and work begins to suffer as a result of it.

It has been observed that those who are addicted to social media particularly youth find it difficult to successfully interact with people face to face. Majority of them spend most of their time online; making friends and interacting with them in virtual world thus hampering their interpersonal relationships in real world. They can gossip, quarrel, build their fake image, boast about their life and most importantly do ‘sexting’ online thus giving them more power in virtual world. 

Social media encourages people to share personal information and people do not mind sharing it, many a times they share their email id and personal numbers too. Anti-social elements can use this information through fake identity to indulge into illegal activities. Hackers can commit fraud, send spams and do virus attacks using this information.

Social media users rarely cross check the information and keep forwarding it resulting in hoax messages getting spread all over. By doing this one is inviting trouble for him/her to become part of online scams and in worst situations identity theft also. Some of these sites sell this personal information to anyone who wants to buy it. On top of it these sites always carry a disclaimer stating that they are free to change their privacy policy any time. One cannot legally sue them for their misconduct. Let me ask you one simple question, how many times have you read the terms and conditions before signing up on any social networking platform?

One also needs to understand that whatever is posted and shared online is being closely watched by family members and potential employers. They may check your online profile to find your persona and judge you.

Researchers have also stated that social media is leading to narcissistic behaviour in people. Narcissism can be explained as “excessive vanity and a sense of entitlement”, meaning it leads to self loving tendencies in people. They further warn that such narcissist tendencies are anti-social as it can lead to an artificial life, increased aggression amongst users and also making people less sympathetic to others feelings in non-virtual world.

The time spent on social media is on the cost of social activities. People will look at the posts, updates and pictures of their friends and acquaintances on social media but rarely will they meet in person. This also affects their family life.  

Regular use of social media is resulting in decreased value of written word, slang language is used more over internet and overall disregard for grammar and punctuation is seen. Prolonged use of internet can also have severe health implications as it may affect your eyes, and result in back and neck problems.

There is no doubt that social media is having adverse effects. But any medium by default does not have good or bad characteristics. It’s the use of those media that makes it useful or useless. If one uses social media strategically, it can do wonders.

In a recent American study, it was found out that social media can actually increase students’ learning techniques. Students comfort level on social media is more while interacting and thus they can solve their queries and discuss their subject here in a better manner. Visiting right kind of pages will only enhance their knowledge. Lot of educational videos are also found on social media that makes learning process as a much more enjoyable experience.

It is not for the first time any media is criticised. Whenever anything new comes up people are awkward about its correct usage. There were cases where critics had confidently predicted that the changes would result in total shutdown of the society at large and individuals in particular. Definitely when new concept comes, it has to make space in the existing old set up sometimes there is loss of quality in the process but we need to carefully observe that the loss here is also eventually resulting in profit there.

What is needed is the right frame of mind and appropriate approach to fight the evil and stress on the good? This changed approach may help users to stand out by using the social media platforms.