Brands must offer more than a message in their marketing

19 July 2007 | By Michael Nutley

In the past few weeks Nike+ has won a Cyber Lion Grand Prix at the Cannes Advertising Festival and picked up the Special Award for Innovation at the NMA Effectiveness Awards 2007.

For £20, Nike+ wirelessly links a pedometer in your running shoes to your iPod Nano, which then uploads the data from your run to the Nike site when you sync it with your computer. This allows you to record your run, see how your performance has improved and so on. The NMA Awards judges described it as "taking the gym onto the street" and "taking fitness to the next level". So why did it win an advertising award?

The idea of advertising as service has been floating around for some years now. I first heard about it in a speech given by GM O'Connell, founder of US digital agency Modem Media, at Ad:tech in New York back in 2003. The rationale goes like this: people are barraged by marketing messages, most of which they don't want and which distract or interrupt them. At the same time, interactive media give people more control over their media consumption than ever before. So in order to persuade people to accept their marketing messages, brands will have to offer something of value in return.

In truth, this isn't such a new idea. It's been understood in TV advertising for years, where what was on offer was a piece of entertainment in return for viewer attention to the brand providing it. The problem there, as any Leonard Rossiter aficionado knows, is that the better the entertainment, the more likely it is to overshadow the product being advertised.

But the idea of digital applications as marketing is gaining ground. People talk about Sky+, and particularly the ability to programme it via your mobile, in the same breath as Nike+. And at the OnlineMarketing07 event late last month, writer and blogger Russell Davis surprised everyone in one of the panel sessions by saying that he thought the people who would lead the marketing conversations in the future wouldn't be digital agencies but user-interaction designers, "people who design stuff that's actually useful".

Early manifestations of the advertising as service idea include the work Modem did for Kraft Foods in the US, which involved a site providing recipe ideas for stressed mothers, or the baby development emails that have become a feature of all nappy brands' web offerings.

But applications like Nike+ and Sky+ seem to me to go a significant step further. They're not services provided by the brand, they're additional functionality for the product.

This ties in with another ongoing debate. There's an argument that brands are losing their lustre, that they were valuable in an age when product information was scarce but that now it's the quality of the product itself that really matters. Research by BT last year backed this up (NMA 02.03.06). It found that traditional brand loyalty had all but disappeared among young people, to be replaced by a kind of 'episodic loyalty' that saw them switch brands to benefit from special offers and promotions, or because rival products had brought something new to the market. What's more, product innovation as advertising fits perfectly into a world of social media and brand evangelists.

Product innovation isn't a traditional role for ad agencies, although it's not unknown. There's an ad industry legend that JWT invented the cheeseburger back in the 1930s on behalf of Kraft, which wanted to sell more processed cheese. And it makes current US hotshop Crispin Porter + Bogusky's definition of advertising as "anything that makes our clients famous" look particularly prescient.



Michael Nutley is editor-in-chief of NMA