I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.

The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.

In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (“How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”

“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:

While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”

“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”

Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.

“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:

I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.

Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”

A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”

Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?

Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”

In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)

As a teenager of the 90′s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90′s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”

As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.

And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)

“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?

Cuz here’s the thing: The majority of Americans do not believe in evolution!

(CRAP!)

In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)

Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.

Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?

The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.

In popular music, independent music, often abbreviated as indie, is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording and publishing.

Similarly then, indie brands are independent from major publicly-traded companies, and reflective of a do-it-yourself approach to lifestyle symbol creation. Both indie and major brands appeal to consumers for the same reasons–as expressions of identity, and community belonging–but the indie side functions very differently. Indie brands can often take risks that the major ones wouldn’t know how to were they even interested, they are able to maneuver more deftly in a rapidly changing consumer landscape, take advantage of new opportunities more swiftly, and now more than ever before, they are blazing the trails and creating the models that many major brands are starting to emulate.

As someone who’s been intimately involved in the development of several independent brands I thought I would share some suggestions both from my own experience, as well as from insights synthesized with various examples from Buying In, of what ad agencies (and major brands) can learn from the indies about staying competitive in contemporary culture.

1. INTEGRATE DEPARTMENTS
Agencies talk of integration like it’s the latest buzzword since “viral,” (which, incidentally, before it was a buzzword, was also first tested by independent brands) but most are still set up to approach marketing in a compartmentalized, paint-by-numbers way that doesn’t fit with how any of us in the digital era actually interact with media and messaging. In a time when we update our facebook status while watching TV online, and google something we’ve just seen on a billboard we drove past, all media overlaps. As natives of this environment, indie brand creators don’t think “Print” vs. “New Media” or “Creative” vs. “Media Buying.” Of course, a variety of skill sets is necessary, but when a “media channel” can now basically exist anywhere that people are playing attention, it’s counterproductive to continue enforcing separation between all the various departments of messaging development and dissemination. Without the imposition of this bureaucratically segregated setup, indie brands approach marketing as an inherently integrated process, dealing with the way the different channels at their disposal feed into one another as part of an interconnected system.

2. HIRE DIFFERENTLY
None of the indie brand creators I’ve ever worked with majored in marketing–and that goes for me, too. Marketing majors end up at ad agencies, indie brand creators, on the other hand, end up creating culture. Music, fashion, publications, events, blogs, graffiti, whatever. If it’s a genre of DIY expression, that’s where indie brand creators can be found, and it’s where strategies that take on new marketing options are going to be developed. I’ll admit, I did take one Marketing 101 class, though, and it’s probably because marketing is taught as a segregated process that its students are primed to continue thinking within the same kind of box once they graduate. Indie brand creators think outside the marketing box because 1. They were never taught there was a box to begin with, and 2. They couldn’t afford to try out the box anyway, so developing “alternatives” is their default. This is who you want to be hiring to help develop progressive marketing strategies.

3. INVEST IN CULTURE NOT MEDIA
In a consumer landscape niched up into various lifestyles, “mass marketing” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Indie brands have never had the luxury of a mass marketing budget, so they’ve instead focused on building and sustaining meaningful relationships with the communities that nurture them. In Buying In, Walker talks about Pabst Blue Ribbon’s strategy after discovering that their brand, whose history was essentially as a staid Midwestern working class beer, was experiencing an unexpected popularity surge among the pierced, tattooed, bike messenger alterna kids in Portland Oregon. Clearly this was not a demographic that PBR had sought deliberately (the brand just happened to become quite eagerly adopted by a young culture in need of a cheap beer), but once they noticed what was going on instead of buying up a ton of media targeting this demo, PBR began sponsoring community events such as “bike polo” matches. In fact, a particularly ardent PBR fan that Walker talks to specifically noted he appreciates that he’s never seen a PBR ad of any sort. It shows that “they’re not insulting you,” he says. If advertising AT a community can be perceived as an insult, supporting it can make a brand an integral part of the community’s culture.

4. A BLANK SLATE IS THE BIG IDEA
Ad folks think it’s their job to create advertising. Indie brand folks think it’s their job to make sure their product sells. The disconnect between these two perspectives is perhaps nowhere more blatant than in the ad agency reticence towards “user generated content.” This is not to say that ad agencies shouldn’t create branded content, by any means, but rather to point out, as Walker does, that some of the most potent brands are ones that have allowed people to project their own meanings onto them. His two biggest examples of this are Hello Kitty and the Live Strong bracelet. One benefited from an inscrutable expression, the other from a statement that allowed innumerable personal interpretations. Neither sought to define what specifically it was supposed to mean or stand for, and thereby each allowed people to cast their own relevance onto the brand. Unequivocally cementing a brand into a “big idea” couldn’t accommodate that. Creating a brand that functions as a “platform” for consumers to create their own meaning (whether it’s as literal as UGC or as ephemeral as a personal projection) is now just as crucial as messaging.

5. COMMUNITY FIRST, BRAND SECOND
It is tempting to think that a brand creates a community. In fact, many brands, realizing the power of community as a resource, strive to create their own, and brands such as Apple definitely have a cult-like following. But the reality is that brands do not create communities from scratch, they become symbols of communities. Brands can reflect a community’s values and lifestyle, but I don’t think it’s possible to brand a lifestyle before it actually already exists. Was Apple as hot before the rise of the creative class? (The trend itself, I mean, not just the book about it.) Of course, the Apple technology certainly helped facilitate the expansion of the creative class, but the bottom line is that the societal predisposition that can come to constitute a community has to be there, and a brand does not invent it, it reflects it. Indie brands are spawned out of the very communities that they represent, so it’s not like they need to conduct massive amounts of consumer insight research, and their understanding of this community first, brand second dynamic is deeply intimate. For many major brands, however, the focus shouldn’t be on fabricating their own “community” but on developing a more significant understanding of the needs of the communities that buy and endorse them. (Then, see #3).

6. THINK BEYOND THE QUARTER
The relationship between a culture and a brand, like any kind of relationship, takes time. That it can’t always be statistically documented after three months does not necessarily make the relationship unsuccessful. My favorite example of a brand thinking “beyond the quarter” is Scion integrating it’s cars into Whyville, an online community for tweens. Pretty much the coolest thing you can buy in Whyville is a Scion, and its added bonus is that then you can drive all your other friends around in it in the game. They start at 15,000 “clams” (Whyville dollars), but for 20,000 you can get it all customized. The most fascinating thing about this whole strategy, however, is that the Tween demographic is between 8-12 years old. It’s gonna be a while before they even have a driver’s license at all, let alone be in a position to be buying a car in the real world, but when they are, owning that virtual Scion will no doubt be an experience they draw on when making the purchase decision. This is thinking five, ten, fifteen years beyond the quarter, and it’s how indie brands think. Ok, maybe they don’t necessarily have the forethought to think that far ahead, but they do have the luxury to not have to think of success as based on proving something to shareholders every season. After all, just ask Starbucks about how rampant growth can even undermine success in the long-run.

The trend of more and more kinds of facilities cropping up to support DIY creative endeavors means that more and more kinds of indie brands are getting created. The evolution of marketing that doesn’t look anything like what it has before is only going to continue. Might as well take a cue or two from the side that’s plowing head-first into the changing the landscape.

“We read to know we are not alone.”
- C.S. Lewis

in retrospect, it’s not so surprising that while i was studying film in college i was also producing art and music events as an extra-curricular activity. i joke that producing a movie and producing an event are pretty much exactly the same process, except with events you only get one take. in both cases what you’re producing is a story and an experience, so the transition, post-college, from film to festivals was, in a sense, really just the transition between one medium of story/experience creation to another.

whether written, filmed, experiential, or any other kind, i think stories in general appeal to us for the same reasons, yet we experience and appreciate them in different ways depending on the medium. just because the book might have been better than the movie, doesn’t mean it would make a better movie to film the pages of the book, dig?

which is the kind of analogy i think about as i read the NYTimes’ recent bit on Quarterlife, “Can NBC Do for ‘Quarterlife’ What YouTube Could Not?”:

Scripts by Marshall Herskovitz, the Emmy award-winning writer and producer, have drawn millions of viewers to movie theaters and television sets over the past two decades.

But on the Internet, where his 36-part series “Quarterlife” is unfolding on social networking sites like MySpace, the audience metrics are starkly different.

Some episodes of “Quarterlife,” a drama about a group of good-looking people in their 20s, have yet to attract 100,000 video views, according to combined view counts from MySpace’s video site and YouTube.

The low traffic numbers are significant because the series has been touted as the first television-quality production for the Web, as well as the first to be introduced online as a warm-up for its network debut. NBC will broadcast “Quarterlife” in one-hour increments beginning in February, and the Web-to-broadcast process is being closely watched as a potential business model for television on the Internet.

i wrote about quarterlife a few months back, before any of the episodes had come out. the prospect of what an “online series” could mean in terms of a new format for creating stories was really exciting to me. i even thought it was pretty neat that the show came with an accompanying online social network app aimed at being a resource for those going through their quarterlife crisis. (at least in theory. i’m not a member on quarterlife.com so i don’t really know for sure, but the impression i got is that the site seeks to facilitate collaborations among the nascent members of the creative class, and if that goal is actually being fulfilled then i sincerely applaud the effort.) that there was no indication at the time about the online series simply being a “warm-up” to a network debut is an interesting aspect unto itself, but there are more interesting things i’d like to talk about, in particular:

The Folly of a “Web-To-Broadcast” Model,
and the Tragically Misguided Concept of “Television on the Internet”

according to the NYTimes article, quarterlife’s sponsors, which include toyota, paid well above standard rates to appear with the series on the web. and perhaps the folks involved with quarterlife may want to consider why it is that they might have been willing to do that.

the same day as the NYTimes asked, “Can Web ventures like “Quarterlife” turn a profit? The answer is unclear,” online media daily reported:

CONSUMERS ARE 47% MORE ENGAGED in ads that run with television programs that they view online than those watched on a TV set, according to new research findings. A cross-media study by Simmons, a unit of Experian Research Services, also found that viewers are 25% more engaged in the content of TV shows that they watch online than on a TV.

what are the chances that toyota, what with their experience with integrating the scion brand into whyville’s online tween world, would have some understanding of the benefits of being on a medium with a much more elevated engagement rate?

as a marketer, one of my favorite things about quarterlife is that the brand integration is so seamless it makes the traditional concept of “product placement” look like cave drawings in comparison. two of the characters on quarterlife, aspiring filmmakers–the pragmatic producer and the visionary director, of course–pitch a local toyota dealership to shoot a commercial for the business. of course when they deliver the ad to the client, the owner of the dealership, says he can’t see his cars enough in the ad. how are people supposed to buy his cars if they can’t see them? so the duo then has to recut the ad to make it less high concept and more car-y, they screen the revised version for their friends, after which one of the other characters–the typically self-righteous activist stereotype who’s being positioned to become the lead character’s love interest–gives them shit for selling out and making a commercial in the first place, and bashes the “corporate hegemony” in the second. after which they deliver the revised ad only to be told it’s STILL not car-y enough, and then get scolded by the dealership owner for not being serious about their business–which is supposed to be helping HIS business sell cars. oh he also tells them that they don’t know what they’re talking about when they insist that the ad is supposed to be selling “the experience” of the car, which i thought was a particularly interesting touch. then after that other things happen, but my point is that this whole time that you’re watching several key plot points and delving into various bits of character and theme development–and this stretches out over several episodes–you’re watching toyota in the show.

it may not be subtle, but then neither was carrie bradshaw’s love for manolo blahniks. that’s the thing about authentic character development now, you and i express ourselves through the brands we buy, so why should it be different for the characters on our favorite shows? in fact, can we even identify with a completely brandless persona in a character-driven series enough to keep watching week after week?

well, to be honest, i don’t know. i haven’t really watched TV since i started college, (except for netflixing the whole run of sex and the city, and going on a 24 bender last year, and 2005 when i lived with some roommates who had a TV set, and i got all into the sopranos) but, i HAVE watched all 14 episodes of quarterlife out as of now. and if i was watching this on TV (well, if i owned a TV and was watching this on it) i think i would love it. i’d be telling my friends to watch it too, it would be significant that a television network had had the vision (or nerve) to create a show about our generation–a generation which is watching less and less TV though, and hence less and less incentive to make content for it, but regardless–if this was on TV, it’d be great!

except it’s not on TV, is it? while we allow a certain suspension of disbelief for the contrived nature of scripted programming on TV we have a dramatically different relationship with online content. we may not expect it to be TRUE, but we don’t expect it to feel artificial either. here TV’s forced quality feels almost…invasive, like getting a friend request from your mom or dad on facebook (or if you prefer: walking into your room to discover your mom or dad already in it). like, TV! what are you DOING in here?

the whole time i was watching those 14 episodes i felt like i was waiting for something to happen. some subtle yet hugely important aspect in the very nature of the show to change. i mean, great, it’s “television-quality” production for the web, but who exactly was lamenting its lack here in the first place? i’ve seen ipod billboards that felt more real and compelling than quarterlife. (and that’s coming from someone who really wanted to like the show!)

to be fair, i think the internet community too is just barely scratching the surface of the possibilities for online video content, but writing a TV script for the web is about as powerful a use of these possibilities as writing a TV script for a feature film, and given the results of that Simmons report, a “web-to-broadcast” strategy seems rather pointless considering that consumers are practically 50% more engaged with content the medium you’re starting out on. we’re by no means all looking for the same kind of content on the web, but we are not looking for the same old same old, either. i can’t wait for something to really take advantage of all the medium’s potential and uncover whole new ways of creating stories.

what do i think looks like it could be one such possibility?

working with so many music festivals i’ve come to see the pattern in their ticket sales to be a kind of concentrated tour through all the major factors involved in driving adoption.

like the type of excursion that shuttles travellers to all the major european cities in the course of 6 days, from the moment a pre-sale begins till the gates close a music festival’s on-sale period exposes a landscape of distinct adopter personas within the kind of condensed time-frame that could double for an academic experiment on diffusion dynamics. while the details vary from one type of music event to another, in general certain things hold true. a huge amount of tickets–often-times the vast majority–are sold late. yet most people attending a major music festival have known about it, and have actually been considering going for some time before finally making their decision. this despite the fact that a ticket at the end of the on-sale period is considerably more expensive than it is at the beginning, since tickets scale in price as lower-priced tiers sell out.

inevitably this raises the question: WHY are the vast majority of folks waiting till the ticket is at its most expensive to commit to making a purchase?

the answer to this is not only about the dynamics of adoption for music festivals, but sheds light on the factors that drive adoption in a much broader sense. a couple of months ago i wrote a post comparing various music festival websites and mentioned that:

essentially there are three things that a festival is selling:

1. the event lineup
2. the event brand
3. the event community

like toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels, they’re all made up of the same stuff, and to a certain degree serve an interchangeable function, but at the end of the day, you do buy each for different reasons.

to broaden the application of what i’m talking about, lets consider that every time i mention “the lineup” what i am essentially referring to is the “product.” features, design elements, utility, whatever. think of “the lineup” as the thing with the actual bar-code on it–unless you too happen to be in the business of selling tickets.

what that ticket is actually SELLING–the cumulative representation of lineup, brand, and community–is different at different stages throughout the course of an event’s on-sale period. the point at which someone buys a ticket (aka where on the adoption chart they fit in) tends to be a result of the relevance that that particular combination of lineup, brand, and community has for them. these three elements are distinct adoption-drivers whose impact and interplay it is essential to understand in order to develop an effective marketing strategy–whether for a music festival or anything else really.

1. EARLY ADOPTERS BUY ON BRAND

unlike selling tangible goods, where the product and brand are generally simultaneous and thus difficult to separate and examine independently, selling an “experience” makes it much easier. when we initially launched the pre-sale for the Do LaB’s Lightning in a Bottle music festival we did not announce a lineup.

with the “product” an unknown, and the community still solely theoretical (sure, you may know who’s LIKELY to go, but the first week of a pre-sale you’re not likely to know too many people that actually ARE going) the most overt selling point was inevitably the brand.

the do lab had been creating events for seven years at that point, establishing a reputation for consistently spectacular, jaw-dropping creations, and the people who bought tickets that first week before either the lineup or community of LIB was a viable element, bought on the basis of the identification they had with the brand.

that bold stuff is the common denominator that i believe drives early adopters in general. whether you’re nike coming out with a new type of shoe, or lexus with a new model of car, or mac with a new sort of i-something, the people at the very front of the line buy on the basis of the identification they feel with the brand.

the first tier of lowest-priced tickets was sold out before we announced the lineup, having gone to the do’s most ardent early supporters. i imagine to a lot of people reading this (due to the nature of this medium’s demo) the logic in that kind of arrangement is self-evident, however, because i have seen this group be treated with the most extreme disregard, i’m going to go off on a little tangent here.

the folks who would buy a ticket without even knowing who’s playing, in a more traditional marketing model have generally been regarded as the most easily conned. the cheapest date who evidently requires the least amount of wooing. in the do lab world however, and in a world of brands that actually care about their consumers, a world that is being more and more empowered by social media, that kind of take-the-money-and-run mentality is going to fly less and less.

early adopters buy on brand, and yours better be the kind of brand that understands the necessity of rewarding them for this devotion as opposed to taking advantage of them for it, otherwise you’re going to LOSE them.

2. EARLY MAJORITY BUYS ON BRAND + PRODUCT & DRIVES COMMUNITY

the conventional assumption has been that it is the early adopters who steer a product to eventual popularity, but as the prior article on late adopter strategy pointed out, that is not necessarily the case. i’m of the opinion that it is actually the early majority that is responsible for pushing adoption against gravity, up the slope of the s-curve. in the case of LIB, an easy way to define the early majority is everyone who bought a ticket from the point when the lineup was announced, up until two and a half months later when the online sales officially ended the night before doors opened.

in the marketing bible malcolm gladwell splits the burden of causing cultural epidemics to “tip” between three types of culprits: connectors, mavens, and salesmen. gladwell gives an example of one such a maven: a man who after getting taken to a new japanese restaurant by his daughter and liking the food, comes home and sends an email to all his acquaintances who live near the restaurant recommending that they check it out. mavens, i would say, are the folks that comprise the early majority in general, and they make or break “critical mass” for adoption by generating what is technically referred to as, uh…. buzz. if you understand the impact of this, you’ll do everything you can to give them the tools and the content they’re looking for to help them do just that.

3. LATE MAJORITY – BUYS ON COMMUNITY

the late majority of a music festival is likewise easy to identify: it’s all the people who bought tickets at the door. in the case of LIB07 this turned out to be approximately 2/3 of the total purchasers. since this was a weekend-long camping event, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that had a spur-of-the-moment appeal. pretty much all of the late majority had known about this festival for a while. they knew the lineup, they knew the brand, but did not make their purchase until the last minute. why?

they were waiting on the community aspect to build. for the late majority, it is the community–a factor that is nonexistent when the tickets are inexpensive–that makes the higher price of the ticket worth it. when the buzz gets loud enough is when the late majority starts to realize that they don’t want to miss out on getting to share an experience with all their friends. in the same way that brand functions as the major motivator for the early adopters, community fills that role for the late majority.

in the conversation that is going on right now about how to measure the success of social engagement, an interesting factor to throw into the equation is that the “late majority” gets the thing once all their friends have it and won’t shut up about it–and this applies to whether we’re talking about a ticket to a festival, a pair of sneakers, an mp3-player, whatever. the better a brand’s social engagement strategy (and this transcends simply online social engagement, by the way), the easier it is for the early majority to build that buzz. the “effectiveness” of social engagement can thus be seen as directly correlated to the size of a product’s “late majority” purchasers. (tho it sure don’t hurt the other categories none either).

in the end, it comes down to developing a strategy that addresses what is relevant to the different personas on the adoption curve (in the broadest sense: brand, product, and community), and likewise is then able to proactively anticipate and deliver on these elements in ways which will help expand the adoption to the next phase.

“Expanding Brands into Experience Platforms”

ended up featuring this image from lucent l’amour 2006 :

photo by: mickipedia

i figure, depending on how well the presentation has been going in the preceding 16 slides, i might point out that this particular moment was going on in a confession booth:

photo by: mulling it over

since the event itself was actually taking place inside a cathedral:

photo by: siouxzen

“expanding brands into experience platforms”…. you know?

the church obviously got the memo about that one. they’ve been using that tactic in their “engagement strategy” and it seems to be working out pretty well for them. (ok, well, maybe not that EXACT tactic–kissing in the confessional at st. vibiana’s cathedral was only made possible by the pope first signing a note establishing that “God has left this building.”–not kidding–but you get what i’m sayin.)

anyway, 2000 years of catholic church case study aside, modern day ad agencies want to know how to measure the success of such a strategy. which got me thinking, well, how does scion measure the success of throwing a party at alcatraz? or how does red bull measure the success of their underground ascension extravaganzas? and furthermore, how do we? at the do lab, how do we evaluate the success of an event?

well….

did you have fun?
did you meet new friends?
did you hook up with someone?
did you get your mind blown away?

…experience itself has the capacity to be a broadcast channel. a much more powerful, much more visceral, much more immersive channel than any without the prospect of making out–or, i mean, just connecting to other human beings (and sometimes god) in exciting ways in general, really. if you had the time of your life with us (tho we have yet to implement any real exit polls….if you were there, you did. believe me) then this experience is now part of who you are. and since people buy the brands that represent their identity, this whole brand-experience approach is like getting a brand in on the consumer psyche VIP-list, while all the other brands are standing in line waiting to get in the club.

oh my god, all my analogies are even party related.

in other news, here’s richard branson chillin in our little experience platform on HIS really big experience platform this weekend:

ps. bonus points to anyone who recognized that branson’s whole branded empire is built on an iconic religious concept.

if it’s a matter of getting them to drink diet pepsi vs. diet coke, or getting them to shop at target vs. walmart… no one’s gonna die.

it’s not really a matter of life or death.

however, when the ad is for an hiv-awareness campaign…. it actually IS.

i have no idea if this was just a spec or if the spot actually ran, but if it did, i think it’s pretty fucking tragic:

“you have no idea what a difference that makes” …. they may as well have added “and hey, ignorance is bliss, right?” at the end, cuz it’s not like that ad conveys ANYTHING about the difference that DOES make.

so…. just keep having no idea.

don’t get me wrong, it’s hot, and you want to watch it…but is it really something that’s going to change people’s behavior?

since i’m not actually the target audience for this, a couple of gay friends later the consensus to that question is:

“not so sure.”

exactly what good does a sensational and even popular ad do, if the message isn’t effective? priority #1 should be to make an message that works, not a video that gets passed around.

the idea that some ad agency is actually thinking that it’s more important that a lot of people see their ad than that anyone is actually motivated to use a condom…. is kind of sick.

the point isn’t about making an ad viral… it’s about making a message that might actually help STOP the virus.

i’ve been tinkering with this draft for a while now, about what i’ve got to say on the way i see the value of social engagement marketing being discussed, which is, like, oh man, just a big monster of a topic that only seems to make the post more and more unwieldy the further i delve into it.

so, i think, rather than waiting until i’ve got the whole thing complete enough to just barrel at a 90-degree angle against oncoming traffic, i’m going to tackle a bit of the onramp–as i see it–at a time.

** curves ahead: **

please be forewarned — i am NOT an online media expert. i do NOT have any kind of technology background, and quite honestly i couldn’t do math to save my life. my perspective comes from almost a decade of producing events and experiences that bring hundreds and now thousdands of people together, and create a platform for interaction on some incredibly visceral levels. large-scale live event creation is sort of like a “control” running parallel to the online experience creation experiment, and there are a myriad ways in which each informs the other.

my perspective also comes from studying PEOPLE and SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, (there’s a reason this blog is called “social creature,” after all). if i was doing what i do in a rural village in africa, it would be called anthropology. in l.a., however, we call it marketing.

so…. with an understanding of THAT basic caveat in mind, here’s an initial attempt at getting on that bull that’s the discussion about “the value of social engagement marketing,” and seeing how long i can stay on and ride it.

myth #1:
THE INTERNET INVENTED SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT MARKETING

nope.

guess again.

before it was about pressing Enter, it was about pressing the flesh. before web 2.0 there were tupperware parties, door to door salesmen, and patent medicine shows. all of these involved the same exact elements as what’s currently referred to in such clinical terms as “social engagement marketing,” and its potency as a selling method was never in question. before advertising, in fact, this was the only method there WAS.

but though the internet didn’t invent it, it DID upgrade it. as the tools for generating and enhancing social interaction got way fancier (and also more removed from immediately physical interaction) they seem to have also made us confused. we now look at this whole process as if it’s some alien anomaly we’ve never encountered before, when the truth is that this process has been in existence for AGES. for, in fact, as long as human beings have known how to communicate.

Strong, E.K. (1925). “Theories of Selling”. Journal of Applied Psychology 9: 75-86.

A lot of models are known in order to sell, e.g. the BOSCH-Formula, developed by Peter Hubert for the international sales training for consumer goods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA

• Be inquisitive – ask open questions
• Offer solutions – talk about the endresult benefits for the customer
• Stimulate the senses – let the customer test your product
• Cross your sales – think of all the necessary accessories
• Hit the closing point – sell when the customer is ready to buy

….ask open questions and offer solutions, stimulate the senses and think of all the necessary accessories. sounds a lot like “social engagement,” wouldn’t you say?

and all of this happening before the invention of media as we know it, let alone the application of social media.

before we go any further in this conversation (and i do hope to make this a conversation) about evaluating the “ROI of social engagement,” we must first take the follwing into account:

1. the internet does not exist in an easy vaccum.
2. the online measurement of the effectiveness of social engagement marketing is a PARTIAL measurement of the full social picture.
3. to measure the remainder of the social picture you will need a shitload of radio transmitters and a good number of soviet psychics. don’t worry, they’re on order, and will probably be a service package offered soon by these guys : http://www.mworks-inc.com/about.html

i believe that because the internet did not spawn either the concept or the application of “social engagement marketing” (only the terminology), nor did it eliminate all its prior forms, but rather ENHANCED them, it’s vital to recognize that any measurement of online social engagement will NOT be a measurement of its TOTAL effectiveness.

- – -

thanks to the following folks for their insight, info, and sounding boards for this in one fashion or another:

micki krimmel | jeremiah owyang | jesse shannon | thomas dillmann | sarah kalbeitzer

there’s more to come on this, for sure, but if you’ve got any thoughts on this particular part of the onramp, feel free to use your turn signal in the comments.