On Thursday I had a chat with Shiv Singh, Vice President of Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives at AvenueA/Razorfish and the leader of the company’s social media efforts. He’s behind the upcoming launch AdLife, and effort that AA/R and Pluck, the social media technology company.
The service will combine traditional digital marketing - ad units - with social media aspects. In other words, consumer generated content. This sounds like an excellent idea and I hope it works. It’s in it’s early stages and won’t be up and running until this fall.
I’ve never been anti-banner. At first they got too much hype and then became unfairly trashed as being useless. But they still, in my book, put a product or a service name out there, giving would be stakeholders inadvertent exposure.
What AdLife offers is rich media models in which the public - you and me - can contribute to the marketing message. Be it a short product review, a small piece of artwork, a photo. At this point, it can’t include video or audio, but who knows? At some point it may.
I did, and still do, have some concerns about the feature. Some of the content will have to be vetted so as to keep the presentation consistent with the brand. And vetting could lead to client control - doing away with a negative review. But vetting will be needed. Heck, I could add a “Hire Me” post and it could appear all over the place.
Secondly, Shiv mentioned that they’ll be working with their Fortune 100-1000 clients and the ads will probably appear on larger sites. My concern their is that, as we see with social media, targeted sights based on demographic similarities or by interest may be the spots where this plays best. The more targeted, the more people usually want to share information. Sites for moms, for geeks, for sports fans. Many of those sites are huge enough.
The bottom line here is that online marketing needs this. Traditional digital could use a means to involve the viewers of the ads and social media needs to be able to be seen by those who aren’t necessarily looking for it at the time they see it.
I think this will be a success for those reasons.
Thanks to Shiv for the interview and AvenueA/Razorfish PR person Katie Lamkin for setting it up.
1 Comment » Posted on August 15th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn
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