Certain thoughts can caress your imagination only if you find yourself in particular conditions. Your sensitivity reaches limits never reached. Your desires collide with the rationality that surrounds you. Your mind wanders and finds a break from work and thoughts. And around everything is different or so it seems to you. So I got off the last plane to join a great friend in Los Angeles and after having "drank" the book page after page FREE di Chris Andersons I said to myself “…even for advertising the time has come for a change… from tomorrow FREE. Why? Because the best witness of a brand is its consumer! It is today and it will be even more so tomorrow. Because I can't advertise my motorbike, my drink, the wine, the beer, the book and the technologies that have satisfied me and so do hundreds, thousands of other people the same…”.
Many business models live on income from advertising alone. For example, Andersons speaks, at a certain point in the book, of a "two-sided markets" model where two distinct user groups produce profits in a synergistic and indirect way. In this model, the consumer gets a good for free but pays the costs later, through the purchase of optional services including the so-called premiums. One of the evolutions of this model can be found in what is defined in the book as FREEMIUM. This term defines web-based economic models, where the basic service is offered free of charge and the premium services are paid for. In this model, 5% of payers maintain the cost of the service for all other users. Another evolutionary model is the "nonmonetary markets" in which the passing good between producer and consumer is the enhancement of the reputation often sought through gifts and favorable conditions. These three models very often develop their main revenues from advertising, reaffirming the importance of the latter, and although current and successful, if we look closely at the results obtained up to now by those who adopt them, they could in my opinion still have some modifications and why not find revolutionary adaptations that lead advertising itself to review its commercial and social role.
From these considerations, curiosity arose in me towards a new type of traditional and digital advertising, which I have decided to call Open Source because it is inspired by the free movements of other goods which throughout history have known how to revolutionize, enliven and make thought grow economic and social.
So why not encourage the development of a new type of advertising, free and produced by the consumers themselves. Why not develop social campaigns where the protagonists are from the local community, for example ordinary citizens and consumers of a specific area, Milan or even a neighborhood. Seeing your neighbor advertising his new BMW motorcycle on billboards with his own photos, pay offs, etc.! Wouldn't it be more fun and effective for the brand than to keep turning to the characters, styles and words of copywriters who are still trying to amaze us? but you don't realize that most of the advertising to get our attention uses the usual means: semi-naked women, intriguing men, slogans to "take your breath away", etc... The usual few emotions of an old and boring advertisement.
In many markets, to raise the value of a product and make it current and commercial, it was necessary to make it a commodity by shifting the consumer's purchase input to collateral services. Andersons book, for example, is full of examples.
Advertising, both traditional and digital, needs a strong and radical change. There is a need to change so that it is not hypocritical to describe a consumer as being at the center of the purchasing process without him being able to directly make his purchasing experience available freely and with conviction in favor of others, as is already the case. happening on social media.
Do you see policy issues? Do you think anyone can abuse it? or negatively affect the brand? what about sales?
To all these indisputable perplexities we should answer "... this is already happening ..." or better "... today between blogs, fan pages, ..." the consumer is at the center of the purchasing process influencing himself and others with free tools and despite this I've still read around of examples that can make managers and brands worry.
Do you think distribution costs too much? That the contents may not be of quality? with texts and commercials out of place?
Possible. But I wouldn't worry about quality and content. Users are "growing" from all points of view, just check how some Social Media in terms of content have improved considerably. Without forgetting the value of one's reputation which is increasingly at the center of the attention not only of brands but also of managers, professionals and users themselves.
But what would be the advantages?
The hunt for the protagonist of the campaign. Sharing shopping experiences. The development of a healthy protagonism that could awaken consumers and emotionally bring them back to the center of a process of which, not only for reasons of contraction, they feel only passive users.
Let's think about it! the future is here… and digital will be a land full of changes also for advertising!
