In Aaron’s “Googley Lessons Blog Tour” (for TopRank), his message is to make ads that are valuable by making ads that “act like content.”  In other words, “there’s value in the content and the ad,” and make “ads that are valuable, relevant content.”

I get a funny feeling when I hear these types of statements because it feels to me that they presume the marketer is trying to fool the viewers, that the marketer is being disingenuous.  In other words, here’s the latest way to package your product message, almost like we’re trying to fool the viewer into subconscious submission.  Of course I believe that the best kind of ads do educate, so maybe I’m being overly harsh inferring intent.

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What do you use?

Businesses create specific content so that customers react in a very specific way.  Without a clear understanding of the customer’s information needs, any reaction that is close to the end goal is pure dumb luck.

I like the conciseness of what he expressed.  One of his core messages is that all marketing materials, such as custom content, must be designed to evoke an action, an action consistent with organizational goals.  I talk a lot about product simulations as if there is almost a single type.  The kind I’ve seen mostly around are product orientations, walkarounds, and the like (a lot of 3D spinning products), and they do have a place.  However, it is all about recognizing what that place is, and what informational need that serves for the buyer or customer.  Here are some initial thoughts on phases of the product marketing/sales process I can see relevant in focusing a sim (or really any content) to drive viewer behavior along the sales process.  In each phase, customer’s/prospect’s will likely have different information needs:

1. Attraction/Awareness
2. Garnering Interest
3. Engagement
4. Conversion
5. Buy / Recommend
6. Reinforce
7. Support

Especially in B2B markets, but also in consumer purchases that take some time to occur, we often do not factor in sufficiently how our content relates to where the prospect is in the buying cycle.

It is probably obvious, but something that works in attracting interest may not be sufficient to convert the interest into the sale.  Just as we want to design our marketing materials to give the viewer a “purpose-driven activity” (Game-Based Marketing, Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder), we also need to apply content in our marketing strategy to keep moving the prospect along our sales process.

I firmly believe there is a happy medium.

The core is about how the piece is framed.  If the focus is on presenting a real industry issue, and uses a branded product to show how it solves the problem, it has merit as valuable content.  The marketer also wants to ensure that it has value as a promotional piece.  I believe the most effective way is to frame the problem in such a way that highlights something unique or compelling about that product.  This may sound deceptively manipulative–crafting the right problem for display–but it really is merely presenting an approach to solving a certain class of problems that some prospective buyers are (hopefully) facing.

Therefore, I think effective product sims can be applied in a series of presentations that focus on demonstrating solutions to sets of real industry problems, oriented to the product’s strengths.  Mark Fidelman states in his slide deck for “What Every CMO Needs to Know about Content Strategy“:

“Every company has content which includes documentation, video & graphics, etc. for products and services, but most content are an afterthought and not strategic…”

Certainly, every company does have content about its products, but that content is almost always focused on the product itself.  I am advocating re-focusing the aim.

A mistake I have seen in a company that made a promotional game using one of its products was that the situations faced in the game using the product could be equally solved by pretty much any of their competitors’ products, so it lacked value as a good promotional piece because it didn’t distinguish the product’s capabilities in any way.  According to one of the product managers, the company walked away with the feeling that games weren’t going to help sell the product, but I think they missed the point.

“It’s not a lie, if you believe it”

My favorite line from Seinfeld is from George Costanza, during an interaction with Jerry when Jerry is trying to learn from George how to beat a lie detector test.  George offers the following piece of advice: “it’s not a lie if you believe it”:

If we put aside the obvious manipulative implication in this line, we can see a  fundamental, positive truth in this statement.  It’s not a sales pitch if you believe your solution to the problem is the best way, whether your are inside or outside the company.  Therefore, marketers need to find the right problem to make that statement genuine.

The gist of ‘custom content’ seems to mean information for industry professionals that is expected to be vendor-neutral, information about news or techniques that are outside of traditional sales materials that promote a company’s products.  However, in the third article, Makino clearly demonstrates that there may not be a clear line between custom content and promotional material:

We’re using content to drive engagement and develop discussions with our customers and prospects, and we’re doing that in a way that shows how our premium products and high technology can help drive their business’ success, performance, and profitability,” [Mark] Rentschler [Markino's marketing manager] said.

I think this cuts to the heart of the message I have been developing/emitting — if you make marketing materials using product simulations that show how your products solve real-world problems, those materials themselves can make valuable training (‘custom content’) beyond a sales pitch.  For example, we produce training materials for one of our client’s products that use interactive simulation to show how the products are applied.  Word on the street is that their competitors even use the material to illustrate how the device works and should be applied.  This effect is echoed in the article by Tom Gaudreau, PureSafety’s VP of marketing — “[i]t’s all about thought leadership for us.”

So in my view, the border (if there is one) between neutral content and content involving branded products is pretty fuzzy, and something completely in line with using product simulations to sell products through teaching.  Product simulations that teach about how to solve problems are a perfect fit, and the savvy marketer can present problems that their products uniquely solve or solve in a particularly effective way.  In this way, marketing/sales is about solving customer problems in a demonstrated way, as opposed to merely hawking products by features and benefits.

The articles point out the greater demand for custom content and how many companies are investing more money into a marketing strategy incorporating custom content creation, rather than traditional paid media.  That sounds really sensible to echo the shift in adapting to more social ways of selling.  The author quotes Joe Pulizzi (who I mentioned in a previous post on B2B digital marketing as a ‘Custom Content Expert’) about why custom content is growing:

1. Search engines have made it imperative for company websites to have worthwhile and relevant content
2. Social media’s popularity has forced companies to create content that can be shared
3. Current emphasis on lead generation has prodded companies to produce content from which they can get leads.

It all comes back to the ‘e’ word — engagement.  The second article points to results from a recent survey “B2B Content Marketing 2010 Benchmarks, Budget and Trends,” — highlighting that

[t]he biggest challenges to custom media players are producting “engaging” content [36%] and producing enough content [21%]

Emphasizing the point about finding where to create good, engaging content, and like the quotation from Makino’s marketing manager above, where better to start regarding content than around a company’s current product set and the problems they solve?

To me, scenarios, stories, etc. that feature branded products solving real customer problems — the heart of product simulation advertising — make great custom content.  There might be some fear that focusing on a company’s products would make the user feel too much like it’s a sales pitch.  That is a fine line to walk, but if the content is really good (relevant to the user’s problems), I believe the user will be more appreciative than skeptical, as in the case of my client mentioned above.

In some areas, creating custom simulation content can bring issues into the conversation.  Another one of my client’s is in a somewhat controversial but growing area of the Fire Service and is producing simulations to educate users about safe application of the device.  As you can imagine, debates can get quite heated (no pun intended) because of misinformation and misapplication.  Of course videos and technical reports are part of the mix, but the simulations put users in the driver’s seat to ‘experience’ it for themselves.

Calling the readers to action

Another theme regarding content topics is presented by Dan Blank (founder, We Grow Media).  The article quotes his opinion that the biggest hurdle is making custom content “actionable.”  “It’s not just informing and entertaining, but calling the [readers] to action….”  I think product simulations that are framed in the right real-world customer problem have strong calls-to-action because they put the problem squarely in front of the viewer to solve (and relate to).

Is it wrong to involve your products?

There is an interesting point of conflict in these articles between the case from Makino, recognizing that custom content can “show how our premium products…help drive their business’ success”, and Matt Johnston’s (VP marketing, uTest) aim that

the goal of [uTest's custom content] site is simply to create useful content for their market–not to immediately sell uTest’s products and services.  “It’s not a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said.

I almost feel like the latter statement expresses a feeling of guilt if a company makes content around its products (the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”).  I think in this context, we shouldn’t fear that viewer’s are going to expose a promotional intention–we should focus on making good content that solves customers’ real problems.  The hard sell is bad content, but we as vendors shouldn’t feel embarrassed about helping our potential buyer’s solve their problems with our products — after all, that’s why they have found us, and that’s the information they want from us.

So this post is a series of a few fragments.

About Experiential Marketing

(by Scollin Sevan, Dec. 2009).  “Experience is the now more that ever it counts [sic]….Experiential marketing often involves events, contests, interactive campaigns to promote, however holistic experiential marketing considers the experience delivered to the customer through the purchase or use of the product or service.”  Sounds to me like getting a feel for the product via simulation could be right at the center of importance here.

Experiential Marketing

(by Scollin Sevan, Nov 2009)  “Experiential marketing is a sort of marketing which results in the emotional connection to a brand, idea, product or a person….Experiential marketing simply focuses on the consumer experience and his response. By differentiating the traditional and experiential marketing, experiential marking allows the customer to experience and test it for them, while in traditional marketing is going to sell the consumer of the features and benefits of something.” Again, a fairly obvious connection regarding his point about the consumer experience — presumably the experience using the product.

Audi – Virtual Car Experience

(Dec 2009).  “”An enjoyable experience will leave a product lingering in the minds of consumers. If players have enough fun in a virtual simulation of the Audi R8, they’re more likely to associate the car with those good memories when it comes time to put real money down on the lot.”  This is interesting to me because it says they feel the product experience needs to be jazzed up with a fun element (in this case, a fantasy race car game).  The indirect product experience is more important than what they feel they can get through a direct product experience.  Maybe this has to do with their goal of introducing a product to a new market, but the most direct form still seems to make the most sense to me: why not aim at demonstrating the real functions for those actually considering buying a car?

Essentially, my take on it is that he feels companies jump on the social media/technology bandwagon, i.e., try to adopt the latest tools and technology of social media, without really thinking about their own relationship with their customers and prospects.  It’s the classic ‘get a technology before I figure out what the problem is.’  If you try to be like someone else, you can’t really have a meaningful conversation with your own customers and those you want to attract.

What really sucked me in was the sentence “Marketing is about many things including connecting audiences with products they want to buy.”  That really says it.  Therefore, as much as companies want their interaction to be perceived as amusing, leading edge, offbeat, memorable, or whatever, ultimately it is about helping audiences connect with your products.  It’s not simply about being engaging, it’s about engaging prospects with your products, and about offering authentic product experiences that connect with your audience.

A few lines later, he sums it up beautifully: “[Marketing on the social web is] more about companies being able to connect with customers in ways that are both meaningful to those customers and to the goals of the business.”  Potential customers need content that is meaningful to their purpose of researching/pursuing the company, namely acquiring an understanding of why the prospective customer should buy the products of one company as opposed to its competitors.  If the company aims simply to make its site ‘sticky’, without a direct, sustained relevance to the products, then it runs a good chance there will be a disconnect with the prospective buyer, no matter how interactive, fun, or memorable the campaign was.

In Lee’s suggestion area, one bullet item stands out:

- Create – Content that customers actually want.

I think it’s implicit in his argument that the content be aligned to the company’s business goals.  Isn’t so much of it really about creating content that relates to why customers are interested in the company in the first place, namely the company’s products or services?

I’m not thrilled with the term ‘degrees of closeness’, but the idea is to have some measure to evaluate a product demonstration or exposition with respect to a real experience with the product.  Today, there seem to be a number of product advertising sites that simulate the experience in a somewhat static way, stitching together product photos (or 3D recreations) with selections such as color.  For example, I came across the 2011 Ford Explorer’s site, which, in the 3D view, lets one navigate from position-to-position, and change the exterior and interior colors.  Done in a professional way, it doesn’t give any interaction with the car.  Maybe the ‘degrees of closeness’ would have various categories, two for example, might be functionality and physical presence (the Ford example being closer in the physical presence category).

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with one demo for the Sony Cyber-Shot TX7 camera that features Taylor Swift.  I can’t seem to find the link anymore, but the idea is that the camera lets you stitch together photos to make a panorama shot.  The demo lets you take pictures of Taylor Swift in a few situations, and I think you can ‘save’ those snapshots somewhere.  On the surface, it seems like a product demo that lets one ‘try out’ the camera.  After some reflection, I see that the functionality demo’d really isn’t terribly useful, from an ‘understanding the camera’ perspective–it doesn’t really use the feel of the camera to give me any more information than if it were briefly explained with some static photos.  Certainly one ‘uses’ the camera to take the photographs, but there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting one learns from that demo as a result of being able to ‘use’ it.

This reminds me of another type of ‘simulation’ which I think falls short on the advertising side.  This happens when manufacturers are sold the ‘product placement’ concept, without a corresponding specific product use.  There seems to be an aura around the product placement concept of ‘if I simply put my product into an ordinary situation, people are going to subconsciously want to buy it.’  I have seen it in games that use branded equipment, presumably as advertising (or adver-training).  If the training (or problem presented to be solved through the ad/training) does not accentuate unique features of the product, then it might be a good training piece for that type of equipment (or it might not even be a good training piece), but certainly it’s advertising effectiveness is questionable without a direct tie-in to the specific product’s specialness.  Ultimately, this makes it of questionable value as an advertising vehicle.

Another key sentence in his post is as follows:

By allowing people to make up their own minds (instead of coercing them through slick offers and time-limited deals that everyone knows are lies concocted by marketers to get them to buy), people are much more willing to listen to what you have to say when conveyed as an interesting story.

What better way to help them make up their own minds than by evoking them to interact to solve their problem(s)?

His point is that games represent a new way to communicate with an audience, in an immersive, engaging way.  He dismisses “branded entertainment” and “product placement”, which I agree, are indirect at best.  Then he states “where the content is the advertising and the advertising is the content”.

This is exactly the point of product simulation advertising or marketing, namely making the advertisement the content and the content the advertising (or vice versa).  I agree with his point that games are an important new form of marketing to the gaming demographic, but I would argue that a more direct interactive simulation, focused on competitive features of the product solving real-world problems, is a more compelling incentive — after all, the advertiser wants the viewer to see how the product solves the viewer’s problems, not just walk away with a good feeling about the product (a nice side effect, of course).

In other words, games are a good manifestation of interesting interaction (to the viewer), but not the most direct.  The most direct would be interaction with the product itself.  So have I just invented a “degree of closeness” measure, namely, that games are typically second or higher degrees of closeness compared with direct product experience (being 0 degrees, and 1 degree being some type of product simulation)?  Of course games can have direct product experiences, or authentic product experiences, but games that don’t wholly focus on the product experience would earn farther degrees of separation.

I would say that Alan’s use of the word “game” may be fairly general, judging from his other comments in the post, but I think adding the word “gaming” unnecessarily shifts the perspective away from the core that the content is the advertising and the advertising is the content.