• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 2, 2008

Be confident. Don't feel threatened. Step back and let consumers build your brand.

That was Digitas Chairman and CEO David Kenny's central message to brand marketers and advertising agencies in a presentation on digital advertising at the Advertising Research Foundation's Re:think 2008 conference in New York on Tuesday.

Of course, joining the consumer-in-control movement born of Web 2.0 applications and social networks isn't so easy for multimillion or billion-dollar brands and the large agencies traditionally entrusted with their care. After all, what role does that leave them?

Nevertheless, the fluid nature and hyper-interactivity of digital media are pushing the industry to adapt or get left behind. "If there's one big shift it's that today, and more and more every day, people are building brands--not advertisers, not brand stewards, not ad agencies," Kenny said.

The function of agencies--and research professionals in particular-- is to listen to consumers and harness their feedback to strengthen brands, he said. That effort has to go beyond traditional research methods and measurement tools to grasp the "flow of conversation" people are having among themselves online about brands.

"Too often, brand people and agency people talk to each other in a way that has nothing to do with the way people are talking to each other," Kenny said.

Illustrating how brands can tap into a grassroots upwelling of support online, he highlighted a campaign Digitas developed for Miller's college crowd-oriented Spark beverage, which is half caffeine and half beer.

Examining blog posts, and photo and videos posted to sites such as Flickr and YouTube, the agency discovered an unspoken affirmation among Spark fans which involved proudly sticking out an electric orange-colored tongue--a common side effect of drinking the stuff.

The campaign ended up incorporating much of the user-generated material inspired by Spark, making the outstretched orange-colored tongues a centerpiece of creative efforts in cross-media campaigns.

"We took this very public, very under-culture idea and brought it to the forefront," said Kenny. "We used something people were already doing as opposed to formulating an idea."

An earlier example of that approach was Coca-Cola developing a campaign adapting the viral "Diet Coke experiment" video on YouTube showing what happens when Diet Coke is mixed with Mentos.

Kenny also showed how tailoring advertising to existing consumer habits can apply as easily to a more stolid marketer like General Motors. Based on user information gleaned from GM and other auto-related sites, Digitas was able to develop online ads targeted to individual consumers.

"The creative actually changes person-by-person, so there are thousands of different combinations based on what we know about a person, what they told us, and what they're looking for," he said. "It's about mapping people to the right product in the [GM] portfolio."

By engaging in a conversation with consumers, GM is simply building on car buyers' natural tendency to seek advice from friends and family and from auto research sites before making a purchase.

To get a true sense of brand perception, Kenny encouraged the crowd of researchers to take 30 minutes each day to read blogs and other primary sources of consumer feedback instead of relying solely on tools that track brand buzz online.

"The danger is that people go to the tools without going to the raw data so I encourage you to do both," he said.

Looking at the industry more broadly, Kenny said Digitas expects the Internet's share of ad spending to catch up with the audience in the next two to three years. By the end of 2009, the firm predicts it will reach 8% of total ad dollars.