Brand Building in a Post Advertising World.

There will always be this thing we call advertising in some form or another.

Sometimes it is just the best way to persuade someone to buy a product or sign up for a service you are trying to sell them. It is honest in its straightforwardness; simplistic and, perhaps, even wholesome in a way.

Then there comes Marketing’s addiction to making ads and a kind of laziness around just going for the sale. It seems so much easier than crafting some artful narrative and ethos around what you are trying to get someone to buy.

So it is unlikely that there will ever be an end to ADVERTISING.

Think right now about a person under the age of 35. Their TV has no ads. Their music: No ads. All that YouTube they are watching might have loads of ads but they can and do skip most of them. Even cookies are going bye-bye.

But in another way, there is so much of the classic advertising world that is diminishing that it is not too hard to build a case for THE END OF ADVERTISING AS WE KNOW IT.

So in that way and for the purposes of this article, let’s pretend that ADVERTISING IS OVER! Dying. Death rattle. Last gasp. Gone.

This isn’t a media habits report and yes the common person in life is going to be exposed to thousands of ad messages each day. But contrast this back to generations growing up at the turn of the millennia. Did you know that, in the 90's, Young & The Restless delivered a 14 rating against a prime shopping demographic? It aired at 4:30 in the afternoon. And prime runs of shows like Seinfeld, Frasier and a handful of others were pulling numbers in the 30’s on a regular basis. Without getting into the media math – TV had the power of reaching up to 90% of any demographic you would want to go after. I can guarantee it would be almost impossible, take much longer and cost way more to try and do that now.

But I digress. Boy did I. You don’t even need to go down the rabbit hole to at least pretend that, one day, ADVERTISING WILL END. At least for the purposes of argument.

So what if? Let’s pretend advertising is over.

How do we build a brand now?

One of the exercises I’ve often done in my Planning Workshops is to challenge participants to build a successful communication plan with NO ADS. I will say 'what if we could not create any classic Ads but still needed to build our brand, generate desire and interest and ultimately make sales?'

BEHAVIOURS & ACTIONS

In a world with less ‘talk’ (Ads), a brand would need to embody more ACTION. Think about the way we get to know a person. Yes, it will be things they say and how they talk about themselves and others, but a very large part of our getting to know them will be based on WHAT THEY DO. How they show up. Posture. Little behaviours. Big behaviours. How they conduct themselves. Think about how this gets translated into marketing and brand building.

What kinds of things do they do out there in the world? A cause. A purpose. A mission.

Helping? Making, contributing? What do they do to create fun? Interact with consumers? Create some mischief. Become famous.

What events would you find them at? To see and be seen.

I am being purposely non-prescriptive because our minds can start to fill in the blanks of what this means in terms of disciplines and channels – everything from Sponsorship & XM to PR & Publicity. Partnerships, stunts and surprise & delights. It should be different depending on what brand we are looking at.

At its core and what drives it, should be the subjects and output of pure Brand Positioning & Strategy so you can see why this work becomes more important than ever. My horn. Tooted.

CULTURE - BORROW, STEAL, PARTICIPATE or CREATE.

Based on the brand’s beliefs and core personality as well as what resonates with its most important customers – we can start to poke around at CULTURE. You know all those things they say about culture and who eats what for breakfast (Strategy) – which has nothing to do with what I am saying but I got distracted.

What are the natural places where the brand wants to enter into Culture? Where can it intersect? The most powerful is when it creates a new fold of culture but of course not every brand has the resources or even a compelling enough personality to do that (although that could be set as Job 1 – finding a core and inner fire for the brand where it develops the chutzpah to play a more solid culture game.)

This is radical and important. It would flavour everything that comes before and after in how we market the brand. It writes its own plan and where we go from there.

CONTEXT

In the old days remember when someone at the boardroom table would say ‘We want to own…dot dot dot’. Usually, it was meant that the brand wanted to dominate something by trying to surround it with ads or brand mentions. Sometimes it would be to ‘own an idea’ or to have the brand become synonymous with a certain area of thought or interest. 'Our brand will OWN Music (good luck with that)'. The way it was expressed back then was nearly always impossible to achieve because no brand could OWN anything in an outright way. Even those brands with the finances to scorch the earth would still run into difficulty penetrating the minds of their customers and completely owning a thought or association in their minds.

But there is a way to enter into a CONTEXTUAL relationship with consumers.

And this would be an important choice to make in the long-term planning for the brand.

What is the headspace? What is the place in time, meaning or occasion the brand should spend most of its time trying to develop? It will be different for every product or service you are trying to promote. There will be often more than one. Perhaps there are several.

To be less cryptic, think about anything and its potential context can start to be developed.

Take a Beef Jerky brand. There is a temporal and spatial context like road trips, filling up at the gas station – missed lunch or that 3 pm snack time. There might be a strong association with Sports – watching it with thier friends. Maybe even a certain sports celebrity who has missing teeth and it looks funny the way the meat-stick fits in there…Ya context can start to create texture, nuance, fun and involvement for the brand. AND. It is different for every category but more importantly for every product. There becomes that ‘ownable’ association that starts to present itself as perfectly right for each brand.

BRAND AS STUDIO

It is apparent that all of these thoughts overlap and propel each other. They are interrelated and fold back on themselves. As it should be.

A core idea for how a brand obviously builds itself in an age of no ads is to act as its own broadcaster, publisher, communicator and content engine.

Content is, for sure, still king even if that expression meant something else when Bill Gates first said it.

In the world of branding against a backdrop of the death of advertising, it purely means content that PEOPLE WANT – that serves some kind of purpose and creates value – that this will be the ONLY way for a brand to interact and communicate with the people it wants to have as customers.

And you can see how the aforementioned CULTURE & CONTEXT will drive precisely what shape this content takes.

The brand literally becomes a studio that fires up a smart and well-conceived content ENGINE.

It might seem that the brand is just spitting out endless reams of different kinds of stuff but that should only be true in that it finds what works and what doesn’t. The real truth here is that we are not shotgunning a bunch of material waiting to see what sticks – rather it should all be carefully and STRATEGICALLY designed in advance – in the capable hands of those who know how to do this. Your trusted agency co-conspirators become your best allies in this new world - at least the ones that have evolved past campaign-thinking, and :30 ads.

Strategy. Creative. Channels. Producers. Creators. Project Management. These are the SHOWRUNNERS of your new brand-as-studio concept.

And to remember – you are not spending money on Ads anymore so spend at least as much on this new activity as you used to on that old ‘working dollars’ mentality…and you will be moving in the right direction. Building a brand in the age of No Advertising.

Yes, I know. There are always going to be some ads. But when you look at it this way, you can start to see just where, how and what role those should and could take. It provides a fresher and more optimistic perspective that the end of the old ways can mean so much more – we can finally do what we originally set out to do.