• by Joe Marchese , May 8, 2007

Any platform with aspirations to provide access to brand advertising opportunities across the new media landscape must be able to efficiently achieve “mutual relevancy” -- that is, emotional relevancy to the content and the viewer simultaneously. A key factor in achieving mutual relevancy in brand advertising will be the creation, adoption and mastery of  “distributed creative development.”

Determining mutual relevancy for brand advertising is no small task. It requires categorizing the emotional context of content for each brand advertising opportunity, followed by determining the most emotionally relevant brand advertising content for the viewer. Brand advertisers’ ability to access a critical mass of emotionally relevant, image-enhancing advertising opportunities, while actually enhancing the viewer’s content consumption experience, is the point at which digital assets will monetize at rates far exceeding even Bubble 2.0 rampant speculation.

In short, mutual relevancy is showing people stuff they want to see, but only in places where the brand wants to be seen. The people accept the advertising, and it is the content surrounding the brand that builds the brand’s social currency. In this scenario digital distribution of traditional media assets (newspapers, studio movies and television) can monetize at rates that support the entire operational structure of traditional media organizations, and the dominant social networks have Google-like market capitalizations.

The development of systems that can efficiently and effectively determine mutual relevancy is a ways off. Given the emotional, and therefore human, element necessary to determine mutual relevancy for brands, the system will never be perfect. But just because perfection may never occur, that doesn’t mean solutions can’t be leveraged to unlock a significant portion of the potential. Look at search and contextual; neither of those are perfectly relevant by any means, but the incremental increase in relevancy has driven astronomical growth.

Here are a couple of secrets:

It won’t be hyper-complex algorithms that crack the dam on brand advertising relevancy; rather, it will be a reevaluation of the fundamental nature of relevancy and the application of a seemingly obvious solution made possible by current technologies.

Even after the code is cracked on brand advertising relevancy, the full effects won’t be felt for some time, because advertisers and agencies will first have to adopt the revolutionary system. And as Rishad Tobaccowala said at last year’s OMMA East, people will continue to change at analog speeds, regardless of how fast digital can change.

Perhaps the most significant factor in actually achieving mutual relevancy is a concept I refer to as “distributed creative development.” Whatever you want to call it, this is one of the more important issues facing advertising’s future across all media. Implied in the ability of GoogleClick, or Yahoo/Right Media, or any other platform to someday deliver mutually relevant brand advertising, is that advertisers and agencies can provide the massive amounts of advertising creative necessary to address the seemingly infinite potential combinations of contextual and personal relevancy. With additions to the various advertising situations, across various media, brand advertisers face a short shelf life for emotionally relevant creative.

Distributed creative development has the potential to address a number of these issues. With professional agencies acting as directors of distributed creative development, the market can more efficiently allocate the best professional creative resources, and tap into semi-professional and amateur creative resources. The application of community “voting” (implicit or explicit) allows the agency to leverage the knowledge of the masses in terms of what is emotionally relevant to them, while allowing the agency to focus on how best to use this to communicate the brand message.

Distributed creative development can also mean building modular creative components wherever possible. By building modular creative that can be combined and rearranged by the system at the point of the advertising opportunity, advertisers and agencies can significantly increase their ability to relevantly serve the maximum number of advertising opportunities.

Finally, by building creative that can be personalized by content publishers and content viewers, agencies can again leverage the knowledge of the masses to achieve real-time emotional relevancy. The challenge here is for agencies to design creative that can be altered and still maintain the integrity of the brand message.

None of this is coming tomorrow, but when was the last time anyone looked at a five-year plan as anything other than a work of fiction? Maybe we can’t plan for a future when we can’t see how change will happen -- but we can certainly plan to adapt to a future when we can identify why there will be change.