What happens when you apply TV to Social Networking
A virtual footnote on the Ad Age email and site today, Unilever and Sprint may have just launched Web 3.0 with InTheMotherhood.com. Or at least 2.6.1.
It came, I suppose as ironically as it could in our "big bang" world of headline and PR-driven mainstream media. The top story is about March retail sales being even worse than expected. Um – has anyone besides me noticed an annual slump in retail sales between Christmas and tax-return checks?
Number two was a story about CBS forming a special ad division for brand integration. Wow. Networks and advertisers working together? In the development process? What ever happened to my dear old artistically- and altruistically-driven art philanthropy of the networks?
The headline should have been, "Close friend in PR very excited about CBS execs realizing advertisers drive programming." We may still be in the scatter buy media model — but jeez, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we just went back to the sponsorship model that spawned the golden age of television?
After that was a "Who wins in deal." Your typical cognitive dissonance/American Dream/if you work hard you can win this lottery story.
Fourth was a story about Project Runway switching to Lifetime unraveling sponsorships. The kittens at Project Rungay have their backs arched and their tails all puffy. Oh the drama: but one woman’s passionate journey in a later-in-life-than-expected-coming-of-age story is another gay man’s richly-layered camp. John Waters couldn’t have engineered a more perfect post-modern contrast. Where narrow-sighted sponsors leave, more will follow, seeing the underlying (read: obvious) commonalities between the two audiences.
Then, buried way down, is the innovation of InTheMotherhood.com, part of an Ad Age 3-minute video report. Sandwiched between beer and beer, no one over there noticed how important this site really is: To brands, social communities, serving users on their terms, and creating a completely new narrative structure; the kind of narrative I carped about coming out of SXSW.
At InTheMotherhood.com, you can see right away how simple engagement can be for large brands. All they have to do is shift television dollars spent on funding programming and create their own programming.
The beauty here is that the narrative extends into the community — the audience of viewers. Ostensibly, they’ve used the Web to do nothing more than say, "What do you want to see? We’ll make that for you."
What results is this incredibly dedicated and vocal community of like-minded commiserators. It’s a win-win for everyone:
Community by Lottery
While everyone is obsessed with the idea of how to drive more engagement, InTheMotherHood.com gives all the People-reading moms what they want: a chance to tell their own story and have it influence a television show and a reality show.
If you look at how People Magazine’s editorial breaks down, it’s something like this:
1) Movie Stars
2) TV stars
3) Personal stories (cause/celebrity)
4) reality TV stars
It has been a continual recipe for success, with every time-poor, multi-dimensional mom taking time out to think about what life would be like as a celebrity. InTheMotherHood.com gives them all that.
Even more, by selecting certain stories and rewriting them, and flipping that into a video story of a winner whisked to the set in LA, every single member of that community feel like she could be the next winner. When you develop a lottery mentality of fantasy built on engagement, no one loses.
The participants all feel part of a vibrant community where their personal voices are heard and rewarded, and the brand benefits with what I’m sure are outrageous metrics — far more involvement than any amount of TV ad space can buy.
Ridiculous Research
As someone working in the field, you can bet that any campaign I create for moms will start with a trip to this site. The comments are honest, thoughtful, and entertaining. I’m jealous of the writers and designers who have access to the complete wealth of data — because having so many outlooks on a topic gives you such a head start… and allows you to do the job you’re paid for: evocatively communicating with an audience in the way that they want to be communicated with.
Circular Narrative Comes To Life
Running out of writing time here, but this is the illusive circular, or "non-linear" narrative convention the guys on the TV for Web and Video panel at SXSW were trying to get their arms around. You have these videos that are built as an outgrowth of the circular narrative rather than trying to spur community around the content. Women naturally express ideas in this circular, conversational, social way, and these companies have benefited hugely by creating a platform for this expression — really, giving it a staff and production facilities.
Could write a couple-thousand more words on this, but I’ll leave it here: All the components and the technologies used to create this site and the video have been around forever, but I applaud the courage of the people who work at both of these companies to put their own budgets and reps on the line to create such a tremendous example of what happens when you take the resources you have, and put them to work in serving your audience — not just prodding them to buy.
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