A media plan is not a brand-building strategy. It may be strategic, but it is not a strategy. Because a successful brand-building strategy has to begin with having something worth saying (and selling) before it engages with the mediums and channels through which it will be said (and sold).
In other words, you need a story to tell, a way to tell it, an audience to tell it to, and a plan for how you're going to deliver on its promise...before you identify the right media, channels, or experiences to use to tell it. Then, when you do identify the right media, you have to use that media right.
Right now, far too many brands are playing the game in reverse, and badly. For one, they are determining the media they will use and then force-fitting their stories into those media. Then they are failing to adapt their storytelling to those media in a creative, relevant or respectful way.
Two quick thoughts that flow from the latter point (the former, the need to have a story to tell before deciding where to tell it, is one I talk about often)...one thought was inspired by a meeting last week with a major shopping centre...the other was inspired by a Q&A I attended yesterday with a number of actors at the Sydney Theatre Company.
First, the shopping centre thought.
Both shopping centre brands and the brands that seek to profit from exposure and activity within shopping centres are allowing the quantitatively-driven buying and selling of shopping centre media to damage their brands. It's happening because, far too often, both groups are treating the surfaces and services available within shopping centres as pure media that can drive one-way communications with consumers, instead of treating those surfaces and services as opportunities to add value to shopping experiences, engage customers, and spark two-way dialogue.
It's part of the wider trend...a trend that involves turning everything in this world into advertising media...and it's a trend being driven (unsurprisingly) by media agencies, not brand-building agencies.
So, what should brands that want to play in shopping centres do? Rather than simply allowing a media agency to identify a demographic and psychographic fit in a shopping centre and then take up off-the-shelf media opportunities or drop down a generic physical presence, brands should be investing far more strategic and creative energy in finding the right, real, and relevant things to be doing to build stronger relationships with the target audiences in those centres.
For me this is a big part of the growing up of live space experiential marketing...recognising that not all experiences are the same, and that the use of a medium or channel like 'live' has to shaped as cleverly and creatively as any television ad.
Likewise, shopping centre owners, rather than auctioning off every piece of media and every service they can find to the highest-bidding brands, should be looking at how they can use third-party brand dollars to enhance the experiences for their shoppers, in the process maintaining far greater control over the quality of their shoppers' experiences.
Second, the theatre point.
We live in a world today when anyone can tell a story, and they have numerous storytelling mediums at their disposal. Some see it as the death of high art, others as the democratisation of creativity. Whatever.
The interesting question for me as I listened to yesterday's talk was...how can theatre maintain relevance and keep its grand traditions of live, oral storytelling alive, given that there are so many simpler and more accessible options available to aspiring storytellers today?
The point the panelists at yesterday's Q&A made was that too much theatre had responded to the pressures of television and film by trying to make everything big, impressive, epic, and ostentatiously good value-for-money. Turning everything into a cross between an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and a Michael Bay film in other words. Clearly, this might be a way for a few big shows to make money, but it's not going to keep theatrical storytelling alive at a grass roots level.
For me, the key is for more theatre to move in the other direction. Instead of big, its key word, its driving principle, should be 'LIVE'. Theatre needs to focus on storytelling that distinctly benefits from live performance. That might mean more minimal things, more spontaneous things, small or more intimate things. It means not trying to bring the best of one medium (like film) into its own. Instead, it means specialising and focusing on the unique advantages of its medium.
An email from a colleague and a post over at work.play.experience both brought a theatrical collective called the Neo-Futurists to my attention last week. Greg Allen from the Neo-Futurists has put together a great list of rules for good theatre. One rule is really central to the case I am making here...
Rule #11: Create true theater. A show should never fail to answer the question “Why is this theater?” Theater is live performers in front of a live audience. Never forget this. If your show can be put on television or turned into a movie without losing something, you have failed.
The moral of these two rambles is simple. Don't make the mistake of thinking the medium alone is enough of a message (that theatre is great because it's theatre, or that shopping centres are good places for brands to be because lots of people are there).
Remember, the medium is just the medium. It's what you do with it (cleverly, respectfully, and relevantly) that counts.
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