There’s been a lot of debate in recent weeks about whether marketers should be focusing on campaigns or platforms online. If I had to pick, I’d pick platforms. However, the good news is it’s not a zero sum scenario.

The benefits of platforms’ scalable growth vs one-off activity, basis for long-term relationships, and depth of interaction and connection with the brand to name a few, mean that they open up massive opportunity for long-term marketing success.

However for platforms to reach their potential, they can still use the galvanizing force of campaigns to build awareness and activate the community. What changes is the campaign model. The nature of the platforms offer up amazing possibilities for activating the platforms themselves while still communicating brand values through the nature of that activation.

In the offline / broadcast world, advertising can only express a value proposition and it’s often quite illusory and intangible (use this body spray, get a beautiful girl, not). In the online world, we can create these platforms and communities, and use campaigns to activate them and provide real value (get fit, play exclusive games).

The benefit of these campaigns is they are not just driving brand awareness, they are activating their existing platform communities and providing new value to them, as well as driving further membership, creating long-term value for the brand.

We start to then move away from building bespoke campaign experiences every time, which require constant traffic driving for no long-term benefit:

Campaign > Microsite model

To campaigns that feed and build equity in a platform, helping grow a long-term user-base while activating and providing value to the existing audience:

Campaign > Platform model

In this respect we can often end up with the platform living at the core of the marketing effort, with brand and activation layers surrounding it, but refreshing over time.

This is obviously a simplification, there are lots of scenarios where microsites or one-off destination support will still be the right choice for a campaign, or where we aren%u2019t looking to activate around brand platforms.

But as a way of looking past using digital media as simply another broadcast channel to support a brand messaging campaign, and towards using the unique interactive properties of the web to engage and provide value to customers and brand fans over a long-term period, this is a type of campaign and marketing model I think we will start seeing a lot more of in the coming years.

A look at how Ford, Kodak and Best Buy run their programs:

CENTRALIZED

The social-media department functions at a senior level, reporting to the CMO or CEO, and is responsible for all social-media activation for the brand. “We work with a lot of clients that have appointed one person,” said Ketchum’s Jonathan Bellinger, VP-social media strategy. “It’s nice to have a celebrity; it puts a human face on a company. You can achieve that by having one person being the public face both externally and internally, but it can get distracting because it becomes about those people.”

Dangers: Having a social-media head means departments outside that person’s scope might not benefit from efforts in the medium. For example, is customer care being considered if social media is centralized under marketing? This model doesn’t necessarily take into consideration social media’s influence on the entire business.

Essential roles: The social-media lead.

Marketers with this model: Ford. Scott Monty, global digital and multimedia communications director, joined the automaker from social boutique Crayon and has been a visible proponent of social media for the brand. Mr. Monty operates within the corporate-communications department, which reports directly into Ford’s CEO.

DISTRIBUTED

In this setup, no one person technically owns social media. Instead, all employees from customer care, marketing, media and beyond are represent the brand and work social media into their roles. This is often implemented through training and encouraging social media use across an organization.

Dangers: If there’s no standardized practice, social media can veer a brand off-message. For example, Jet Blue Senior VP-Marketing Marty St. George brought Twitter into the agency-of-record pitch process — tweeting the news of the search to see how many agencies were digitally savvy enough to find it there. “That experiment is over — and not to be repeated!” he tweeted after his tweet blew up into media coverage. Without a leader, learning about new social technology or sites then also falls on individuals.

Essential roles: Senior leadership that champions social media; training and internal communications around social-media policy is necessary.

Marketers with this model: Best Buy is decentralized because everyone in the organization has a role in social media, as Twelpforce demonstrates. Any employee can sign up to respond to customer queries on Twitter. The retailer does, however, have protocol and guidelines in place for tweets, and it has social-media experts in marketing. Last summer, CMO Barry Judge crowd-sourced a job description for a senior manager-emerging media marketing. Brands like IBM, Intel and Kodak have published social-media policies.

COMBINATION

This involves centralized best practices and decentralized execution. A brand maintains a committee of social-media stakeholders to work up its position and voice, which it disseminates to the company at large. From there, each discipline is left to incorporate social media into its individual executions.

Dangers: How do you hold departments accountable to a research council? Also, when a social-media program goes sour, who ends up as the fall guy, those who built the social-media strategy, or those who implemented it?

Essential roles: A team of social-media experts plucked from various departments.

Marketers with this model: Ketchum’s Mr. Bellinger cites his client Kodak as a company that’s found a good balance. It employs Jenny Cisney, chief blogger, in marketing, but she’s tasked with steering the company’s social-media presence rather than own it entirely. Kodak has published online its social-media policy for employees within a guidebook for marketers looking for lessons in social media. Starting in 2005, IBM used a wiki to crowd-source guidelines for a company blog and has asked employees to collective revise the rules for new forms of social media. Those efforts ultimately feed back to IBM’s social-media head Adam Christensen, who most recently spearheaded the company’s Smarter Planet blog.

Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, recently offered an insightful perspective into how brands could best engage consumers over the long-run by ceasing to refer to %u201Cviral%u201D as merely a campaign objective %u2013 but rather as a deliberate choice to share quality content that a consumer will be motivated to share with others.

According to Askwith,

It%u2019s time to accept a difficult truth: viral isn%u2019t a quality that we, as marketers, have the power to bestow. In fact, viral isn%u2019t an inherent trait that advertising can have at all. Viral isn%u2019t what a marketing campaign is, but how that campaign spreads. And when a campaign does achieve viral propagation, it%u2019s not simply a function of what we do as designers and planners. Instead, it%u2019s a function of deliberate choices that each consumer makes about what is worth sharing and why.

The ultimate challenge for brands is to understand their consumers and their motivations well enough to offer them something valuable enough to share.  Askwith suggests that, rather than focus on creating something %u2013 anything %u2013 that might spread like a virus %u2013 brands should focus on offering their consumers gifts so valuable that they%u2019ll want to share these with others.  And what makes a gift %u2013 or content %u2013 worth sharing?  Askwith poses three specific scenarios %u2013 each with unique purposes, motives and behavior patterns %u2013 in which people share content:

1. Contributing (1-to-Many): Sharing relevant content is often more casual and less deliberate, as in an online community.  Anything that might be interesting or useful has a good chance of being shared;  making valuable contributions is an important way to %u201Cprove%u201D that one belongs, and the pride of being the first to discover something of value offers a powerful incentive to share.

2. Broadcasting (1-to-World): In more public spaces like Twitter or Facebook, the act of sharing is more about the person sharing than the person receiving. Sharing an opinion or thought here makes a statement about who the individual is, what they like, and how they wish to be perceived. In this context, consumers are likely to share anything that expresses their identities, opinions or strengths.

3. Gifting (1-to-1/Few): More private channels like email, IM and real-world conversations allow for sharing that is closest to gifting. The decision to share depends on relevance and value to both giver and recipient, since sharing is intended to strengthen relationships and reinforce shared values. Consumers here will be likeliest to share anything that helps generate, strengthen or sustain connections.

Big Spaceship: “Getting Past Viral”

The golden age of the Web is coming to an end. Prepare for the Splinternet.

As we all gird for the launch of the Apple Tablet, take a moment to step back and realize what all these new devices are doing. The whole framework of the Web (and Web marketing) is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing.

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web, that’s not true. Your site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

Meanwhile, more and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can’t see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login.

Web marketing has grown since 1995, based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization — it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized.

Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines. 

We call this new world the Splinternet (with a nod to Doc Searls and Rich Tehrani, who used the term before us with a somewhat different meaning). It will splinter the Web as a unified system. The golden age has lasted 15 years. Like all golden ages, it lasted so long we thought it would last forever. But the end is in sight.

Here’s what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.

Here’s what to do: choose your devices carefully — investments in one cannot be transferred easily to others if you make a mistake. Rethink analytics, links, and measurement — they’re just becoming available in the new environments. Promote the new channels, SEO won’t help you so much here. Platforms like iPhone apps and Facebook are some of the most exciting new channels out there. Just realize that you’re leaving the comfy environment of the Web behind — along with all the tools you’ve grown dependent on — as you embrace the new platforms.

Note added 1/27 after iPad announcement: It appears the iPad, like the iPhone, doesn’t support Adobe Flash and runs the same proprietary iPhone apps. Regardless of how successful it becomes, it’s another splinter — an Apple controlled platform in which much of the Web’s infrastructure is missing.

See Proof the Splinternet is real, added 1/28,

 

Thanks to @elan_miller for letting me include my two cents.

Today we are in the third age, the experience age. The environment is one of unprecedented choice and transparency and the defining factor is a fickle Gen Y audience who demand more from less.

In this age brands must be built around their Experiential Selling Proposition (XSP). Unlike the simplicity of USP’s and ESP’s, the transparency of the third age demands that brands manage complex systems of value – understanding how all of the actions of the brand owner (product/service, societal, environmental, technological, marketing) interrelate to create the experience.

The technology that enables this age is the Internet and the platform is Social Media.

The definitive role that this age will invent is not yet clear, but so far we see Innovation leaders, Engagement leaders, Digital leaders, Social Media leaders and Experience leaders.

The fundamental and exciting shift is that the third age represents a sea change from the other two.

The brand owner no longer benefits from an information asymettry over the consumer. Instead this relationship has been reversed. As such, the old rules and indeed the very definition of how brands must behave in order to succeed has also changed.

The tools of brand positioning and advertising that have held such strength for so many years must now be replaced by both new tools and new rules.

XSP demands integration of product, service, social, environmental and marketing layers. It demands the creation of value across the system of the brand. And fundamentally it is built from a trust that brand owners will have to earn from their consumers on a daily basis.

The implications of this change for many brand advisers are potentially dire. Entire industries optimized for the more effective communication of a brands ESP now find themselves facing a systemic decline in efficacy and indeed value.

This will mean one of two things:

1. Brand advisers will need to focus less effort on how a brand communicates its ESP through marketing communications, instead focusing their efforts on helping brands to innovate across the entire system of the brand in order to generate revenue driving XSP.

2. Brand advisers who choose to remain focused on marketing communications will need to find ways of innovating and re-engineering their business model and offer for a lower value, lower fee world. Seeking structural change to create value both for themselves and the brand owner.

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We know how you love Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads with John Hodgman and Justin Long. So, here are all 66 TV spots (plus the 90-second extended version of 2008’s musical ad “Sad Song”) that have aired since the campaign, created by TBWA Media Arts Lab, launched on May 2, 2006.
   The success of Microsoft’s Windows 7 raises questions about the viability of “Get a Mac” going forward. (The three October 2009 spots, slamming Windows 7, look a little goofy now, and Apple skipped doing holiday spots for the first time in four years.) Have we seen the last of Mac and PC? We’ll see. For now, click on the thumbnails below, and enjoy the work from the past four years.

1) “Better”	20) “Sagotage”	36) “Referee”	53) “Biohazard Suit”
2) “iLife”	21) “Surgery”	37) “Time Machine”	54) “Legal Copy”
3) “Network”	22) “Tech Support”	38) “Breakthrough”	55) “Stacks”
4) “Restarting”	23) “Security”	39) “Office Stress”	56) “Time Traveler”
5) “Viruses”	24) “Computer Cart”	40) “Yoga”	57) “Customer Care”
6) “Wall Street Journal”	25) “Flashback”	41) “Group”	58) “Elimination”
7) “Out of the Box”	26) “Stuffed”	42) “Pep Rally”	59) “PC Choice Chat”
“Touché”	27) “Choose a Vista”	43a) “Sad Song” (Short)	60) “Surprise”
9) “Work vs. Home”	28) “Genius”	43b) “Sad Song” (Long)	61) “Top of the Line”
10) “Accident”	29) “Party Is Over”	44) “Calming Teas”	62) “Trainer”
11) “Angel/Devil”	30) “Boxer”	45) “Off the Air”	63) “PC Innovations Lab”
12) “Trust Mac”	31) “Podium”	46) “Pizza Box”	64) “Broken Promises”
13) “Better Results”	32) “PR Lady”	47) “Throne”	65) “PC News”
14) “Counselor”	33) “Misprint”	48) “Bake Sale”	66) “Teeter Tottering”
15) “Self-Pity”	34) “Now What?”	49) “Bean Counter”
16) “Gift Exchange”	35) “Santa Claus”	50) “V Word”
17) “Meant for Work”		51) “I Can Do Anything”
18) “Sales Pitch”		52) “Tree Trimming”
19) “Goodwill”

The FMCG giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities. While both companies will continue to create campaign sites for certain brands in the immediate future, they have said the long-term future lies with social media on platforms populated by their target consumers.

Coca-Cola will position its official Facebook and YouTube pages as the lead online channels for upcoming international activity for its Coke Zero and Fanta brands, new media age understands.

Prinz Pinakatt, the Coca-Cola Company’s interactive marketing manager for Europe, said, “In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site. In most cases these will still exist as it’s the most obvious destination for a consumer, but it might only be a page linking to YouTube encouraging people to join the community there.

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,” Pinakatt added.

The job of an industrial designer is to consider the end-user’s experience. Once upon a time that was as basic as making a chair supportive in the right places, making a handle chunky enough to grab or asking the graphics guys to make the numbers bigger for legibility. Nowadays it’s getting more complicated.

A modern product like an iPhone works (or doesn’t work–read: AT&T) not only because of its inherent industrial and interface design, but because of the ecosystem in which it “lives.” In the case of the iPhone that ecosystem has been carefully designed, in the form of the iTunes Music/App Store, (among other things); providing consumers with an easy way to buy and use music and apps increases the phone’s utility, improves the customer experience, and creates wealth for the record labels, musicians, and software companies.

In other words, as well-designed as the iPhone is as an individual object, it is the design of the services around it that makes it a game-changer.