Make New Friends, and Keep the Old

What are we so afraid of?

This morning, AdAge published an article in which current research done by the Advertising Research Federation (ARF) revealed that most advertisers see the wealth of consumer online brand opinions as more of a curse than a gift. Their main concern is that it's difficult to measure accurately the correlation between what is said online and offline, as well as the very fact that they can't control what is said.

Just to get it out of my system (and also because I'm a college student): People, if it's free, USE IT.

Like I said in my last entry- the trend of consumer dialogue with companies and brands is changing the ad industry as a whole. The wealth of opportunities offered by unsolicited (and oftentimes, unbiased) consumer opinion, and consumer dialogue, is unprecedented! We could pay consumers to come sit in cold rooms and tell us their [read: biased, paid-for] opinions of our commercials, or we could merely do some research on Facebook for an hour and find more there than we would have in three focus groups.

Now, maybe this isn't necessarily true, and there definitely are advantages to traditional methods of research. However, everything in moderation. We shouldn't confine ourselves to traditionality when opportunity is banging loudly on our doors, and in the currently uncertain economic climate, it's always better to save money and be more efficient where we can afford to be.

Yes, maybe this does mean hiring one new person to keep updated on the buzz going on about a particular brand. Maybe it means a new person in client-side marketing departments to interact with consumers through their social media. This change is not coming slowly, and we don't have time to prepare or be reticent about it.

So keep having focus groups. Keep taking surveys, doing one-on-one interviews, and anything else that is traditional and necessary to satisfy the clients on the research side. But make sure to keep informed about what's going on digitally, and make a concentrated effort to engage consumers in dialogue about your brand(s).

They want to talk to you. If they didn't, they wouldn't be talking about you.
One is silver and the other's gold.