Advertising placement, scene-based customization!

The situation in all aspects is not very good this year. Marketing is becoming more and more difficult, budgets are also tight, major platforms are under great pressure to realize commercial value, and advertising revenue of self-media is also declining. In short, the era of rapid development is over, and what we need to think about next is how to carry out more refined marketing.

The consensus in the past one or two years is that the effectiveness of advertising is getting worse and worse, and it is very likely that tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of budgets have been spent without changing anything. Brand advertisements are drowned in the ocean of information, and people pass by in a hurry without having time to take a second look.

Today we are talking about the integration of advertising and media. Media has never been just a place with traffic, the media itself can also be part of the content. In the integration of content and media, there is still a lot of room for growth in advertising efficiency, as long as everyone is willing to explore it.

Next, let’s talk about the solution:

Just a little special

Today's advertisements are too much like advertisements. They are obviously advertisements at first glance, but people are naturally desensitized to advertisements. They won't stop to see whether the creativity is good like advertisers do. The public needs special advertisements, different advertisements, advertisements that don't look like advertisements. Today’s advertisements are like the quiet beeping noise in a large square. Hundreds of millions of advertisements are broadcast every day, and most of them have become the background noise of society.

As far as the current situation is concerned, as long as the advertisement is a little bit special, it can stand out from the crowd and be seen.

If you don’t believe me, just watch the rap commercials like Earl Travel Photography, okay? not good. Any creative ideas? No creativity, no specialness? It's really special. We saw it and we remembered it.

This type of advertising is just a little annoying, but there is no problem with its values. Of course, this type of advertising is only effective for certain brands at certain times, and recently we have seen some brands blindly imitating it, which is very dangerous.

In my opinion, these rap ads are disgraceful. They are the most crude and low-level way of showing off one's uniqueness, while lowering the level of the entire industry. As a practitioner, I do not want this kind of ads to become popular. At the same time, if this type of advertising is done too often, it will no longer be special, and only the first one to do it will have the greatest value.

We need to think of smarter, yet respectable, ways to make advertising more special.

So, how can we make advertising more special without losing its dignity? Most of the time, creative people are looking for breakthroughs in the content itself, racking their brains to find more distinctive ideas, and there are many very successful ideas. However, creativity cannot be standardized and good ideas cannot be copied.

We need to find a traceable, scalable and methodological approach to make advertising special.

People ignore the content value of media and merely treat it as an advertising space with traffic. This is wrong. Media can become a part of content, and the media itself has a role and values ​​in mass communication, but most people don't delve into this matter deeply.

So next, we break out of the existing framework and establish a new formula: content plus media equals new advertising .

Customize ads for ad slots

According to the existing logic, most of the time, advertising content is created first, and then media is sought, with one content being delivered on a large scale across multiple media channels.

Can we go against the logic and have advertising space first, then create content and customize content for the media? Can this make the content and form of advertising more diverse, making the advertising more special and outstanding? I think it is possible. Let’s take our case as an example.

Recently, something I saw that is more worthy of mention is the advertisements that Ctrip ran in multiple subways in Beijing and Shanghai during its 20th anniversary brand promotion. How should I put it? It's a mirror corridor. In the subway passage corridor, travel destinations are depicted one by one, and then a mirror is built into the destination. As long as you stand in front of it, you will be anywhere in the world.

I think this is very clever, using mirrors to make an ordinary subway corridor come alive. Young boys and girls, if you don’t stop to admire your beauty when you see a mirror, you will be doing a disservice to your own beautiful faces. If you take a selfie in front of the mirror and share it, the effectiveness of this advertisement will be very high.

Let’s explain how to customize ads for ad slots.

Brand content plus media scenario

Since it is reverse customization, the content must depend on the media.

First of all, there is the role of the media. The subway is the subway, Focus Media is Focus Media, the official account or Douyin and Kuaishou are still on Weibo, and each media role is different; then there is the crowd, who are the people in this space, why do they come to this place, and what are their expectations here; finally, there is the content, how to integrate the content with the media but make it stand out. It must appear special in this space, but it must also be reasonable.

For example, Ctrip puts mirror ads in subways. First, it’s the media, public transportation, and huge flow of people. Then it’s the crowd. Subways are probably the most crowded places in the city. People rush to and from get off work, and actually don’t care much about whose ads are in the subway.

Based on the content produced by the media space, Ctrip describes poetry and distant places in the subway, moves various travel destinations into the subway, and displays them in a scene-based manner. It also displays them in a special form, through mirror advertising, in a highly interactive way in the subway corridor. People passing by in a hurry, when they tilt their heads and see me, can't help but give me a smile.

So in this case, brand content and media space are integrated. Brand content is a semi-finished product. Only when the media and the people in this space are added can it be considered a complete creative idea.

Old space creates new scene

How to make a familiar scene seem special? Design master Kenya Hara once said: "Turn the known into the unknown to keep a sense of freshness in life." This is cross-border thinking, allowing different ideas to cross boundaries and produce something different.

Why do we ignore the existence of advertising? Because they are all familiar scenes and familiar pictures, elevator advertisements must be colorful discount promotions, subway advertisements are all standard flat KVs, and public account advertisements all have unexpected twists at the ending. Everyone has fallen into a fixed mindset, and otherwise it would not be an advertisement.

So if you want your advertisement to be special, you can make familiar scenes unfamiliar, such as dressing up an elevator advertisement as a letter from the neighborhood committee, turning a public account advertisement into an in-depth report, or turning a subway corridor into poetry and the distance.

Back to Ctrip’s mirrored corridor, it actually makes the familiar scene of subway advertising unfamiliar again. In a crowded subway, you can experience global travel destinations and blend in with them through the mirror. Entering poetry and the distance from the humble land, this sense of escape is the basis for the advertisement to be seen and felt.

This device allows users to pretend to travel and can be played at any time during their commute. Just look in the mirror and you will find how beautiful you are when you travel. Through the mirror virtual scene, users’ yearning for real travel can be aroused, and perhaps they can start planning their next journey.

In fact, it is a scene replacement, placing an unfamiliar new scene in a familiar old space, and it is logically valid. It's just putting a flower in a patch of grass to make it eye-catching enough.

Large-scale customization

Finally, let’s talk about scale, which is very important. It’s one thing to customize one ad spot, but it’s another to customize dozens of ad spots across all media.

In this 20th anniversary of Ctrip, we have actually seen the first signs of large-scale customization. The subway mirror corridor is one of them, and there are also Ctrip cruises on the Pearl River and Huangpu River; landmarks of major cities around the world such as the Oriental Pearl Tower, Guangzhou Tower, and Burj Khalifa; Hainan Airlines' Ctrip theme flights, and Turkish Airlines' Ctrip surprise flights; including many customizations on the online communication end, making the entire Ctrip 20th anniversary communication complete.

Last year, I wrote an article titled "Systematic Subversion of Big Ideas", in which I argued that a single big idea is difficult to penetrate the public. It requires many ideas to form a system and a cognitive dome before it can penetrate and shape public cognition. If we look further into the execution level, it is the large-scale customization of advertising.

Previously, a large-scale campaign only had one TVC and KV, and then the final drafts were made in different sizes and formats. The most exaggerated thing I have done is to expand a set of posters into hundreds of finished drafts of different sizes. Some were arranged roughly, some were flattened or cut. In short, they were very rough, so the effect was naturally not good.

Now we should do personalized customization and customize different advertising content according to different scenarios and different media attributes. The purpose to be achieved in each media scenario is different. Some are for pure exposure, some are for strong interaction, some are for conversion, and some are for PR, so advertising must be customized on a large scale according to different scenarios and media attributes so that it will be more efficient.

Advertisers, please be more diligent

The image conveyed to us by the American TV series "Mad Men" is that the creative director is always smoking in a dissolute manner, and he will come up with a big idea in a flash of inspiration, and then the proposal will be successful and ultimately save a brand. Before I entered 4A, I always heard the legends of the masters in the hall. For example, when they could not come up with any creative ideas after working overtime until late at night, they would take a taxi from Jinbao Street to the beach in Qinhuangdao, listen to the lonely sound of the waves for a while, and then take a taxi back to the office. Then they would suddenly come up with a great idea.

I have great respect for my predecessors and I envy the creative people of that golden age. But today, the communication environment is no longer what it used to be. Marketing is a more complex and systematic thing, and it may require a combination of many small ideas to become a new "big idea."

Today we talked about the customization of advertising and media, and used the example of Ctrip to discuss how content and media work together and how media becomes a part of content. In fact, it is to further subdivide creativity, and customize different content according to the scene for each type and even each position. This is a huge challenge for current advertisers, especially those in the 4A system.

Customization is not just about traditional advertising space. On the Internet, in content marketing, customization is even more needed. The content of a big V, a Weibo topic, a Douyin challenge, Kuaishou UGC, each platform and medium has a different media role, and the content that needs to be placed is also very different.

A large-scale brand campaign, a core strategy and brand information, dozens of different types of media collaborate and cooperate with each other, some for exposure, some for interaction, some to enhance brand quality, some for authoritative endorsement, and some for traffic diversion and conversion. Each media form customizes content according to different scenarios, fully utilizing the value of the media itself, and ultimately forming a cognitive dome, allowing the entire brand campaign to be efficiently transformed.

Today, the stage of rough marketing and advertising creativity is bound to end, because brand owners do not have that much hot money, the effect of rough marketing is continuing to decline, and even most of the advertising costs are wasted.

In the future, advertisements should be more diversified and have richer content. It will no longer be a simple advertisement placed in an ad space, but an integration of media space and brand content, just like the Ctrip mirror advertisement we talked about today. I think we can summarize three reference standards: scenes, interactivity, and action.

The next step in marketing must be more diligent, with more refined customization and systematic collaboration to make every point shine.

Advertising is not only a mental job, diligence is also important.

Author: Yang Buhuai

Source: Yang Buhuai