Search = engagement marketing

January 12, 2006
by Latitude

In the new issue of New Media Age, Michael Bayler predicts this for the future:

Advertising [will move] from the current model of ‘interruption of experience’ towards ‘enhancement of experience’: an almost unimaginable shift for big media and big marketing.

Forgive a bit of jamminess as I say that, while it may at this point be almost unimaginable for the vast majority of big media and big marketing, this fact is one that Latitude has been sharing with our clients and the public for a while now.

From the pitch for the Online Marketing at the Crossroads event which we held last year:

The claim that the “customer is king” may have rung hollow in the past, but in the new always-on internet world, it’s taken on a more literal meaning. Are you ready?

The ability of consumers to get information about anything they want, whenever they want, and freely exchange views publicly online, has serious implications for online marketing…

As the ownership of brands changes hands from marketing departments to consumers, find out how you can take the right turn at the crossroads and make the empowered consumer your most valuable brand evangelist.

That event featured visionaries who have also been telling business for a long time that interruption is going the way of the T Rex: Alan Moore (co-founder, with old school ad guru Axel Chaldecott, of engagement marketing firm SMLXL), Alex Bellinger (founder of the world’s first podcasting consultancy, Audacious), and Adriana Cronin-Lukas, founder of the Big Blog Company, the world’s first blogging consultancy.

Adriana has the prominent opinion piece in the first issue of the new year for NMA. In it, she says:

In advertising, the demand side is supplying itself. Blogs, social Web, tagging, user-generated media – all these enable users and customers to provide each other with information about products, brands and companies.

Online is now a profoundly social place as individuals have been gaining more control over their environment and the way they interact with others. The authority of the one-way broadcast model will decline further as alternatives emerge, showing up the traditional communication methods as expensive and counter-productive.

There’s a different type of new media created by users for users where digital isn’t an issue but empowerment is…

So with behavioural marketing, interactivity and engagement, word of mouth and viral, what will work in 2006? The same things that have always done: engagement, connection between individuals and conversations, as blogs and the blogosphere have demonstrated…

As in any shifting landscape, there will be two types of company: those that cling to what they know and those that immerse themselves in the social aspect of the new media and share in the empowerment that the individual customer has been experiencing for some time.

In addition to drawing the attention of our clients and others to these changes, the core of what Latitude does is fundamentally about empowering individuals. A person comes to a search engine – there is no interruption or intrusion involved – and is actively seeking information. Many of those searchers are looking for products and services supplied by our clients. Bringing the two together and making sure that what the searcher finds is as relevant and useful as possible – so much so that the search leads to a sale (and future sales) – is truly interactive. It works.

With all due respect to the clever and entirely correct future gazers quoted above, their predictions of how marketing will work months from now are amusing from our standpoint: Latitude has been operating on an engagement model from the start. That the rest of online marketing will eventually realise the value of this approach is not surprising. Well done to our clients for being in on the ‘secret’ for some time.

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