Authentic Advertising

As marketers the online space affords us a medium to communicate with today’s more sophisticated consumers. Indeed, consumer’s today are much too savvy. It is simply not enough to have a clever tag line and a catchy jingle. From an awareness standpoint, your product might enter the consumer’s consideration set, but in order to truly move the needle, us marketer’s need to adopt a more authentic approach to advertising.

So what is ‘authentic advertising’? As ironic as it might appear to be ‘authentic advertising’ does not emphasize the product and driving sales is a secondary, more ancillary goal. It is all about engaging the consumer and pushing content that is actually useful to the consumer. This allows brands to build strong, close-knit communities of like-minded people, and consequently this can be a fairly successful mechanism in driving home the brand’s primary message.

The dynamics of the online channel allow advertisers to really take advantage of authentic advertising. The two way dialogue between company and consumer is much more effective in engaging end users and genuinely providing value. For instance, Dell has built an extremely effective customer service platform via Twitter. Other examples of this are online travel sites that maintain blogs on travel tips and destinations. The most shining example of authentic advertising, however, is the Nike + Running community. It is extremely effective in bringing the running community together. It includes ways to track, share and compare your runs with other members of the community, while also staying especially careful to not overtly push Nike products on people. This ‘backdoor’ approach to advertising has really helped bolster Nike’s reputation as the consummate running brand.