I’ll take a break from the theory stuff to share a story or two. (Also, I lost an argument. You’ll understand what I mean in a little while.)
One of my favorite people is Pepper Feraren (@pepperfer on Twitter), with whom I worked for over a year at Ogilvy. He was a planner who was very good at digital stuff. We got along like a house on fire. We stayed close friends even after he left to take a job at BBH Singapore, keeping in touch through Yahoo Messenger and World of Warcraft.
Half the things I learned about digital marketing, I learned from our chats. Pepper’s quite fun to talk to, and the conversation tends to flow quite freely whenever we’re together. I always walk away with new knowledge.
Earlier today I was debating with him about the central thesis of Al and Laura Ries’s book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR (the link goes to Amazon). As I understood it, the central theory of the book was that advertising had lost its credibility with the modern consumer and was therefore unable to fulfill its role of primary brand builder. The authors cite multiple examples of award-winning, creative advertising that were unable to “move the needle” and sell product. Al and Laura Ries argue that the role of primary brand-builder should therefore go to PR instead, as PR’s role is primarily concerned with reputation and credibility. (There’s more, but that’s not essential to this story.)
The book I liked... that lost me an argument. Boo.
In response, Pepper linked me this Nielsen study (note: direct .pdf link). Released in October 2007, it says that not only is traditional advertising more trusted than online advertising… but Filipinos (and Brazilians) have the highest level of trust in their advertising in the world (67%).
So, yeah, I lost that one. You traditional advertising guys can relax now.
So now I need to push one of Pepper’s terms.
If you don’t know, Pep loves to make up new terms and get them into the common vocabulary. By far his most successful effort is “MOMOL”, which he made up as part of a bet with one of the Ogilvy creatives. (For the non-Filipino speakers, MOMOL is short for “make out-make out lang“, which basically describes a very casual physical relationship.) MOMOL was so successful that it was the title of a movie released in 2007, and I still hear it from my friends today.
His new term, which I’ve now got to get “out there”, is Onsumer – the always-connected, Internet-savvy consumer for whom most answers are one Google search away. We all know someone like this (I’m one.) When I’m not online through a wifi connection, I have my cell phone browser ready.
Onsumers are interesting. They have a high affinity for technology but they’re bored easily. Novelty is important to the Onsumer, and if you show him something he’s never seen before, he’s more likely to be engaged. Run-of-the-mill is not good enough for the Onsumer.
Whose market is the Onsumer? Apple, for one. Technology companies in general want to sell to Onsumers – most Onsumers are gadget fanatics, as gadgets are the enablers that allow them to be online in the first place.
Are there any more Onsumers out there? Let me know – Pepper and I have some questions we’d like to ask you.
Not yet a full on ONsumer but…I think they’d be a perfect market for food delivery.
I’m a fan of wristwatches made by small boutique brands that don’t even have shopfronts. They don’t market in the luxury press, they don’t market in the mainstream, in fact they market very little at all.
They sell online, mainly. No distribution chain even.
They’re just seeded through a community of horology fanatics, mostly on forums, very knowledgeable about the category and from all over the world.
These forums aggregate information from all these user nodes and make it available for ppl such as myself to be equally knowledgeable.
Needless to say, these watch brands often sell out their first production batch in the pre-order phase, before anybody even sees the product in person.
Oh, I sit behind Pepper, but don’t play WOW.
I refuse to be an onsumer until the mobile telcos here structure data plans built for the new generation of media-savvy mobile devices. Case in point: Globe docked me over Php12k last month for mobile data usage, which basically said I was online for about 75% of my waking life. Granted, they eventually reversed the charges, but if they want to tap a market that wants to stay connected, they better keep up. Offering new phones without data plans to support their connectivity is just plain stupid.