Godin and the Impact of Change

Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage, Event, digital ooh

Mitch Joel’s twitter post keyed me to a talk given by Seth Godin almost 2 years ago. The video itself is focused on how Seth has used various tactics to create conversations with and between his audience (or sell his 10 best selling books over the years if you’re a cynic). I recommend you watch it for a few reasons:

Seth is a great author and speaker and always provides interesting insights
I loved how he starts off his talk relating the lack of wants for monks to use change because they’re busy and like how they’re doing things now. While Seth was talking about the publishing industry, it just as easily relates to the media business – People don’t want to start to use a better mousetrap if they don’t have to and will let you go your own way until it becomes either a threat or beneficial to them.
As he says in his talk, the powers that be aren’t incented to be catalysts for change in any business – that’s YOUR job. As smart as the folks are in ANY business, there is rarely a real incentive at the top to innovate or do a core job very differently. This means that it’s up to the folks who are effecting the change to….
….prove it. Prove that your way of doing things is necessary and better than how I’m doing things now. This is just as true in media…more research and metrics programs anyone? results?
Lastly, in listening to all of the strategies and tactics Seth has used over various books, he made mistakes – as you inevitably will when you innovate or “try stuff”. He learned from those mistakes and improved on them and came out with a better model. In media, I would relate this to some of the work I did in online advertising in the late 90s. There were online campaigns we did that were abject failures for our clients…some of them large banks or telecommunication companies. But we didn’t stop pushing use of the medium nor did my clients shy away from identifying mistakes and improving and going back out to try it again and they became more and more successful the further they got into the medium. Mistakes are allowed….the first time

There is one part, about half way through that I believe in sooo much. He discusses a test he did with a book he wrote called the “Dip”. The test was to write a blog post about HIS new book and the same day write a post about a friend’s book. That day he sold 3 times more of his friend’s book than his own. Why? because people assume that if he is writing about his own book, he’s “advertising” whereas if he is writing about a friend’s book, it must be because he really likes it and it’s worth buying.

Why is this important to Digital OOH? I’ve discussed in the past how advertising/advertisers have to be a PART of the conversation in today’s media circus and not BE the conversation….i.e. you yelling about your own products is going to fall on deaf ears. You using other peoples comments from various sources IN one of your ads adds credibility. Check out twitter to see who is speaking about, say, Orbit Gum. Sure, there’s some raunchy/weird comments in there, but Orbit customers are generally extolling how much they love it….BY FLAVOR!

So how powerful would using some of their commentary be in an ad in an environment and screen like this:

Right when they get into the store? Using digital conversations on digital screens where products are bought or where conversations are relevant and beneficial to consumers?

We’re finding lots of interesting tidbits of successful DOOH ad use in ways like this and it’s helping to push that “prove it” mentality Seth mentioned.

The video can be viewed here.