By David Burke
How many bars of soap do you have to sell to 10 of your friends to buy a communications satellite? The multi-level marketing company Amway would know, because they've shot one into space. Last year this company made billions of dollars, most of it from people who sold Amway products to people they knew. This is one example of the new marketing. In the future, any marketing campaign will operate less like a movie premiere or hit record, and more like an election drive or a religious cult.
"Develop friends of your brand," writes Bernadette Tracy, president of NetSmart, in her essay "Beyond Branding to Bonding." "Make sure you give visitors a truly motivating reason to return and to tell others." This commonsense advice illustrates just how the work of advertisers is about to change. Just as interactive TV encourages them to use the dimension of time, so they will now move through networks of friends, acquaintances and families. Instead of pushing a message, the marketers of tomorrow will be gathering and mobilizing groups of supporters.
Interactive television will allow them to accomplish this on a mass scale. Who watches programs about new technology and is the first to buy any new gizmo? These people are the all-important "early adopters," and interactive television will be able to make special offers to the early adopters you know. What if that friend of yours who always has the latest thing buys a certain brand of gadget? Chances are, he'll recommend it to you when you look into buying something similar.
What if all the top executives at your company were offered a deal on a certain brand of clothing, car or handheld computer? Would you feel left out? What if everyone on the football team at your school were wearing the same running shoes? Or what if all the well-off kids in your class had been offered a deal on a brand of bicycle or wristwatch? How would you feel then?
Any club, team or social group you belong to can be targeted this same way. Each one will have its own group dynamics, its own leaders and followers. Sales will go to the company with the best information and the best strategy for playing members of the group off against each other.
And the great thing about interactive TV is its ability to sell with discretion. Whether or not a marketer mentions other people is up to him. Sometimes, it may be prudent not to mention other people and thereby allow awareness of the product to build in the group without anyone noticing the concentrated sales effort. Later, it may be useful to purposely tie customers together, building on the identity they share as members of the group. Everyone in an office can be offered a special price product or service, perhaps on the invitation of one person, who acts as contact. Meanwhile, that contact and a smaller, select group, can be offered their own incentives to try something else.
These marketing techniques are as old as buying and selling. They simply require some understanding of how a group gets information, absorbs change and makes decisions. In other words, that group's psychology. Interactive TV allows the creation of marketing campaigns targeted directly at the psychological profile of an organization.
And as mentioned before, the one informal involuntary group to which everyone belongs is the household, usually a family. No social unit has been studied so long in such detail. Only now, with interactive television, will marketers play a full role inside homes, where viewers and their families interact. Every family will fit a profile and every family will show signs of where they stand in a cycle of changes and purchases. What an interactive TV set can then do is manage the information that different family members have and, to some extent, influence a set of interactions.
Working slowly, carefully, building coalitions of support, isolating opponents -- it could be said that this is how any salesman or politician has done his work for hundreds of years, before television. But now he doesn't need to ring the doorbell or stick his foot inside; he will live with us, in various rooms of the house, giving customized pitches to each person who lives there.
Imagine: the television in Winston Jr.'s room could offer him a video game in which he races the advertiser's new model car, the Victory, against his dad's old banger. Downstairs, Winston is watching the headlines. It seems that his car did badly in some safety tests. By coincidence, a commercial comes on for the Victory, featuring a father and son driving together. Just then, Junior comes in. He is pleasantly surprised.
Interactive television will even be able to influence self-selected, informal groups, otherwise known as friends. It will offer them services: chat rooms, video games, online beepers, mail lists and ordinary e-mail. All can be analyzed to produce lists of people who keep in regular contact. Whether they are used this way depends on the law and people's willingness to put up with it. But even when groups of friends cannot be identified, they can be created. Such a strategy is clearly visible on the Internet where people reaching out to their "like-minded peers" come back with a fistful of branding.
In 1998, the advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi sent psychologists and cultural anthropologists into dozens of online chat rooms. Their conclusions about people who use these virtual "third places" as if they were coffee shops and bars were offered in an essay titled "A Fly on the Virtual Wall: Cybercommunities Observed." The report's author, Myra Stark, describes how each of these personal, informal meetings can be turned into a powerful branding exercise. She advises marketers to create, sponsor or underwrite such communities so that "the brand communication is the community." She continues: "The intense loyalty of members to their cybercommunities is exactly what the marketer needs to build long-term relationships between consumers and brands."
Her work followed an article titled "The Real Power of Online Communities" in the Harvard Business Review, which made the same point: "By creating strong online communities, businesses will be able to build consumer loyalty to a degree that today's marketers can only dream of and, in turn, generate strong economic returns."
Anthony Lilley of Magic Lantern, a producer of interactive television programs, told the interactive advertising conference in London: "Television is really about communities of potential buyers" and that a good TV show could build those communities. "How does it really work?" he asked, and behind him was projected the one word in large letters: "DATABASES."
An organization that creates and therefore owns such an online group is in a position to monitor and even censor what participants contribute. Participants benefit from this arrangement only to the extent that they support the aims of the organization that owns the group — Shell Oil executives in a news group owned by Shell for instance, or environmentalists in a news group owned by Greenpeace.
More difficult to understand has been the participation of thousands of people in Internet forums about the environment, sponsored by Shell. And that is on the Internet, where any of the participants could easily have started his or her own discussion. In the costly, tightly controlled medium of interactive television, online communities run by public relations departments will be the norm. Meanwhile, the organizations that own the databases behind these Web sites will be in a good position to do their own imitation grassroots networking.
Imagine a PR disaster scenario for any government or company. Just as they prepare now, with entire "dark" Web sites ready to mount at a moment's notice, interactive televisions across the country would broadcast material putting the organization's point of view. Television providers would be in a good position to guess who had and had not heard about the disaster, and software could make snap decisions about how to break the news or answer criticisms, depending on what viewers already knew. Likely supporters of the organization could be mobilized, likely waverers could be won over and likely opponents could be deliberately confused or pacified in some way.
How these groups of people then interact on the streets, in the workplace and in the home can all, to some extent, have been influenced and even orchestrated by the organization's public relations office. This is the marketing, the advertising and the politics of the future.
- David Burke is the British director of the anti-television campaign White Dot. This essay originally appeared as a chapter in his book"Spy TV — Just Who Is the Digital TV Revolution Overthrowing?," (2000); reprinted by permission.
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