I thought I'd take a quick moment to talk about the power of enthusiastic brand followers and one tremendous benefit they provide when it comes to video and marketing.
When a company is marketing its products it does so under very strict limitations. All content must be created and owned by the company. If a company is creating a marketing video, if they want to use a popular song track for said video, they must pay the artist. As you can imagine that can be quite expensive when it comes to popular artists (which is why you only see Coke or Nike using popular music in their video ads).
And even with said song track, the track is likely only appealing to a certain segment of the overall intended audience. And no company has the money to create multiple versions of a video with multiple tracks and by association pay multiple artists. Much less do they have the strategies for segmenting the distrubtion of said content to specific audiences.
This is where enthusiastic brand followers (via social media, specifically video) can come in handy. In the future, and it's already happening today, individuals who are really excited over a brand are out there marketing said brand. And as an individual they are not bound by the same restrictions as a company.
Technically, they are. But realistically, a band isn't going to sue some every day Joe for posting a video on YouTube with one of their tracks. Joe has no money and the band knows this, so what's the point of suing? However, if a company had used their track, you better believe they'd be suing (because obviously a company has money).
A recent example of what I'm talking about is the following video promoting a 'money bomb' for Ron Paul. The video was not created by the Ron Paul campaign, so they have no connection to it, and as such no legal responsibilities (it's purely grassroots). The video uses a popular Rage Against the Machine track.
Now I doubt Rage Against the Machine would even let Ron Paul use one of their songs even if they paid (although they might given his anti-war stance). Point is though, because this video was created by some person from who knows where, there's no problem.
In addition, when an individual uses a band's music, the band assumes (rightly so) that the person who created the video is a fan (and probably a consumer of their art). As such, I'm sure the band is actually happy to see them using their music (the thought of suing them or telling them to take down their content probably doesn't even come to mind).
Having enthusiastic brand followers can open up a huge world of marketing opportunity and content creation that a corporation, especially small and mid caps, simply can't engage in themselves.
In addition, users create marketing content that appeals to their demographic. Which means, with enough enthusiastic brand followers, you can penetrate multiple target audiences with content that resonates with them (because it was created by one of their own).
Now, like anything that has a benefit in life, there usually comes associated risks. The risk, if you haven't already figured it out in this case, is that user created content can redefine what a brand means. For many corporations, who spend thousands or millions defining their brand, this is a scary concept.
Yet there's no way around all this. User created video content (which basically is tantamount to a commercial) will grow more and more common (I think video is the future of socmed and will far surpass Twitter and Facebook as the medium through which ideas are communicated). As such, organizations must prepare themselves to empower said users to create compelling content while at the same time become thick skinned to the reality that their brand will be a hybrid of the brand definitions they create and the brand augmentations users create.
Right now user created content is done by the most enthusiastic of followers with no help from the various brands themselves. But in the Ron Paul video above, one thing the campaign could have done to encourage said content creation is to have a data base of all Ron Paul video associated with the campaign. This would then allow users to simply go to one spot and get all the 'footage' they need to build out their own video. This would also help the campaign mitigate what video clips users are using, thereby supporting the brand messages that they want to see front and center.
When constructing your brand today you have to think simply beyond the activities and messages that you are going to use and also factor in the potential user created content that will take place outside of your control.
Companies who do this will find themselves with a grassroots marketing force creating content that the company itself cannot legally create and creating a wide assortment of content that augments the marketing efforts of the company itself.
It can be a little odd to view your brand as a 'shared asset' but like it or not that is the future. And there's no reason it can't be an amazing future where your brand followers are creating compelling content, on your behalf, for free!
When a company is marketing its products it does so under very strict limitations. All content must be created and owned by the company. If a company is creating a marketing video, if they want to use a popular song track for said video, they must pay the artist. As you can imagine that can be quite expensive when it comes to popular artists (which is why you only see Coke or Nike using popular music in their video ads).
And even with said song track, the track is likely only appealing to a certain segment of the overall intended audience. And no company has the money to create multiple versions of a video with multiple tracks and by association pay multiple artists. Much less do they have the strategies for segmenting the distrubtion of said content to specific audiences.
This is where enthusiastic brand followers (via social media, specifically video) can come in handy. In the future, and it's already happening today, individuals who are really excited over a brand are out there marketing said brand. And as an individual they are not bound by the same restrictions as a company.
Technically, they are. But realistically, a band isn't going to sue some every day Joe for posting a video on YouTube with one of their tracks. Joe has no money and the band knows this, so what's the point of suing? However, if a company had used their track, you better believe they'd be suing (because obviously a company has money).
A recent example of what I'm talking about is the following video promoting a 'money bomb' for Ron Paul. The video was not created by the Ron Paul campaign, so they have no connection to it, and as such no legal responsibilities (it's purely grassroots). The video uses a popular Rage Against the Machine track.
Now I doubt Rage Against the Machine would even let Ron Paul use one of their songs even if they paid (although they might given his anti-war stance). Point is though, because this video was created by some person from who knows where, there's no problem.
In addition, when an individual uses a band's music, the band assumes (rightly so) that the person who created the video is a fan (and probably a consumer of their art). As such, I'm sure the band is actually happy to see them using their music (the thought of suing them or telling them to take down their content probably doesn't even come to mind).
Having enthusiastic brand followers can open up a huge world of marketing opportunity and content creation that a corporation, especially small and mid caps, simply can't engage in themselves.
In addition, users create marketing content that appeals to their demographic. Which means, with enough enthusiastic brand followers, you can penetrate multiple target audiences with content that resonates with them (because it was created by one of their own).
Now, like anything that has a benefit in life, there usually comes associated risks. The risk, if you haven't already figured it out in this case, is that user created content can redefine what a brand means. For many corporations, who spend thousands or millions defining their brand, this is a scary concept.
Yet there's no way around all this. User created video content (which basically is tantamount to a commercial) will grow more and more common (I think video is the future of socmed and will far surpass Twitter and Facebook as the medium through which ideas are communicated). As such, organizations must prepare themselves to empower said users to create compelling content while at the same time become thick skinned to the reality that their brand will be a hybrid of the brand definitions they create and the brand augmentations users create.
Right now user created content is done by the most enthusiastic of followers with no help from the various brands themselves. But in the Ron Paul video above, one thing the campaign could have done to encourage said content creation is to have a data base of all Ron Paul video associated with the campaign. This would then allow users to simply go to one spot and get all the 'footage' they need to build out their own video. This would also help the campaign mitigate what video clips users are using, thereby supporting the brand messages that they want to see front and center.
When constructing your brand today you have to think simply beyond the activities and messages that you are going to use and also factor in the potential user created content that will take place outside of your control.
Companies who do this will find themselves with a grassroots marketing force creating content that the company itself cannot legally create and creating a wide assortment of content that augments the marketing efforts of the company itself.
It can be a little odd to view your brand as a 'shared asset' but like it or not that is the future. And there's no reason it can't be an amazing future where your brand followers are creating compelling content, on your behalf, for free!
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