While an irresistible Brand Personality is set to be paramount in connecting Brands with the Digital consumer, so it is the need for a credibility and consistency across the channel mix.  Which Digital Places suit your Brand? Which can you safely say do not?Digital is the opportunity to add crazy new dimensions to the Love Marks we nurture.  We get to direct how Brands best act and engage in the emerging channels consumers lead us to. 

Blog, chat, newsgroups, ratings sites, social networking, social directories – entire virtual worlds like secondlife.com. Game, desktop and mobile placements…. The constant is that the number of choices will continue to grow.Sure it’s a challenge keeping up but there’s no need for panic.  The traditional rules still apply.  Brand credibility, consistency and audience remain the core building blocks for Digital Brand dialogues.

A Digital Strategy Makes it Easy
A Digital Strategy is a process where we define and choose which channel best matches the digital brand values and expectations of the customers. Basically – what are the most credible places to engage with the customer, and how should we act within those places?Define a Digital Strategy and every other channel decision becomes easy.    

FLOG – When Channel Choice Goes Dad

It was only a matter of time before engineered truth emerged in the very personal trust circles of the Blog.

A FLOG is basically a fabricated BLOG set up as a tease or reveal.While the tease technique is well used in billboards, creative’s may need to do more than a basic cross over to win over Digital Consumers. 

Recent FLOG attempts from Sony, Walmart and McDonalds suggest the consumer backlash has the potential to impact negatively on how a clients’ brand is perceived.  The Consumerist ran a poll to determine the worst FLOGS for 2006.  This is an award show agencies probably do not want to add to their awards calendar. However not all agree that Brands Doing Bad is the end of all of your customer trust relationship. Stanford Research  suggests that Exciting Brands are likely to bounce back from a mistake while their Sincere counterpart may not.  

The key is leading clients with a process for gaining the most benefit in new and emerging digital places.

So what’s in store for us online in 2007?

Here are my 7 predictions

Second life brands
Agencies will have 2 people fulltime overseeing client blog and chat sites, and monitoring how client brands are being presented to the (online) world. Trend: http://www.secondlife.com
RSS will challenge email for marketing purposes as a 100% opt-in alternative to the deluge of 500 plus spam messages sent to each of us daily.

Tom Cruise
That Minority Report screen and mouse combo arrive -  Richard Simmons, Jazzersize and Writing a Brief merge in a scary collaboration of workout and work.   Like the first 30K plasma screens, wave one of this product is too expensive for most of us.
Trend: Take a good, long look at  the latest XBOX controllers.

vMoney
Virtual money arrives as a convenient, safer way to transact. Initially launched by a telco, it is adopted by youth subscribers keen on maybe a free credit feature. The service is accelerated into the mainstream as an alternative to credit cards as a trading bank offers free account services and better rewards when you use the mobile client.
Driver: GPRS is more secure than HTTP
 Trend: http://www.paygo.co.nz

A banner on Trademe
Will create more leads than an ad run in both the Herald and Dominion.
Trend. With 3,149,547 visitors a month and 1,485,040 registered users  Trademe is set to reach more readers than the Herald and Dominion combined
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Community/SiteStats.aspx

Youtube slips
Google set aside $500m as a legal pool for youtube related copyright issues.  This in my view is not going to be enough and there’s a legal blood bath on the horizon. As marketers we’ll see a control, paralysis and slow decline in household name user sites such as youtube as syndicated artists assert and sue for their slice of the cash pie

Disk space wins
…and the social network moves on. Online storage remains the killer app and whoever can provide enough of it, for free and with enough add-ons emerges as the next social meeting place of choice

Video mideo
This time next year the idea of sitting around waiting for Grey’s Anatomy to screen at 7.30 will seem as foreign as washing your clothes by hand. Sky and TVNZ mobile platforms will hit the mainstream with on demand content. The turning point will be a telco price war (like with TXT) and suddenly mobile video will be everywhere. At last we can watch a show on the dunny.  Mobile content authors will shoot up in prominence and smart marketers will own this channel…..

Itunes rocks but SpiralFrog rocks harder
Itunes is great if you have a credit card. Most kids don’t and they drive music which is why free music sites such as spiralfrog will emerge quickly on the local stage

Allowing?consumers to?decide the success or failure?of a marketing campaign by publishing unmoderated comments and content?on a campaign website raises as many questions as eyebrows.

While advocates of?traditional campaigns?run the risk of public criticism from their new media?counterparts?are the traditionalists in reality saving their clients from the very real risk of market failure?

?The question remains?- Is it?proven good practise to let public opinion determine the success or failure of your clients? products, or should some caution be practised when allowing user driven content in campaigns?
?

The Consumer and Brand Mix
In an attempt to better engage with the 25 to 35 year old car buyer Volvo?s C30 Free Will campaign takes a quirky turn on the ?be honest and the consumer will love you?? approach as it enables consumers to rate parts of the campaign creative.

Consumer?s have the option to rate short TVC?s which are a wide range of good and bad.

While the?site?appears?to have?escaped?the?bain of?Usability?testing – using just about every new flash?icon feature?available – ??the rating concept?creates a workable balance?of Brand?voice and consumer submitted content.

This approach is not new. GM launched a ?create your own ad? during a US release of The Apprentice in March. However?the destination site?really only lets you arrange pictures and put titles over images ? not the same as say – creating a movie.
This is not congen it?s advertisers not getting it…the campaign slipped away with little consumer interest.

Enter the FLOG
Fake boobs. Fake tan. Fake blog. It was only a matter of time before the FLOG came to advertising.
A FLOG is basically a fabricated blog set up as a tease or reveal. While the technique may work for billboards, it?s just not ok to present oneself in a BLOG and then reveal an alternative purpose, and the recent examples imply from Sony, Walmart and McDonalds suggest the consumer backlash has the potential to do real damage to how a clients? brand is perceived.
The Consumerist is running a poll of the worst FLOGS for 2006 ? a list agencies probably do not want to add to their awards calendar.

Let’s re-iterate
A digital strategy provides a framework for validating whether an online activity is a match.
?A sense of urgency is always justified, but there’s no reason to panic. Take stock of the brand assets and how they fit into this new landscape. Old media expertise is still the best foundation for building a successful new media engagement.? Brand credibility, accessibilty and audience remain the core building blocks of old and new media

The challenge for all agencies is finding a practical balance between readers participating in media and retaining appropriate editorial and brand control.
I guess it?s all just a question of how far you want to take the honesty angle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uLxKzqpSSA