BlogOn: Can Advertising Be Social?

In the panel hosted by the always fun and interesting

Steve Hall - Publisher and Editor, Adrants, who spoke with Joseph Jaffe - President and Founder, jaffe LLC

Mark Kingdon - CEO, Organic

and David Rubin - Brand Development Director, Unilever.

More and more ad dollars are moving online, but smart companies are approaching social media with care. In a world of one-to-one conversations, how do you get real reach? Forget everything you know about traditional advertising - in social media, the rules of brand identity no longer apply. What advertising practices deliver results in social media?"Massive and arrogant company named Apple" - Joseph Jaffe - on how Apple react or proact with bloggers. Jaffe also notes how when he created a Nike ad, it was being seen at Nike corporate HQ, but he was not contacted. There are creative types out there that are creating creative home ads for their favorite brands, but the corporations are not contacting them, or "purchasing" those ads to run on television.

The conversation is now public, the new era with consumer generated content and advertising, and companies need to realize that there is a new era and work and talk with customers when there are appropriate times. The wired generation is used to the negative nature of the Internet and blogs, so keep things in perspective. There's not much discomfort, because the wired public is used to it - but it is an issue that companies do need to understand, and there is an obligation to communicate with the consumer/customer. Companies just can't market products that suck with good marketing, but need to actually have good products or the blogosphere will note the suckiness of the product.