Author Archives: Jim Kim
When I attended the Location Based services session, I realized I hadn’t really done a good job of checking in (see what I did?) with the technology in the past 9 months. Thus I was really delighted and engaged by the subject matter and how the opportunities that the technology offers had evolved in a very specific vector.
Game dynamics is not a new topic this year, but the recent applications shown here in the keynote and other sessions were equally inspiring and equally unanticipated.
Thus I walked into “Decision Trees: YouTube’s New Breed of Interactive Storytellers” with high hopes of being blown away by the evolution I hadn’t been paying enough attention too. What had these young storytelling geniuses come up with to push YouTube’s ability to serve interactive narrative experiences.
The last session of the day was chosen solely on its ballsy, provocative title: “Brand Consistency is Killing Digital Advertising.” Now this just seemed intentionally inflammatory. And even up to the moment the guy started talking I was ready to bolt in case it turned into overly cerebral planner talk.
Then the guy started talking, Justin Cox, a planner from Pereira & O’Dell.
And I dug it
Methodically, he challenged everything I’ve been led to believe in the last 5 years about how integrated marketing should work, ye ol’ hub and spoke, the 360° campaign, every channel serving the same big idea. He showed a slide of cross channel pieces from a recent Gillette campaign. From the print, to the TV, to the display banners, everything looked exactly the same, sharing the same art direction and assets and messaging. And it was easy to see. It all added up to crap. Consistency did not, as I’ve espoused to many clients, amplify their message; rather it seemed pointless and trivial.
Repetition diluted any possible hope of more meaningful engagement.
And then he made his big, bold claim. Across channels, brands don’t need to look the same, they just need to feel the same.
