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When was the last time you saw a TV ad, that looked and sounded familiar, was slickly produced, clearly cost a lot of money, but you couldn’t quite remember whether it was for a hatchback, a mobile phone tariff, or a shampoo. Advertising is becoming a bit like pop music. There are only so many messaging ‘tunes’ you can play, and after a while they all start sounding alike.

Great creative ideas will always achieve cut-through, as evidenced by the SONY Bravia bouncing balls and exploding paint, or the ongoing excellence of the Guinness ads going back through time. But for the rest with average to good creative, and marginal product or service differentiation, there is a real need to make your media work harder to get your brand message noticed.

In an increasingly complex multi-channel world, with more and more choices about how you reach your target audience, but fewer and fewer genuine mass market media options available, it’s not just what you say, but when and how you say it that matters. For organisations looking to cut through the communications clutter, it is increasingly the case that the ‘medium is the message’.

So what is happening in terms of media innovation? And how can you take advantage of new media channels to stand out from the crowd? Here are some of the most recent opportunities…

Media ideas which cut through the clutter
Sponsorship of TV shows – Although conventional TV advertising is in long term decline, companies are still keen to reach mass market audiences through this medium. A popular alternative to traditional TV advertising, increasingly avoided by channel surfers opting out of the ad breaks, is programme sponsorship. Recent examples include: Cadburys and Coronation Street; Herbal Essences and Desperate Housewives; and Dulux and Ugly Betty.

This approach gives consistent brand exposure to highly relevant target audiences. It also creates a halo effect by backing a programme the audience loves, with reflected brand benefits from association with programme content. The strategy can backfire though if audiences fall out of love with a show (eg, recent Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty race relations row on Celebrity Big Brother causing Carphone Warehouse to cancel its £3m sponsorship of the programme). In this case it is best to cut your losses and get out early!

Another interesting development is Joost TV, which has just been launched by the founders of Skype. This offers ad-supported online TV, which is streamed direct to the viewer. Ads can be targeted by time, day, physical location, viewing habits and opt-in profiles.

Interactive posters/ mobile downloads – Another area experiencing surprisingly high levels of innovation is outdoor. There’s always been clever stuff done here at key locations like Heathrow and Vauxhall Cross, but now a new infrastructure is developing which allows really innovative messaging and genuine audience interaction in a much wider range of locations.

To promote the Nokia N95, the company's most advanced phone yet, Nokia has installed interactive touchscreen games at various London bus stops. You can experience this for yourself on a YouTube video – no doubt shot with a mobile phone camera!

There are also great opportunities for location-specific product/ service promotions through a series of tube and rail poster sites, which allow you to download information, or even bar codes for special offers/ discounts via your mobile phone. Euston station now boasts a series of broadcast quality poster sites, on the main up escalator from the Tube to the concourse, which push rotating advertising messages throughout the day. And Transvision screens at most of the leading London termini combine news programmes with advertising messages to commuters and long haul travellers waiting patiently for their trains. Moving away from the station, Yell has used a GPRS positioning system linked to ad panels on London buses to broadcast ads which are relevant to the street they are travelling down.

Rich media/ brand interaction – Unsurprisingly, digital media is at the forefront of innovation in matching the right message to the right customers at the right time. Ad serving technologies can now offer behavioural targeting which presents relevant ads to online users based on their most recent online usage and behaviour (with the caveat that aggressive ad blocking tools in browsers are blocking out much of this content). Linked measurement tools can also provide brand and response tracking to a level that offline media can only dream of replicating.

Standard banners and buttons are also becoming less common, as broadband penetration makes rich media the best means of achieving cut through online. Homepage takeovers and page peels, are certainly intrusive, but they are almost guaranteed to get you noticed. Recent successful campaigns include the NSPCC ads, with small disadvantaged children wandering wistfully across the page. Coke Zero has run a strong ‘silhouette’ campaign, linked to a micro-site showing all the executions in one place, linking the product to sport, music, leisure, etc; and Renault Clio uses a sexy woman strutting provocatively across the page, before walking into an ad banner and driving off in her new car. All of these ads demand your attention and are every bit as clever as their offline equivalents.

Some companies have taken the concept of brand interaction a stage further – often by creating micro-sites linked to online ad campaigns. IKEA shot hundreds of hours of video to create a series of scenarios in a virtual house kitted out exclusively with IKEA furniture and accessories. In it, a man stands with his back to you, half-dressed. By selecting certain options you can send him to the wardrobe to select the clothes you want him to wear. The effect is high quality and intriguing. Dutch telecoms operator KPN goes a stage further with its soap-opera styled house of the future, inhabited by a sparky family of 5, with flirtatious teenage daughter, web-savvy skater boy son and their environmentally aware sister. You can navigate your way through the house and watch various (sometimes amusing) scenarios featuring KPN products and services as you go.

Viral campaigns – Viral was all the rage about 12-18 months ago, when advertisers (and some agencies) got carried away with the idea you could reach mass market audiences for almost no money, by seeding messages onto a few key opinion former sites. Experience has shown that it is fiendishly difficult to achieve this level of exposure with genuinely new material. Our own experience with the famous picture of the Argentinian footballers clutching Gucci and Prada handbags from the Japan/South Korea World Cup, which made it on to the front page of the Daily Mirror, suggests that the best ideas tend to just happen and are tricky to replicate.

There are a few specialist corporate examples which have worked, such as the VW video, where the sunroof of a hatchback bites a curious cat’s head off – association with which was hotly denied by both client and agency. But the trend now seems to be towards the phantom launch of hot creative material such as the SONY Bravia colour ads. The first was shot in San Francisco and captured by local residents on mobile phones before being leaked to YouTube. The second, shot on a Glasgow Housing Estate, was leaked by the client/ agency themselves, who realised the power of limited release of much anticipated content through a community channel.

Widgets – A quick mention for widgets, which provide the user with the option to download a brand and associated technology onto their desktop. Widgets form part of the growing category of ‘push’ technologies, which send news, information and applications out to the user, rather than relying on a proactive decision to log on. They are particularly useful in sectors such as travel, insurance, or auction sites, where regular automatic updates are valuable and can help purchasing decisions. And because they are permission-based they imply a closer commitment to the brand or publisher offering the service.

Community sites – Much vaunted, but so far little understood by corporates, this is where many of the free-thinkers of the web have gone. The sector can be divided into early movers who have cashed in their chips and opened up to the corporate world (and to advertising) such as My Space (News International) and YouTube (Yahoo) vs others who so far at least have held back from the lure of the advertising dollar (eg, Bebo and Facebook). The former have developed into relatively mainstream media options, whereas the latter can only be penetrated by stealth and with significant reputational risk if you get it wrong.

Another important community option is blogging (see separate article by David Blanar), which certainly has a role to play in reputation management, (as Shell and other oil companies have quickly found out). The most effective response seems to be to engage with these pressure groups, whilst at the same time using the medium to launch your own blogging voice. GM has gone down this route in the US, allowing employees to present a more human face to the organisation by presenting insights into the inner workings of the organisation.

Virtual worlds – The ‘wild west’ frontier of media at the moment seems to be virtual worlds. Six months ago they were barely on the radar – now they seem to be everywhere, including the Sunday papers and BBC Breakfast TV.  Second Life is the main focus of corporate attention, with its glammed up flying avatars, virtual real estate and Duran Duran party island. Fashion brands such as Adidas and Nike have been quick to move in with virtual product launches and clothing options for avatars.

But the plot is thickening, as Lacoste launches the first avatar modelling contest, and Calvin Klein creates virtual perfume – apparently you can now surround your avatar with appropriately branded visible scent bubbles. Other developments include: context-specific virtual billboards which mirror the conversations of avatars who are close by; virtual tech expos – for real-life geeks to get together and check out cool new stuff; foreign embassies; and professional firms such as PA Consulting, setting up virtual offices to attract wired recruits.

For serious gamers though the preferred option has to be ‘World of Warcraft’, advocates of which can spend days at a time locked in virtual mortal combat. This is the kind of brand interaction which most corporates would ‘kill’ for, but sadly for the potential buyer, this site currently carries no advertising or product placement of any kind.

Who can I trust to help me make the right media choices?
So how can you take advantage of these new opportunities and get guidance on which options might be right for you? In truth, finding the right advice is not easy. Everyone seems to have an axe to grind and everyone has a business model to protect.

Unfortunately, agencies tend to recommend only the channels and media which ‘support the factory’ (i.e, the ones where they themselves make money). Media agencies may be reluctant to recommend blogging, micro-sites or email campaigns, which involve no clear-cut media spend and commission payment. Above the line agencies will generally push you onto TV or national press, regardless of audience or priorities and digital agencies will try and convince you that all your best customers are now online. Each argument will have some merits, but none present the complete picture.

In short, there is an opportunity for completely impartial advice on media and messaging options. The challenge here is keeping abreast of all the opportunities, and knowing when to put them forward. But where that knowledge is not available, then agencies should at least be seeking to recommend media innovation in their own area to challenge clients to stand out from the crowd. 

A word of caution
Before you all get carried away and start booking up innovative media slots, make sure you pick your options carefully. There is nothing worse than trying too hard to look cool, by putting the wrong brand in the wrong place. Being seen in the right places may create high levels of awareness amongst key target customers, but one false media move can have a seriously negative impact on your reputation.

A quick example of where media innovation can maybe go a step too far comes from the US. Boston.com Business reports that Holosonic Research Labs Inc has come up with a new audio spotlight device, which sends sound in a narrow beam, making it possible to direct messages right into consumers’ ears. It has been trialled in US bookstores promoting a new murder-mystery show on Court TV. Unsuspecting browsers in mystery sections in several New York stores are exposed to a voice whispering into their ears: ‘Hey can you hear me? Do you ever think about murder?’ Only of the inventors perhaps…!?

In conclusion…
Not all of these media opportunities will be right for you, but some just might be. If you want to stand out amongst the communications clutter, here are some useful guidelines:

• Do some research and find out where your audiences are going
• Review your media options and pick the ones that fit with your brand and audience behaviour
• Push both your media and creative agencies to come up with new ideas
• Develop your messaging with media innovation in mind
• Pilot and test before you bring the activity into the mainstream

Most media budgets should allow some scope for innovation. Make sure your audience doesn’t leave your media strategy in the dust!

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