Saturday, November 16, 2013

Khue Ngo Blog #9

My Take on Current Events: Disappearing Ads

Snapchat seems to be all over the place, as Facebook attempted to buy it for US$ 3 billion this week. I found this opinion piece by David Berkowitz about disappearing ads that picks up that topic: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/marketers-world-disappearing-media/245294/
He basically proposes that marketers could use the special feature of disappearing media to force the audience to pay more attention. There is a great chance that it could go wrong and a one time availability will not be well received. However, in a world where everything is available anytime and anywhere we want, could something rare or scarce might be able to catch our attention? As Berkowitz says, could it make the viewers pay more attention because they know that they have to either watch it now or never? I actually think that this is quite an interesting idea and I can imagine that it would work. However, it could only be effective if the audience actually knows that it is a one time view. And the biggest challenge would be to get that into the minds of the people that are used to having all information at their fingertips.


My TTIY

I am currently working on my TTIY project. I haven’t discovered anything specifically new this week (I believe I have covered all communications channels so far), but something Brian said at Likable caught my attention. He said that 10% off is nowadays normal, and you can already get that from walking into the store. And I realized that this completely applies to American Eagle Outfitters. There is always some sort of sale that they are offering. Either it is a special holiday sale, or just an ordinary “buy 1 get one free” sale. I think I have never bought something at full price at American Eagle. This basically means that their strategy is to position the brand at a certain price level, but they are selling it as another one. Considering the target audience this makes a lot of sense, as they are targeting15-25 year old females. In this age group, one might only have a certain budget. Positioning American Eagle at a good quality price level, but actually selling it for less and allowing the low-budget teens to buy the clothes is actually pretty smart.

My Recap

So this week we visited Likeable, a social media marketing agency. The office space was less fancy than other agencies we have seen. However, the ambience felt very suitable for their work. In terms of scope of work: What Brian presented and explained matched my expectation for such an agency. One thing, I was always wondering about was how or if they get approval for every little tweet or Facebook comment from their clients. But as Brian and Steven explained, the client usually provides some sort of social media brand bible that contains guidelines for answers, tweets and comments. This is somewhat different from what we heard at Cohn & Wolfe. There they most of the time have to get client approval for every single message. The scope of social media work I think might be quite different at these two places, though.
I believe that one big challenge is to learn the “brand language” of each of their clients. If you manage several accounts at one time, you always have to be careful to use the right tone, language and style that represents the different brands, and not to mix them up.

Even though I found their work highly interesting, I could not necessarily see myself working in a social media marketing agency. Without any intention of devaluating their work, I could rather see myself working on “big campaigns” than little Facebook comments and tweets.

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