The web is it

The internet has brought about many changes since its birth little more than 15 years ago, but one of its less predictable effects has been a surge of innovation within the advertising industry. Shaken by the erosion of traditionally captive audiences on TV, radio and in newspapers, companies have begun to change the way they reach out to consumers.

Where once they would subject us to the hard sell, the new messages are smarter, slicker and, at first glance at least, may not seem to be selling anything at all. When media consumers have so much choice, the goal is to produce an advert that people choose to watch, and will recommend to friends. The old maxim that content is king is proving to be true in advertising too.

A good example of the trend is coca-cola.com, a brand-building exercise that goes well beyond the scope of a traditional marketing campaign. Coke wants visitors to create their own short films in response to ‘challenges’ (essentially creative briefs) set out the site, and then to post them on the site so that other users can view and rate them.

The challenges are designed to elicit responses that are broadly consistent with the brand – that is, positive, active and fun – but entrants are not expected to mention Coca-Cola within their videos. Tom Daly, the company’s group manager of interactive marketing, says that entries will be moderated to ensure that they are on-brief and free of offensive content, but he insists that the company will not make value judgements about what ends up on the site. "That would be disastrous," he says.

This ticks a lot of Web 2.0 boxes: it abandons the top-down, one-to-many model of traditional media, creating instead a forum designed to foster a social network of users who generate their own content.

But there’s a hard-nosed business case for it too. Advertisers have been unnerved by the flight of under 25s in particular from traditional media, as they spend more and more time online. "They’re watching less TV," Mr Daly says. "Coca-cola.com was clearly a response to that."

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