by: Josh Hawkins
AdAge.com reports that Yahoo will begin selling ad space on Flickr's social media service. This represents the first foray into the monetization of social media for Yahoo, and Nikon will be a charter advertiser.
Jason Zajac, general manager of social media for Yahoo, promises more advertisers and opportunities for marketers to leverage their social media properties.
With the growing popularity of social media destination sites – especially in the broadband video space – there has also been a steady stream of naysayers condemning CGM as poor choice for mainstream advertising campaigns. Arguments tend to focus on what I've been calling the guilt by association problem – the fear that brands will be tarnished by proximity to homegrown content which media buyers and brand managers have little or no control over.
Legitimate concerns indeed. But such is life in the Wild West of website content, search, CGM, and now broadband video. As I've mentioned elsewhere, consumers find CGM before they run into official, branded content on the Internet. Consumers use search and customer testimonials to inform purchasing decisions. Search engines give preferential treatment in result rankings to frequently updated, keyword rich, and link-saturated CGM. Therefore, CGM is an inevitable part of modern marketing communications and brand experiences. And smart brands managers will harness CGM to their advantage and produce campaigns that are far more engaging and instigating (from a word of mouth perspective) than previously possible.
There are essentially three social media opportunities emerging that media planners and buyers need to keep in the cross hairs. The first is becoming almost "traditional" now, which is the re-purposed TV spot assigned to pre-roll or interstitial avails on consumer-produced broadband video content. Avails are now emerging on CGM video destination sites, which present obvious challenges. Namely, a lack of content oversight and editorial involvement to screen for pirated or inappropriate home video (you can only imagine the possibilities).
The second and potentially more interesting opportunity involves contextual advertising. Most CGM destinations require that publishers include some form of tagging or descriptive meta data to be associated with the media assets uploaded and displayed on these sites. This information can be exposed to search engine spiders for public indexing – increasing niche consumer traffic – as well as provide media buyers an opportunity to locate avails for highly targeted placements.
In the broadband video context this amounts to instream advertising targeted by some set of genre-based or category-specific tags that identify possible consumer segments and demographics. But beyond this interruptive model of broadband advertising other ad formats are emerging that take advantage of meta data to push hyper-relevant rich advertising content in the form of Flash banners overlays and even hot spots within the real estate featuring Flash video.
The third important opportunity is captured by savvy marketers who are reaching out to customer evangelists with calls to produce and submit video content, blogs, and other content that highlight key value propositions. This content can be rebroadcast across a variety of channels becoming, in essence, CGM advertising campaigns. One classic example is the Converse Gallery, which started out a broadband video exercise but certain consumer submissions were culled out and featured in broadcast TV ad spots.
All three examples of CGM availabilities present a truly unique opportunity for media planners and buyers. CGM content, unlike traditional advertising media, represents a forward-leaning consumer behavior. Consumers are conditioned to tune out interruptive advertising with polished, official brand messages. On the other hand, CGM and "reality-based" media experiences trigger an almost empathetic, or in some cases voyeuristic, responses from consumers. The brand messages that trickle through these experiences are much more like to resonate and result in purchasing behavior and peer-to-peer communications.
Brand managers are well advised to take CGM avails seriously and not automatically dismiss these opportunities for a lack of control over the end experience. Again, the upside could far outweigh any potential risk.
Original Post: http://splinteredchannels.blogs.com/weblog/2006/06/brands_experime.html
