I attended a series of seminars called Digital Sparks a couple of weeks ago. The seminars were hosted by Brandhouse, a strategic consultancy and design agency that helps clients use emotion to build stronger and more profitable brands, at The Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, London. Cool venue, by the way. Thanks to the guys at Brandhouse for inviting me along.

The purpose of the morning was to invite four digital thought leaders to share their cutting edge knowledge and discuss how brands can make an emotional connection in the digital space. Each of the talks was recorded and all of the videos are here to view.

My favourite was the first speaker, Pettri Lattu from W.Steinmann in Helsinki, who is an expert in helping brands tell stories and engage across a number of different platforms (transmedia storytelling, in industry speak) and has won awards for his creative work with Adidas, Nike and Nokia.

His presentation is below, which you can watch. If you don’t have time to watch it, I have included a quick summary further below of, what I thought, were the main points.

Petri Lattu, W. Steinmann, on Transmedia Storytelling @ Brandhouse Digital Sparks from Brandhouse on Vimeo.

Summary:

• According to Forrester in 2009, 72% of the digital population belongs to a social network
• 52% base their decisions on peer opinion – Razorfish ’09; and
• 62% of people trust brands less than a year ago – Edelman ’09

What does this mean? Petri believes that traditional models of communications, branding and marketing are broken and we are moving into an era not of projection (ie. who can shout the loudest) to one of ‘be-ing’, where to engage consumers brands need to change the way they behave.

He believes that this can done through 3 different, interconnected activities, or cornerstones, as he calls them:

1. Outposts
   • Identify and reach the culture and audience you want to be part of. To do this you need listening tools
2. Transmedia
   • Turn your communication into a cloud of activities. Behave according to the medium and tell stories. Transform advertising into content and experiences.
3. Chaining
   • Understand that building friendship takes time. Strategise your activities so that they form a progressive path to a deeper relationship.

Petri then explained what he thought were a new set of rules that brands would have to adhere to in the ever changing marketplace. The new rules are:

1. Listen
   • We monitor, participate, learn and gain insight on our audience. Intelligence rediscovered.
2. Engage
   • We always create a real reason to be with us – we provide a market leading brand experience
3. Remember: I am not their friend
   • We treat the audience with respect. We aim to be their best frienemy.
4. Be useful
   • We strive to create communication and marketing that is worthy to our audience, be it experiences, entertainment, services, value or other benefits.
5. Don’t treat anything as an ad
   • Our aim it to create activities that people participate with voluntarily. We see beyond the advertising model and create collaborative platforms.
6. What you do lasts forever
   • We realize that what we do can be scrutinized ten years from now – we also chain our activities together better than before
7. We can’t fake it
   • We strive for authenticity and are consistent in our chosen method of communicating
8. The world is transparent – no silos anymore
   • We dismantle the silos between our marketing channels and create holistic, engaging clouds of communication.
9. We are strategic
   • We lead the market in understanding the aims and the effects of our activities and base our decisions on true insight.

He made a few final points that I liked:

• This is not new, this is now
• If this is new to you then you may already be too late
• If you are competing for ‘share of voice’ then you are probably doing something wrong

What does this all mean? Whilst I believe that Petri’s talk was coming from, predominantly, large brand experience, I think there are lessons and insights for companies of all sizes in his talk and whether you have a big marketing budget or not. The interesting part, I believe is that I think that smaller companies may have a great opportunity in front of them to compete, engage and grow their business in this changing marketplace as I believe that, culturally, it may be easier for them to adapt and change than it will be for the larger companies who have for decades operated in silo and projection fashion.

What do you think?