By Mohit Hira, SVP & Digital Head - JWT India Group, JWT Delhi Account Management
It could have easily been yet
another typical panel discussion on the future of digital marketing. But it
wasn’t.
Partly because everyone’s accepted
that, when it comes to digital brand-building, the future’s not coming. The
future’s already here. And partly because we had a set of “not-old-but-mature”
CMOs engaged in a sparkling conversation. Literally.
They came from Birla Sunlife, GSK,
Nestlé, Nokia, Pepsi et al at the JWT-WARCConversations last
Thursday in Gurgaon, to discuss how brands could unlock sustainable growth in
2014. And, while it started out as a meandering flow of easy banter around the
current slowdown and possible challenges that brands could face, it quickly
focused on the impact of the digital medium. And, from there, to the role brands
now need to play in this uncontrollable medium.
This is not a new debate. But there
were perspectives that were fresh and set me thinking. Perhaps, because like
the panelists, some of us had also migrated from a static, staccato, offline
advertising era to a volatile, interval-free, online communications age.
So, think about these facts…
There was a time when time was
finite. No, that doesn’t mean we have 25 hours now but we have managed to
stretch time and bring elasticity to it, a lot more than we could in a
non-computerised, fixed-line telephony world. The media of that time – 15 or 20
years ago – was also finite: a newspaper had a predictable number of pages;
television (even with the arrival of satellite broadcasters) had secondage that
could not be extended or revisited. There were no digital recorders, no YouTube
that allowed a viewer to go binge-viewing and create his own programming
schedule: the remote control was, at best, a channel-switcher; whereas today it
enables one to master time itself, to flip back and forth at will. (HG Wells
would have been delighted.) And YouTube, that mouse-controlled,scourge of
copyright-catatonic creators was yet to be unleashed on an unsuspecting, hungry
world. It would grow to become larger than many TV channels at a fraction of
the cost, and allow a viewer to go as far back in time as he wished, at will;
as long as someone had uploaded the video he wanted from an archive.
There was also a time when we
learned that brands had to behave in a certain way. Brands would be personified
and were meant to appear consistently, speak in a defined tonality… in short,
they were predictable. And rigid. Life was easier for the brand manager and his
agency because things were templated. A media plan had to be frozen days (if
not weeks) in advance because, although it had fought the government’s quota
regime, the media was itself still caught in the quagmire of self-imposed
inventory quotas.
Everything was also integrated: all
services rested within a single agency, brands and clients were wedded to their
agency partners, audiences were sitting ducks waiting to be targeted en masse
as they turned up almost magically every Sunday morning to suspend disbelief
and succumb to Ramanand Sagar’s histrionics.
But that was before the media agency
was born out of the creative agency and exposed themselves both to predatory
purchase managers. The partner had became a vendor. Dis-integration had
arrived: remove the hyphen and you’ll realise what the word really means. Media
channels had also mushroomed and eyeballs were no longer available on demand.
Niche became nice. Audiences had fragmented, the client-agency relationship had
moved from long-term commitment to a flirtatious fling with creative boutiques.
The triad of the client-agency-consumer was replaced by the tangled triangle of
the client-agency-second agency. Therein lay the problem: a single brand owner
and a single brand custodian meant greater accountability; but in a
multi-agency relationship, while the brand owner was still one, he had divided
the custody of his marque to several agencies and consultants. As a result, no
single agency could now take credit or blame for either the rise or fall in
brand metrics. And the poor brand manager spent the better part of his time orchestrating
campaigns between them instead of being out there in the marketplace. Somewhere
along this journey, the niche creative hotshops would face the dharam-sankat of
growth versus quality…success meant sacrifice.
Add to this, the explosion of social
media and the onslaught of the always-on, ever-ready-to-express, smartphoned
youngster. Brands now have to be on guard, exposed and in the public eye 24x7 –
not just on prime time. The concept of appointment-viewing is history and media
plans can no longer be cast in stone: a single, radical twist to a campaign can
skew a brand’s plans and lead to overnight changes in media plans. All you need
is YouTube and a maverick with a mashup. It cannot be a coincidence that,
anagrammatically speaking, ‘viral’ becomes‘rival’.
Brands have, actually, never been
used to conversations. That entire stimulus-response thing we learned in
textbook Jim Young workshops was meant for a one-way world. Not for a
stimulus-response-stimulus-response-stimulus-response chain that is now the
default dialogue everywhere. A post, a tweet, a picture instagrammed is all the
stimuli a trigger-happy generation needs to make or break a brand in seconds.
The thumb never had it so good. And because everything happens rapid-fire in
real time, everything is also very transient. Moods change, likes become
dislikes and there is, apparently, nothing wrong in this 180-degree flip.
No guilt. If this is true of human beings where our behaviour and tone of voice
changes within hours or by simply transiting from the workplace to other
places, why should it not be so for brands themselves? And why should brands
continue to invest blindly in broadcast media with no assurance of who’s at the
other end? Why, too, should ROI be demanded from digital media only?
In this volatile splinternet (yes,
the term does exist) how can a templated brand ever converse with its
consumers? Why should brands not be allowed to change tonality depending on the
stimuli that comes back at them? The tux is not a style statement today, the
t-shirt is. Control is not the key, agility is. Dialogue is the order of the
day. Brands that shed the starch and find the courage to be flexible and also
trust one brand custodian for the long-term will find that they thrive. Simply
because you can get one gymnast to be agile and aesthetic, not a motley gang of
untrusting rivals.
So, dear “maturing-client”, keep the
faith… in your long-term agency partner. In the medium that is attracting the
very-mobile masses. And, most of all, figure out a way to engage with, and win,
the faith of the fickle digital consumer.
The article was first published on Facebook.
