ChasNote

If you’ve spent time with me in the past few years, you’ve likely heard some variation of my recommendation to “market in the vernacular of your customers.” (More here.) By that I mean: Figure out what attracts your audience to a particular media product or platform (whether it’s Vanity Fair, MTV or Facebook), and then speak to that audience with the same grammar, tone and format as the medium that attracted them.

This isn’t new. If I was among your target audience in the late 1970s, you were likely to find me watching the groovy kids on the sitcom What’s Happening. When Dr Pepper ran commercials starring a guy dancing his way across town dressed like the kids on What’s Happening, surrounded by a group of back-up dancers that looked like extras from the show, it got my attention. The commercial was nearly as much fun as the program, only shorter. I didn’t yet have an iPad and I had recently burned out on Atari Pong; the vernacular I spoke most fluently at the time was TV, and that’s the language in which Dr Pepper spoke to me.

Fast forward to today. If your customers get their news from Digg (where I work), they are speaking a vernacular in which yellow boxes next to blue headlines help them discover content they better not miss. The bigger the number in the box, the more they are likely to pay attention — since it’s a content item that has been vetted and recommended by influencers in their community.

Brands that speak to Digg readers in the vernacular of yellow boxes and blue headlines are succeeding with the Digg audience more than advertisers running more traditional banner ads. By an order of magnitude, in fact, if you’re looking at click-through rates.

Earlier this month, Intel took the idea a step further. They used Digg Ads units (Digg-able, bury-able ads between the 2nd and 3rd story on Digg’s homepage) and IAB-sized Content Ads to drive Digg readers to page filled with news stories breaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The page wasn’t a collection of press releases on Intel products, or even a list of editorial stories picked by an Intel employee because it said something nice about Intel. It was a round-up of CES stories that were vetted by the Digg readers themselves. Intel’s sponsorship created something that Digg itself was lacking: One page assembling the most important gadget news from CES for the reader who doesn’t want to be distracted by any other kind of news. (You know who you are.)

And Intel’s campaign took advantage of something else, too. While nearly 40 million people come to Digg each month, they’re not the only ones speaking the Digg vernacular. Readers of most content sites on the web have noticed yellow buttons and invitations to Digg stories right there on the site they’re reading. Like a Briton coming to America and finding out that we too speak her language. So Intel took IAB-shaped Content Ads and ran them on other sites — such as Wired and CNET — that also attract Intel’s customers in a context where those customers would understand that yellow boxes with big numbers in them mean there’s socially-curated content they might want to check out.

According to Intel’s David Veneski:

“The ability to ‘Digg’ something on the Web has become a ubiquitous sign of approval from a content hungry audience throughout the Internet. With our content ads the goal was to team up with Digg to provide genuinely interesting stories coming out of CES across a wide landscape of sites where our customers seek information.

“Recognizing the aggregation of compelling content was brought to you by Intel in a social friendly, audience approved ‘Diggable’ format gave us the ability to add value to our audience’s experience rather than just paying for an impression that may or may not be of benefit to them.”

Advertising that seeks to improve the audience experience? I like it. And I’m betting website audiences will too.

(Credits: Dave Veneski at Intel; David Zamorski, Sarah Reed and Melissa Sabo at OMD; and Elyssa Wilpon, Erin Coull, Dav Zimak, Eric Hoppe, Dan Contento and Mac Delaney at Digg.)

A simple advertising program we put together for Cheetos and its agencies, Goodby Silverstein and OMD, has gone very, very wrong.

The idea was straight-forward: full-day roadblocks of all ad positions on several of FM’s sites and video shows that attract hipsters, such as Boing Boing, Uncrate, Outblush, Mashable, Makezine, Barely Political, You’re The Man Now Dog, and others. The team at Boing Boing Video agreed to produce the Cheetos commercial spots that would play as a mid-roll unit between editorial segments. Now, all of a sudden, Cheetos has become a plot line inside Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, a fictitious country (and soon-to-be video game) dreamed up by the art / technology / theory group Monochrom. Here’s how it happened, according to Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin:

“Normally we’d just run this as an ad alongside our editorial content, but I love it and there’s a complicated story behind it, so we’re running it on its own. Now, allow me to explain further. Warning, I am about to get all meta on your ass.

“Boing Boing Video relies on sponsorships to do all of the weird, unfettered, free-speechy internetelevision you (hopefully) love us for. Cheetos approached us recently about sponsoring BB-V, in the form of six one-minute video ads we would create for them, which would run alongside regular BB-V episodes. They were remarkably hands-off and cool about the creative — the only editorial guidance we received was pretty much: don’t be mean (don’t do anything involving Cheetos that would make someone cry, particularly kittens), and avoid anything having to do with sex, violence and drugs. While they did not specify this, I also figured Nazis, pedophiles, 4chan (see previous), or Hugo Chavez (eye-roll) would be bad news.

“Together with the Boing Boing Video crew (Wes, Derek, Jolon) and the BB bloggers (Pesco, Cory, Joel, Mark, et al), we thought up a bunch of stuff we might do in the ads. We came up with lots of cool ideas, and shared them with Federated Media, who sell our sponsorships. But when all of those notions were laid out and storyboarded for video, none of them were sufficiently awesome, subversive, Boingy, or weird. So, I did what I usually do when I’m in that dilemma. I pick up my internet and I call Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom.

“Fast forward to the end of a long, coffee-fueled phone call, me in LA, him in Vienna. monochrom agreed to produce the 6 ad spots for Boing Boing Video, but with one requirement — they do so in the Alternate Reality of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, which is currently the subject of a game they are developing. Also, they will probably work Cheetos into the game, not because they or we are getting any money for that part, but because it’s ridiculous and meta and whatever — it’s very Johannes….

“As I type, the monochrom-bound Cheetos are still being held somewhere. I think we’re going to have to pay a bunch of money to have them released. Johannes and his crew produced this first piece without them. When we saw the video, it was so insane, and the ordeal behind it so unreal, I don’t know, I just felt like posting it solo was the right thing. Flame me in the comments if you disagree. But whatever you do, please watch it. Thanks to our sponsor for being rad. This is the part of the blog post where I say, ‘Cheetos Boredom Busters,’ and disclose to you that I am eating Cheetos at this very moment. And this is the part where I say, do svidanya, tovarishch.”

So Cheetos ends up with a Boingy ad that’s turning into a viral video, and Xeni Jardin thanks them for being rad. I hope I don’t get fired over this.

Check it out for yourself.

Turn the River release

From MediaPost:

“OMNICOM CONTINUED THE RESTRUCTURING OF its digital media operations Monday tapping Visa’s Jon Raj chief U.S. digital officer. The appointment comes amid a swirl of activity within Omnicom Media Group’s digital organization.”

Congrats, Jon!