Age of Social Media, Branding & Crowd-Culture

S ince the era of Facebook & YouTube, building brand has become quite vexing. Was this the way it was supposed to be? Not even a decade ago many companies were claiming this was begining of a new golden age of branding, hiring creative agencies & armies of technologists to take advantage of this new digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But what has been the return of this social media circus?

Branded Content?

Central to the digital strategy of many companies has been to bet on the use of branded content. The intention being: Social Media would enable companies to surpass traditional media, forging a more direct relationship with users & customers. Through creating great stories and connecting with people directly, brands hoped to become a hub for a community of consumers. Companies have invested billions to try and realize this vision, but few brands have generated meaningful consumer engagement. In reality, social media seems to have made brands less significant. So what has gone wrong?

To answer that question, we need to realize that brands succeed when they break through culturally & branding is a set of techniques architected to generate cultural relevance. The digital revolution has not only given rise to potent new social networks but has also altered how culture works dramatically. Digital crowds act as very effective / prolific innovators of the crowd-culture phenomenon. Crowd-culture alters the rules of branding techniques, by understanding crowd-culture, we can discover why branded-content strategies have fallen flat & the alternative branding methods empowered by social media.

Why Branded Content & Sponsorships Work in the past

 

While branded content advocates insist its innovative, it is in fact a relic of the mass media age, re-packaged as a digital concept. In the early days, companies leveraged approaches from pop culture to make their brands famous, with short-form storytelling, cinematic tricks, songs & empathetic characters to win over audiences. Classic ads like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike all snuck into popular culture by creative products placement.

These early days of branded content worked well because the media were oligopolies & cultural competition was limited. Limtied number for TV networks & programming, films were distributed only through local cinemas & magazine competition was limited. Marketing companies could buy their brands to fame by paying for it in a tightly controlled cultural arena.

 

 

Brands also entered culture by sponsoring TV shows & events, affiliating themselves to successful media. As fans had limited access to their favorite celebrity culture, brands could act as mediators. For decades, we were familiar with fast food chains’ sponsoring new movies, luxury cars & sporting events and youth brands supporting bands & festivals.

The rise of new tech enables audiences to opt out of ads making it much harder for brands to buy fame. So brands needed to the ante, for example BMW pioneered the practice of creating short films for the internet. Soon corporations began hiring top movie directors (Michael Bay, Wes Anderson, David Lynch), pushing for ever-more-spectacular special effects & production.

Early (pre-social-media) digital efforts led brands to convince themselves, that if they deliver Hollywood-level creativity at internet speed, they could amass huge engaged audiences around their brands. So was born the great flood toward branded content, but its advocates weren’t counting on new competition & this time it didn’t come from big media companies but the crowd!