As a rule I generally have a low opinion of buzz words and corporate market speak. It’s a vocabulary too often used by the uninformed trying to pose as the overly informed and in the end those fancy words we come up with to describe new trends grow stale and wind up ridiculed by just about everyone in the know. Well at the risk of ridicule I’m going to break my own rule and become a contributor, nay a revivalist to the buzz word lexicon with “Advertainment.” Sure it’s not my own invention and you’ll find it floating around on the blogosphere here and there, maybe in a few industry articles etc. but it hasn’t really found a catch yet. I’m using it now because there really is no better word to describe the growing trend I’ve been seeing from big brands experimenting with long-form-video-entertainment-advertising (see why we need a buzz word?).
Of course, this is something we at VMG have always been strong advocates of, first as conscientious consumers and now as industry participants. It really comes down to a simple conclusion that we reached many moons ago when we first cobbled our little group together: The 30-second spot is dying out, people are becoming desensitized to the repetition, the format, the chaos in volume. In short consumers have been shutting their brains off to TV commercials for years, and yet big brands are only now starting to take advantage of the fantastic opportunities that exist online for consumer communication.
What if brands made, films? TV shows? Short films? Animations, Characters that people liked, storylines that people found genuinely compelling???? What if brands started telling stories instead of hard selling products and services?
The consumer is wise. The consumer has seen all the tricks, they know all the bargains, they’ve heard all the lines, and if they don’t they have an unlimited information resource to find them out.
Let’s imagine a future where consumers judge brands not by the full page sale announcement they see in their paper or the forgettable commercial they see 17 times a day on their TV, but on the emotional connection they have to the most recent short film or online series that brand has released. And I’m talking soft sell here. A genuinely entertaining piece of content, humor, drama, sci-fi whatever the genre, something authentic and enjoyable to watch where you might not even see a logo or credit at all (trust the intelligence of your audience).
So there’s my deep thinker for the day, the brand-as-studio concept, creating the mutant child “Advertainment” and reaping the rewards of a truly emotional connection with consumers by entertaining them first, and selling them as a distant (and sometimes non-existent) second.
“Hey Joe did you see that new film from Heineken today?”
“No George, I’ve been hooked on that series from Panasonic… it’s awesome.”
Sound ridiculous?
Just wait and see.
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