Make Your Own Channel!

BY: SEAN MACPHEDRAN  |  Advergames, Fuel Projects, Online Marketing

When you start digging into the Internet, away from the highways like Yahoo and MSN portals, and deeper past the popular blogs and websites, you’ll find some interesting little side streets and start to feel like you’re living in a William Gibson novel with infinte dark crannies and nooks, strange entertainment and exciting - sometimes useless - information. Sites that have perhaps been viewed only a dozen times in a month, like strange creatures of the deep.

It’s true. Media is fragmenting.

The thing is, because consumers are the ones digging, they’re going to be following patterns of behaviour based on their interests and psychographics. So we have Behavioural Advertising networks, and complementing that, further off the beaten track, is the contextual Google AdSense. So, we already have some solutions for fragmentation online. We can reach the nooks and crannies, as marketers we’re just not very good, nor do we feel safe, visualizing the thousands of sites we’ve never seen before, nor will ever see, where these ads are popping up (referring mainly to the google contextual ads). At the end of the day, it’s like trying listen to every conversation in a party at once, or trying to visualize every star in the Universe. You’re never going to be able to do it, only create models and take samples.

But where I did have a little burst (burp?) of insight is on our own project www.AmericanDadvsFamilyGuy.com. Launched last week for Fox, it promotes the new American Dad DVD - in stores now! One of the objectives of the game, where you can play as everyone from Stewie or Stan to Ryu from Street Fighter 2, was to develop word of mouth online, and it’s been doing just that.

In the nooks and crannies, I can see people talking about our project - having frank, fun discussions about gameplay, about special moves, about the DVD it’s promoting. Some of these conversations are only 5 people large. One click from a site lights up my Spy Radar, and is all it takes for me to track to the original conversation wherever it is on the web. There is a halo of digital conversation around the site, and it’s only one click away for me to be on the ground in the newsgroups, blogs, aggregators, content portals, you name it, where conversation around the promotional site is buzzing.

So while I can’t see every person who clicks, I do have a solid understanding about the sphere of conversation that’s rapidly expanding out through the Internet like a growing bubble - one that already contains around 100,000 players, and perhaps 1,000,000 who have seen a conversation, or banner ad, or link - but not clicked through.

The lesson is that we don’t need to worry so much about controlling media fragmentation and taking ownership of communications channels, it’s going to get worse and worse.

What we need to worry about (Get EXCITED ABOUT!) is building content and experiences that are worthy of conversations online. When you create a medium/message unique enough, with market insight sharp enough, it will cut its own media channel through the clutter. It will magnetize, polarize, the online conversations that your consumers are engaged with and - presto! - you will have built a highway straight to your doorstep. And if you were good enough, it will look like rush hour.