It’s become commonplace to note that the “consumer is in control,” but Brad Brinegar, chairman and CEO of McKinney, introduced a MIXX 2.7 Conference panel by noting that he didn’t feel very much in control when he recently waited for the pre-roll to wind up when trying to watch online video recently. Nevertheless, a panel of featuring a TV network executive, two digital agency execs and a major marketer discussed they are all content creators, but none feel they have a great deal of control either.
– Joseph Crump, executive creative director, Avenue A | Razorfish: We’re at a major inflection point where our reach does not equal our grasp. My point of view is that great ads make people lean forward and we’ve created a lot of mediocre messages. at some fundamental level, it will cause people to be engaged and not feel that they’re being ‘messaged at.’ Two whole years ago, it was difficult to make TV people do the transition from. And there are a lot of trade-offs that will have to be made during that process.
– Andrew Markowitz, director, Digital Marketing, Kraft Foods: By tapping user content, a company like Kraft can and is becoming a content creator. “People are going to look at Kraft as a content company. We are just as viable a content creator as Conde Nast is or Joe Smith down the street.”
– Peter Naylor, SVP, Digital Media Sales, NBC Universal (NYSE: GE): Not all video are created equal. You’ve got perishable content, such as news, or evergreen content, such as parenting-related content at iVillage. We’re casting a wide net and trying to experiment as much as possible. Reiterating a comment from an earlier pane, the need to fail faster is great. “We need to know when we’ve failed on something within two months, not in two years.”
– Dawn Winchester, EVP, chief client services officer, R/GA: If you’re a brand, you have to open yourself to user-generated content, such as letting them rank your products. But there’s a certain degree of reluctance to do that because of the risks to the brand. A lot of the decisions that should be held by marketers have been turned over to lawyers, in terms of user-generated content. Ultimately, by staying out of the user-content, you’re taking a bigger risk by not allowing your company to be part of the conversation that your competitors are taking advantage of.
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