Mutual Relevancy & Distributed Creative Development

According to Joe Marchese, President of Archetype Media, a company that helps advertisers build brands, and social media publishers to monetize content, any platform with aspirations to provide access to brand advertising opportunities across the new media landscape must be able to efficiently achieve ‘Mutual Relevancy’. That is, emotional relevancy to the content and the viewer simultaneously. A key factor in achieving mutual relevancy in brand advertising will be the creation, adoption and mastery of ‘Distributed Creative Development.’ Mutual relevancy is showing people stuff they want to see, but only in places where the brand wants to be seen. Thus, people accept the advertising, and it is the content surrounding the brand that builds the brand’s social currency. In this scenario digital distribution of traditional media assets (newspapers, studio movies and television) can monetize at higher rates, and potentially support the entire operational structure of traditional media organizations.

Determining mutual relevancy for brand advertising is no small task. It requires categorizing the emotional context of content for each brand advertising opportunity, followed by determining the most emotionally relevant brand advertising content for the viewer. Brand advertisers’ ability to access a critical mass of emotionally relevant, image-enhancing advertising opportunities, while actually enhancing the viewer’s content consumption experience, is the point at which digital assets will monetize at higher rates. The challenge is to develop systems that can efficiently and effectively determine mutual relevancy, given the emotional and therefore, human element necessary to determine mutual relevancy for brands. Look at search and contextual, for example. Neither of these is perfectly relevant by any means, but the incremental increase in relevancy has driven astronomical growth. It won’t be hyper-complex algorithms that crack the dam on brand advertising relevancy. Rather, it will be a reevaluation of the fundamental nature of relevancy and the application of a seemingly obvious solution made possible by current technologies. Even after the code is cracked on brand advertising relevancy, the full effects won’t be felt for some time, because advertisers and agencies will first have to adopt this new system. People will continue to change at analog speeds, regardless of how fast digital can change.

Perhaps the most significant factor in actually achieving mutual relevancy is a concept called ‘Distributed Creative Development.’ Hopefully someday, GoogleClick, or Yahoo/Right Media, or any other platform can deliver mutually relevant brand advertising, so that advertisers and agencies can provide the massive amounts of advertising creative necessary to address the seemingly infinite potential combinations of contextual and personal relevancy. Today, brand advertisers face a short shelf life for emotionally relevant creative. Distributed creative development has the potential to address a number of issues. With professional agencies acting as directors of distributed creative development, the market can more efficiently allocate the best professional creative resources. The application of community voting (implicit or explicit) allows the agency to leverage the knowledge of the masses in terms of what is emotionally relevant to them, while allowing the agency to focus on how best to use this to communicate the brand message.

Distributed creative development can also mean building modular creative components wherever possible. By building modular creative that can be combined and rearranged by the system at the point of the advertising opportunity, advertisers and agencies can significantly increase their ability to relevantly serve the maximum number of advertising opportunities. By building creative that can be personalized by both content publishers and content viewers, agencies can leverage the knowledge of the masses to achieve real-time emotional relevancy. The challenge here is for agencies to design creative that can be altered and still maintain the integrity of the brand message.
Thanks Joe Marchese, President Archetype Media, May 2007