Feature: Digital marketing: Generation Game

Traditionally, marketers have avoided requiring consumers to interact too much with a promotion out of fear it would cut participation levels. Mailing off a proof of purchase or sending a text can all act as a barrier. However, as David Atkinson, managing partner at Space, this has all changed with brands encouraging their customers to generate content themselves as part of web-based promotions. “The very idea has been flipped on its head,” he says. “It’s no longer a numbers game, it’s the quality-of-engagement game – ie how many people uploaded their content and genuinely engaged wholeheartedly with the brand.”

The growth of blogging and social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo has acclimatised consumers, particularly younger ones, to submitting their own content to appear on brands’ websites as part of promotional campaigns. O2 and the Ministry of Sound were among the first to grasp the opportunity of MMS to post camera phone pictures online, offering prizes for the best submissions. The latest example of this was Absolut’s online disco competition, featuring video phone clips of people “dancing like no-one’s watching”.

Current trends include microsites where you can create your own digital character, such as Sony Ericsson’s Music Monsters, created by Iris [pictured], and Cadbury’s Wispa Warp 80s throwback.

“Sales promotions have taken on an altogether more strategic role in building a brand, by aiming to create that longer-term brand love, and the ultimate way of doing it is by getting consumers to produce their own content relating to that brand,” says Atkinson. He explains that this is one way of guaranteeing that consumers understand the personality of the brand and presumably buy and consume it.

Tesco is seeking to individualise its interaction with customers through a new online offer, Fashionfile, developed in partnership with integrated agency WARL. People create a personalised space on the website reflecting their own fashion interests, linked to an opt-in for email newsletters. “People don’t appreciate the depth and breadth of offer in Tesco’s women’s, men’s and kids’ clothing,” explains WARL managing director Chris Ambler. “People can use and browse Fashionfile in the same way as a magazine and over time it will change the perception of Tesco clothing.”

It offers opportunities for promotional messages, including competitions to win prizes such as health and beauty products or a theatre break, but Ambler says there has to be a balance or customers will stop wanting to interact and respond to emails. “This is an important thing for brands to embrace. If it became just a promotional channel, open rates would plunge and the whole enterprise would be in jeopardy.”

This is the fine line that promoters must tread when interacting with consumers through digital media. A number of brands now have a presence on Facebook, ranging from Coca-Cola and Pepsi to Reebok and Nike. However, Ambler warns: “You have to enter that social networking space with care. Pushing advertising messages won’t work in that space, but if you enter in the spirit of social networking and add something, you get treated with a degree of affection and get visited.”

Atkinson at Space adds that user-generated content has become a “holy grail” that is becoming a common response from agency creatives. “It’s also become the naff, unsophisticated kneejerk quest of marketers who know little about digital marketing, who believe that doing something ‘new and dynamic’ will create a ‘step-change’ and engagement with their brand,” he says. “Very few campaigns with user-generated content as a significant element actually cut through and create significant or widespread involvement.”

He says part of the problem is that some marketers overestimate the interest that consumers have in their brand. “Are we really going to get 40-year-old mothers-of-two to post in videos of themselves cooking with a certain cooking sauce? Unlikely.”

Relinquishing control of what appears online is also a brave step that might not be right for all brands, says Ambler at WARL. “It does require brands to be courageous – users won’t generate the content that you want them to generate. If you want complete control of the messages that are to do with your brand, it’s not for you. But if you are not embarrassed or defensive about it and show you are happy to be judged, it positions the brand as a brand of integrity.”

CASE STUDY: Sony Ericcson Music Monsters

As part of an integrated campaign to promote its Walkman phone, Sony Ericsson has created Music Monsters in partnership with Emap’s digital TV channels.

Viewers are driven to a website where they can choose cartoon monster manifestations of their musical tastes, selecting hair, features and outfits. The monsters can then be downloaded to mobiles and PCs and entered in an ongoing TV competition. Each month, the best three designs are chosen and developed into fully animated dancing three-dimensional characters.

The project has been devised by Iris.