Dipping your toe into online is not enough

Luke Aviet, managing director Advertising UK AOL & Goviral, says brands need to think and act more like media companies, but to achieve this they need platforms that consistently help them make the complicated easier…

This time last month a huge cross section of the digital industry flocked to the Cote d’Azur to soak up the feast of knowledge on offer at the Cannes Lions, not to mention the sun, booze and food.

It might seem odd basing a piece around the festival a month afterwards, but there was so much information on offer that sometimes it takes a while to let it all sink in and formulate it into a coherent message – one that can not only directly improve your business but have a larger affect on our industry.

This happened to me with a talk by Eric Schmidt, who struck a huge chord with his view that successful online companies today have found that success because of their ability to establish themselves as a platform for others – something we call ‘platform thinking’.

Once others start developing their foundation on the back of yours, then you will be hard to replace. It is also a great reality check that you are truly delivering indispensable value. Google has proved this time and again – first with its Search, and later Android, Maps, YouTube and Gmail products – which can all be seen as platforms in their own right. Google+ in many ways is Google’s attempt to solidify all those platforms in to a “super platform”. Microsoft has Windows, Apple has iTunes and the App Store, while both Twitter and Facebook are rapidly becoming platforms in their own right too.

I think we implicitly realised this a few years ago at goviral and changed our mindset to fall in line with this thinking, but we’re seeing more and more companies come to this realisation and it is leading to a growing maturity in the digital market to the benefit of all of us, brands as well as users.

For video/content distribution, the goal is for clients and agencies to see our technology as the platform for getting content to the long tale with scale and quality, while removing the obvious complexities of working with more than a thousand vertical partners across multiple territories – something that makes us hard to replace.

However, this thinking can be utilised through all manner of online advertising. Through platform thinking brands don’t just see immediate results -you can add, develop and optimise your strategy and approach over time, essentially building a distribution channel for your brands with relevant publishers and users that are interested in your content – whatever that may be.

Platform thinking in marketing is somewhat new. It means that you don’t have to think in campaigns, having to start over again with every new launch. Rather brands can think of your offering as their platform for vertical distribution – just like one might think of YouTube as their platform for hosting and Facebook as their platform for social.

This can be taken one step further by benchmarks, set processes and workflow, and by creating brand specific players and teams that help brands move from just placing singular campaigns towards an “always on” positioning, a positioning that will eventually become the required outcome for any brand taking online and pull driven media seriously.

If Cannes proved anything this year, dipping your toe into online is not enough. Brands need a constant online presence to make impact or create cut-through, and that presence needs to be backed up by consistently updated creative and the means to get that creative in front of the right people. Brands need to think and act more like media companies, but to achieve this they need platforms that consistently help them make the complicated easier.