The new rules
I’ve been working my way through Joseph Jaffe’s Life After the 30-Second Spot (not because it’s a tough go but because at any given time I’m reading five different books).
Having no background in advertising, I’m finding it surprisingly relevant to a lot of what’s going on in the public relations world - agencies grasping onto what used to work, unhappy clients, ineffective and poorly thought out campaigns.
You know, all the fun of working at a PR agency at the dawn of the 21st Century.
At the end of Chapter 9, Jaffe introduces what he calls three new roles for advertising. They are:
- To empower
- To demonstrate
- To involve
How simple! How direct! How true!
Especially the last one - to involve. People love a sense of involvement, like helping to spread the Stormhoek meme. The most powerful evidence that it works.. is it that it’s working.
But how often do we really think to involve the customers except as passive recipients of our ‘message’ i.e., consumers? A couple of years ago I had a client who was actually afraid of talking to their customers for fear of what they would hear from them. We (the agency) were told never to pitch a customer success story because they couldn’t control what the customer might say to a reporter.
You know where that client is now?
Gone. Swallowed up by a larger company and spat out like yesterday’s lunch.
I’ll talk more about the other two when I get around to a complete review. Until then, thanks Joe for putting this meme in my head.
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Involvement has definitely been working well for me… after spending a couple of days trying to find an image to work from for a mosaic I need to start this week, I described the pose on my blog and put out a call. And voila! I now have exactly the pose I needed thanks to one of my readers! One, of many examples, really, but I think that when readers are willing to pose nude for an artist they’ve never met (moreover, to extremely specific instructions) well, there you go.
In many less extreme ways, though, I’ve found that the more opportunity I give readers to participate, the more excited they get by both the blog and the product. When I was nominated for a contest at Treehugger last month, people not only mounted a huge campaign to help me win but most of them did so unasked. It was pretty cool.