AOL's digital prophet David Shing believes the power of digital is building intimacy with consumers, because people “love brands they just don’t like ads that suck.”
Shing was speaking at ADMA's Creative Fuel conference and said he believes the advertising industry is in the throes of disruption as the world moves on from awareness based advertising.
“We grew up in the world of information where it was all just amplified marketing, now we're plum in the middle of the world of social,” Shing said.
“So many people want likes – I think likes are rubbish. You can like my belt, my shoes, my bag, you don't have to like me as a whole any more. There is no commitment in the skin of the game of likes.”
Instead, Shing said brands need to drive intimacy if they're going to cut through the media noise, which sees about 1900 media messages hit consumers every day.
He said that need is driving a 'T-bar model of advertising' which sees brands want scale advertising that reaches everyone – called programmatic – and then they want to go “super deep with intimacy”, tapping what Shing calls the “pass it on culture”.
And key to this landscape are millennials. Shing said that as a generation, they will have a $2.45 trillion spend and will represent 75% of the work force by 2015, meaning it's important to take them seriously.
He said they tend to understand security and privacy better that their predecessors and have most of their social accounts locked. It means that getting them onside is crucial.
One way brands are achieving this is native advertising. The other is a move to what Shing calls “moments,” where consumers can get a direct response from a brand at the right time.
“But there is another opportunity,” Shing said. “If you guys think about creative, here's the deal, audiences always outpace marketers. So you have an opportunity to understands that a lot of these contagious environments today do not have ads, so you have to act like a human. If you’re a brand in that environment, marketing will always following the audience's behaviour.”
He said key to this is driving emotion or building stories.
“If we're going to be reactive, relevant and remarkable we have to be real and being real is interesting because if you think about it, it all comes down to human connection,” Shing said. “And that's about emotion, meaning and your brand being an experience.”
“Digital affords you the ability to have direct intimacy with people, so context matters, building good content putting it n smart places: easy for me to say, really hard to do.”
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