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Interactive Marketing.
Getting Personal.Sick of old-school ads that speak to the masses? You're not alone. Today's sophisticated consumers want information that interests them - and that's where interactive marketing comes in.
by Caitlin Sykes.
How many times have you had to sit through ads where someone is telling you stuff you don't really believe about a product you would never actually buy? More than once, I bet.
But things are changing. Marketers are getting smart to the idea that we're more sophisticated, don't like being 'sold' to, or sitting through ads that aren't relevant. So they're using technology to create cool ideas - online communities, viral campaigns or mobile-based competitions - that we actually want to get involved in and that can be tailored to give us information we can use.
Here's an example: Adidas ran a recent campaign encouraging recreational runners to develop an individual training programme online and get involved in a running event, called AdiRun.
The result, says Keith Norris, chief executive of the New Zealand Marketing Association, was "tens of thousands of hits on the website and thousands of new advocates for Adidas products". Good for runners; good for Adidas.
Rather than just your standard 'one size fits all' sales pitch, interactive marketing is about having a conversation with the consumer. That means the consumer gets to respond, or interact, with a campaign being run by a company, which then allows that company to, hopefully, make their future messages more relevant - like Adidas using the details runners entered on their website to design a training programme for them.
Interactive marketing can be as simple as a single email message or online ad, or be more complex and ongoing, like the Adidas example. It is often associated with the internet, and lots of it does involve stuff online. But it can use all kinds of media, particularly digital media like emails, texts, DVDs or even touchscreens. It's becoming more and more popular because, in a world where more people are spending more time online or doing stuff on their mobiles, marketers have had to adapt, says Cristel Russell, who teaches marketing at Auckland University of Technology. And sceptical consumers, especially teenagers, don't want to be talked to, she says, but they don't mind having a conversation and contributing to the likes of consumer-generated or viral campaigns that are cool or interesting.
Take this example from Telecom: its 'Push the button' campaign, aimed at users of its 027 mobile service, involved running an SMS tournament of a 'Battleships'-type game. The winner of the tournament then won the opportunity to literally push the button that set off explosions to sink a real-life ship!
But as well giving you chances to get involved in cool stuff, the trend towards more interactive marketing will hopefully mean we won't be bombarded with so much irrelevant information in the future, says Cristel.
"Instead of being harassed by multiple marketers who all want a piece of your dollar, you get only relevant information. So it's more personalised and more involving, and in the end hopefully it will mean we get less overall messages that are wasted and not interesting."
How do you get into interactive marketing?
He says doing a foundation tertiary course in marketing and marketing communications is a good start, and then you might want to do further study to hone specialist skills needed in the interactive field, such as programming, or digital design.
"Many employers are looking for evidence of a young person's stickability and commitment to anything," he says. "That's why it's worth getting some tertiary study under your belt."
And don't think once you've studied you'll waltz into just any job you want: "If you're lucky enough to get a placement or an internship, be prepared to start at the bottom and work hard to show you're a real 'tryer'," Lee says.
Aaron Goldring works for marketing agency Aim Proximity where his job title is head of interactive art. What that means is he heads a team of people that use digital technology - everything from websites, emails and texts, to DVDs, CD-ROMs and touchscreens - to get marketing messages across. Last year for example, his team put together the world's first 3D travel website, as part of a campaign for Air New Zealand.
Thirteen years ago, when Aaron started a Bachelor of Visual Communications degree at Auckland's Unitec, the internet wasn't the huge thing it is today. But he was always interested in it, and after working as a print designer, he decided to go back to school in 2000 and study new media at Media Design School, also in Auckland. After that year-long course he got a job at an advertising agency as a web designer. He's been in the industry ever since, but is now involved in dreaming up creative ideas for digital campaigns and heading a team of talented creative and technical minds.
Although he doesn't do much hands-on technical stuff now, he says having a good understanding of how digital media works is a good idea. In many workplaces, people need to be able to handle multiple roles, he says, and the technical and creative types have to speak the same language to pull projects together.
"The more strings that you can have to your bow early on in your career the better," he says. "If you can do the more technical and coding side of things, as well as do the design and creative side, that's a real strength."
While Aaron's not exactly past it at 31 years old, he says the younger members of his team inject valuable ideas because they've been living and breathing the internet since they were kids.
"We're always trying to realise why people want to use a certain technology or why they want to come to a website, or why they use their mobile and certain times, or even trying to work out what they want on their mobile," he says.
"You've got to tap into the people that live and breathe the technology."
What are some of the jobs interactive marketers do?
Lee Parkinson is a partner and joint creative director at Touch/Cast Next - the marketing agency that produced the 'Push the button' campaign for Telecom. Another of the agency's recent projects involved relaunching a 3D international office for real estate company Harcourts in the online game Second Life.
Lee says interactive marketing is a big field, with roles varying according to experience. Some jobs - such as an interactive creative director, art director or copywriter - involve being part of the 'creative' team that comes up with the ideas for campaigns and figures out the look and feel.
Other roles have a more technical focus. A web or digital designer, for example, will work with the creative team to help interpret what they actually want. They know what will work on the screen, and understand how to design the user interface so that a website visitor, for example, finds it easy to navigate. Then there are very specialised people, like the developers (or coders) who design the back-end of a website or other digital projects.
And the list of jobs in the ever-expanding field goes on: there are the interactive strategists, who have a 'big picture' of where the industry is heading and how new technology might be used; researchers, who keep their eyes on the latest trends and figure out what cool stuff consumers might want to interact with; and even database specialists, who make sense of the sometimes mountains of data that come back from consumers as they interact with campaigns.
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