by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

One of the biggest impacts of social media is the way that traditional forms of advertising have had to adapt to it.

As companies begin to embrace social media marketing, that means that a portion of their attention, time and marketing budgets are being diverted from traditional print and broadcast media to address social media opportunities.

But beyond mere resource allocation, social media have become a filter through which consumers and customers experience traditional advertising. Social media have created platforms for the audience to critique, recommend, forward, and even mash-up mainstream advertising.

The media is being mediated.

What’s more, websites like CNET and Trip Advisor redirect millions of dollars every day from one company to another based on their social media-style reviews and recommendations. Traditional advertising may draw attention to your product or service, but the online recommend-o-sphere will inevitably mediate your message—maybe for good, maybe for ill.

While the effect of social media on traditional advertising was first felt in the consumer sphere, a recent study found that nearly one in five business executives make purchasing decisions based on the advice they glean through their social media connections. In other words, they are allowing the traditional advertising messages they receive to be mediated by social media.

While social media marketing has created new opportunities for most companies, it has spelled disaster for others, especially traditional media companies. For example, as Bob Garfield points out in his new book The Chaos Scenario, Google bought YouTube for over a billion dollars and Viacom is suing YouTube for a billion dollars—and for the same reason: YouTube has completely disrupted the way people interact with the media.

Newspapers, radio and television are, of course, the main victims here. They depend on the unsustainable model of mass distribution of ads to an untargeted audience that is used to getting more and better customized media online for free.

Demand for advertising is falling and with it the price of ads. The audience is used to free media, so they aren’t going to pay any more for it than the cable bill, and even that is under pressure as YouTube, Hulu and the television networks’ own sites make high quality current content free on demand.

So just where is there any leverage? Two places: creativity and integration.

The only way to captivate imagination is creativity. Big creative breakthough ideas that engage an easily-distracted audience. And this creativity must be integrated in a strategic, intentional way across traditional and social media.

The integration comes in traditional media’s ability to drive traffic and involvement in social media. And social media can hand the microphone to the audience to let them weigh in on your traditional media efforts, even help you perfect your next message.

The risks and the rewards are there, but more and more, the audience has the final say. As the power structure of communication shifts from a top-down, narrowly controlled flow to a widely distributed, highly granularized base, creative ideas will still get noticed and foster customer relationships.

Just be prepared for some of those ideas to come from the audience.

by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

Looking at politics through the lens of communication theory reveals a lot of good lessons. For example, despite a recent uptick, the falling approval ratings of President Obama (http://tinyurl.com/nlgfn) coincide with the increasing complexity of his message to the American public.

He swept to victory with simple concepts, CHANGE and HOPE–or “CHOPE” as our colleague Mark Poole calls it. This simplicity was embodied in the iconic high-contrast red and blue poster of candidate Obama.

But since being elected, the increased complexity of things has muddied and muted his popularity. No doubt, the realities of the job and the problems of the country provided instant complexity; but the administration’s inability to provide a clear, crisp message on many issues, it’s embrace of multiple initiatives, and its failure to provide a simple message for the country’s direction are weighing it down with John Kerry-like complexity.

While the president and his staff languish in the weeds of complexity, the his detractors like Rush Limbaugh gain traction with simple—even simplistic—concepts and criticism. They are winning the battle of complexity vs. simplicity.

This is not a political blog, merely an effort to learn a lesson from the political sphere about simplicity’s inevitable triumph over complexity.

In marketing, the simplest, fastest path to getting a point across is usually the winner.

A great headline and short pithy text in an ad.

Video that can tell a whole story in 30 seconds or better yet, 15 seconds.

A billboard with fewer than five words. Preferably none.

These are the winners in today’s attention-deficit-driven marketing environment.

Simple sells. Complexity kills.

by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

You can order 250 full-color business cards from VistaPrint for free—something that would have cost hundreds of dollars just a few years ago.

Want to build a custom music library with an array of channels to fit your every mood? Sign up on Pandora. Also free…and with more variety than your CD collection will ever attain.

Want to read Chris Anderson’s landmark book Free: The Future of a Radical Price? Get the full electronic version completely free at Scribd.com.

What’s going on here?

It’s the radicalizing of the terms of engagement between company and customer where customers expect more and more for less…a lot less…preferably free. And businesses are responding.

Take for example office computing. In the recent past, you’d need to shell out at least a thousand bucks for a laptop and another thousand bucks for Microsoft Office and a few Adobe graphics programs. Well, today, you can buy a $199 netbook computer and use a host of free Google applications that do 80 – 90% of what your Office and Adobe programs do, from spreadsheets to photo re-touching.

This commoditization of nearly everything is driving prices toward zero…and it has cost many industries dearly. Experts estimate that Craigslist, with its millions of free classified ads, has single-handedly sucked three hundred million dollars out of the newspaper business—resulting in the closure of many of them— and even drained revenue from online auto listing sites like Vehix.com and Cars.com.

What’s at work here is the freemium model: giving a lower-level service or product away for free while offering an upgraded, more robustly featured version for a fee, often a relatively small one.

A great example is TeamPages.com, a sports team organizing website that is free with basic services, but costs $50/year for upgraded version and $70/year for an ad-free full-function edition.

The goal is to get people used to integrating the website’s services into their daily lives and then convincing them that the upgrade version is an even greater life-enhancing option, well worth the small fee being charged. If nothing else, TeamPages can sell ads and now owns a killer direct marketing database.

So how can your company leverage freemium, and what are the payoffs?

First the payoffs. Freeemium offerings can be exchanged for essentially three things:

Customer Data
In exchange for free goods or services, customers “pay” with information about themselves. Everything from scholarly white papers to samples of beef jerkey are given away under this freemium model.

Customer Attention
If a company can give away something free that customers use on a regular basis, then a relationship of dependency is born. Facebook has 300 million of these relationships and can sell that community’s attention to advertisers for an increasingly higher price.

Customer Relationships
Once a customer relationship has been established and reinforced through hundreds of online interactions, a certain level of trust emerges, and the company’s ability to sell something to the loyal customers is much greater than a cold-call with a banner ad or a direct marketing piece.

Freemium is, of course, a gamble. You are betting that the investment required to give stuff away will eventually be exceeded by the return of customer loyalty, paid in the three currencies of data, attention and relationships.

In slow economic times, freemium models can be used to keep employees…well, employed…developing new capabilities, while reaching out to new prospects who will become paying customers down the road. And as any good businessperson knows, the give-to-get model is often the key to building trust and validating expertise on the ultimate path to a profitable lifetime business relationship.

by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

I was reading the current issue of an ultra-upscale newsletter that is of interest to our clients in the private aviation business. Amidst articles for numerous luxuries was a story about the latest movies out for distribution. It occurred to me that movies are one of those things that seem to transcend economic classes, enjoyed as they are by the super wealthy and those of modest incomes and everyone in between. Everybody loves a great movie.

There are a number of things like that—universals, well might call them—that nearly everyone seems to appreciate and thus tend to transcend class, economic status, race and gender.

A few others:

Blue Jeans
Denim is that most egalitarian of materials. Despite the fact that you can spend anywhere from $10 – $1,000, the result is the same: you just feel good and relaxed when you’re wearing that favorite pair of comfortable jeans.

A Cup of Coffee
Whether it’s McDonald’s or Starbucks or Folgers, that first steaming cup of wake-me-up is equally appreciated by the homeless man at the shelter and the millionaire sitting in the massive kitchen of one of her five homes.

A Good Story
Stories—everything from a short parable to War and Peace—engage people at a deep level. Stories draw people in. Rich or poor, literate or illiterate, young or old are easily swept up in story. Stories have a way of taking people into deeper insights and emotional attachments that simple prose fails to achieve.

A Faithful Dog
My apologies to cat people here, but there is no companionship quite like a canine’s loyal friendship. I’ve seen homeless people caring for their dogs, as careful to make sure their pets are fed as they themselves. Dogs, being no respecters of pomp and prestige, treat their wealthy masters no better than their poorer ones.

A Pickup Truck
OK, this might be a bit less gender-neutral, but a good truck can be a good friend too. I had the opportunity to visit the CEO of one of our largest clients near his summer home in SW Colorado. We met at a little airport and he pulled up in a ramshackle old pickup. I’d never seen him look happier. He could have afforded a top-of-the-line, brand new truck every six months; but he seemed perfectly content with the old beater he was driving. From day-laborer to contractor to wealthy entrepreneur, a good truck is a prized source of familiarity.

In our post-recessionary economy and politically polarized society, these universals serve to remind us of our human commonalities, and reaffirm our appreciation for the value of the simpler things in life. Sensitive marketers would be wise to acknowledge and address these universals and leverage them to build their brands and promote their ideas.

Leveraging the universals can either be done with cynical manipulation (politicians) or with sincerity (the Salvation Army). It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes, but in either case the impact can be dramatic. If the quality of creative execution is good, you can tap into a common human tendency to seek what is authentic, simple and unassailable. One company that has succeeded on a national scale is Liberty Mutual. Never before has an insurance commercial made me want to be a better person like theirs do: www.whatsyourpolicy.com/videos

I can’t say how honest, ethical or sincere Liberty Mutual is, but their commercials tap into a zeitgeist that is much bigger, much more universal than a mere insurance policy. A good lesson to all marketers to try to tap into that which is most universal about the products and services they promote.