Bringing Consumers into Your Orbit: Gravitational Media

Dave Carroll was once just your average anonymous consumer. That is, until a fateful United Airlines flight damaged his guitar. One music video and 4.4 million views later, United Airlines understood the gravitational pull of social media and was sucked into orbit.

United Airlines made a smart choice, responding via Twitter for its muck-up. The really smart learning from this? Tune in, turn on, but whatever you do, don’t just coast.

Capturing attention in the on-demand, dynamically-served media world is the defining creative challenge of our era. As expected, audience fragmentation and user control are undermining the cost efficiencies that mask the tremendous untargeted “waste” of mass media. Surprisingly, the audience engagement enabled by the very technologies that erode mass advertising audiences result in superior media cost efficiencies. Web 2.0 technology enables brands to attract their own audience. The ability to attract and nurture communities presents a tool for brands to counteract the forces undermining the efficacy of their traditional advertising investments. In difficult economic times where every marketing dollar must be stretched, brands must wean themselves from the addiction of mass media and move towards Gravitational Mass Media.

1. Audience fragmentation is correlated to findability.  Audiences will continue to fragment as search and navigational technology improve.

2. People attract people.  (See video above. Fast forward to 1:00 to hit the tipping point.)

3. The law of “perpetual publishing” says that audiences will keep the content fresh if the container is properly constructed.

4. Brands get what they give—yes, our metaphor spans physics as well as Karmic laws!

Gravitational Mass Marketers leverage the above forces to create a portfolio of evergreen, niche media assets that replace the need to purchase distribution from stand-alone media companies.