The Power of Influence

Is Luxury Dead? Maybe Not.

Guess who says the following attributes are most influential in making "important purchases" today: value, price, overall quality, good design and functionality?

A clue: 84% of this group texts from cellphones; 78% use social networking; 66% use the mobile web and 57% use mobile apps.

It's not who you think it is. In fact, it's a group whose median age is 45, not 19.

According to "The New Face of Affluence," an in-depth study from Dwell Strategy and Research, San Francisco, these are the attributes that drive purchase decisions of the "New Affluents." Indeed, the median household income of the more than 1,000 survey respondents is nearly $200,000. They're the same people who have the economy and the environment top-of-mind when making these purchase decisions.

Using 2009 Mendelsohn Affluent Survey psychographic data, and with the help of DJG Marketing, New York, Dwell identified a segment of nearly 9 million Americans who have household incomes of $100,000 or higher. They represent less than half of 1% of U.S. households, spend $303 billion annually on their favorite brands and have a whole new take on what it means to be wealthy.

According to the survey respondents, "luxury" brands, per se, are no longer important to them, or even relevant; neither is "overall social status," they say. This generation of nouveau riche is shunning "conspicuous consumption" in favor of brands that represent quality, aesthetics and authenticity. These attributes, along with uniqueness, integrity, design and performance, represent today's "prestige" for these high-end consumers. And their emerging values and brand motivations make these consumers a more diverse group than one might assume.

A brand does not have to be expensive to attract New Affluents. What they're now demanding from brands is a new and different kind of relationship. And, as supported by these findings, the days of controlled, top-down brand marketing are over, especially for this sector. These wealthy and would-be elites are actually looking for brand interaction -- a dialogue -- based on integrity, authenticity and performance. And not only are they equipped for interaction, they're demanding it.

So what brands do New Affluents find meaningful, authentic and relevant? Apple, Sony, BMW and Ralph Lauren, unsurprisingly. But Crate & Barrel, Ikea, Whole Foods and Levi's, too. Porsche, Lexus, Chanel and Viking. And Target, North Face, Volkswagen and The Gap. Missing from this segment's 75 favorites list are classic luxury brands like Cadillac, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Armani and Versace.

These New Affluents are smart (85% graduated from four-year colleges; 52% did post-graduate work) and hard working (50-plus hours per week -- both at home and in the office); their families are their No. 1 priorities (40% have children at home). And, at a median age of 45, they are well-off. But they got there through careers that for them are a means to an end (only 4% rated "career" as a No. 1 priority). Success for them is having the independence to involve themselves in family -- and their well-being. The qualities they most associate with "prestige brands" are aesthetics, innovation, integrity, originality and authenticity. They don't buy anything "to impress others."

The majority of New Affluents agreed completely that "technology is indispensable to the way I communicate." So, just like the Gen Xers so many marketers seem obsessed with, these New Affluents text, tweet and post on social networks. "They are powered by 21st century technology" -- all of which came of age when they did. It's an integral part of their lives. Google and Dell are among the most frequently cited brands as meaningful to them.

The study's takeaway will be no surprise to successful brand marketers, except perhaps that now it applies to this heretofore stratospheric source of revenue, too: Define an integrated, consistent and positive interaction that reflects your brand's values, and understand that these consumers depend on mobile connections and social networking just like their mass-audience counterparts.

In other words, cultivate a relationship, don't just sell a product. "Great brands create experiences, not products," say the majority of the study's respondents.

It may be time for more brands to consider this sector as a source of revenue. If you're authentic, functional and design-centric, and you know how to cultivate a genuine relationship between the brand and these New Affluents, then it may be time to consider some targeted, interactive communication with them. If you can generate a "personal connection" like their other top brands do, and engage them in a meaningful way, 86% are even willing to pay more for a brand they like. They are classic early adopters, and willing to embrace brands that heretofore might be considered unworthy. Some of their emerging top brands have already figured this out and are breaking new ground creatively and are using new media.

Many of their top brands eschew traditional advertising forums to focus on web outreach. Nordstrom is one of their many favored brands posting banner ads online. For some, targeted catalog distribution is a core marketing vehicle: Design Within Reach and Room & Board both distribute impressive catalogs on a regular basis, in addition to aggressive online marketing.

Other brands have maintained and even enhanced their cachet through a reliance on long-standing brand attributes that are now even more important to this sector: quality, design, functionality and innovation. These brands include BMW, Mercedes, Bosch, Nike, Hans Grohe, Volvo, Bose, Porsche, Rolex, Canon and Viking.

Even a big-box retailer has earned its way into New Affluent-favored status as one of these "authentic," "meaningful" brands: Target. In part through its bold "Expect More. Pay Less" positioning and advertising, Target has turned a seeming contradiction into a compelling design-driven platform -- one that has direct appeal to New Affluents. Target is once again realizing net earnings growth and increased margins, no doubt in part because they've added incremental appeal to a high-spending sector without losing their base. Target has successfully extended its customer relationships through ancillary programs such as "Dream in Color" and "Democracy of Design," and their many museum and theater partnerships, including the Target National Design Center at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York.

Target has helped make good design accessible to everyone.

In fact Target has taken a page out of Russell Wright's mantra, "the importance of the value of good design in everything and for everyone." Wright, who preceded Martha Stewart's retailing to the masses by 50 years, extended modernist design to the masses in furniture, accessories, dishes, glassware and table linens. Now, the study shows, there are a number of collectible, retro brands that are also among the New Affluents' top choices: Herman Miller, Knoll and Eames.

So, is luxury really dead?

No. But it has been redefined by those in the category who have clearly rejected "social status" as a contributing factor to purchase decisions. They're buying fewer things of higher quality; they're shying away from disposables when they have a choice. They have replaced older values with contemporary new qualities such as the economy, sustainability, the environment and current cultural trends as top-of-mind issues affecting these decisions.

They're using new language. Attributes like uniqueness, know-how, design and performance have redefined "prestige." Now it's "self expression," not "status." The New Affluents' brand choices evidence at minimum the demand for a new dialogue with them. Don't sell them a product. Offer them a brand. Better yet, a brand experience -- just like astute marketers have been doing for years. The difference now is it's 24/7. This newly defined segment is up late, surfing the web, taking the time to learn about products and what appeals to them. And once they're in, they'll stay with you -- as long as you maintain the relationship.

The internet has created a way for people to connect at every level, and the New Affluents are taking advantage of it like everybody else. The brands that are connecting with them know it. And now these well-to-dos are attracted to many of the same brands that other segments are. They're wearing some of the same kinds of clothes, driving some of the same cars and shopping at many of the same retailers.

Got a brand that has these kinds of values but isn't on their list yet? Ask yourself, why not?

[via Advertising Age]

Running 2nd Social Media & WoM full day workshop 7th April

Back by popular demand the organiser puts it .... blush blush

Anyway - I'll running my Social Media & WoM Marketing workshop in KL again - details here Download Social Media & WoM Workshop by Ian McKee

Social Media Revolution

Not brand new but still good!

P&G Embraces Facebook as Big Part of Its Marketing Plan

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Procter & Gamble Co. loves Facebook after all, and besides encouraging brands to develop a presence there, the world's biggest marketer has opened an office in Silicon Valley to help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities with the website.

P&G's outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier.

Those messages came in a meeting last week between P&G executives and venture capitalists, recounted by David Hornik on VentureBlog in a post that quickly picked up currency over the weekend on, of all places, Twitter.

"P&G's explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that," Mr. Hornik wrote. "And while P&G's thought leaders expressed some skepticism about the efficacy of Facebook's 'engagement ads,' they certainly view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building. They didn't quantify what they are paying for that exposure, but it is quite clear that the numbers are very big."

Mr. Hornik contrasted the enthusiastic outlook on Facebook to a less-enthusiastic one by P&G executives toward Twitter. "They described Twitter as 'much more like television than one might think.' To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium -- it is best for one-to-many communications that are short bursts of timely information," he wrote. "P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand-building and advertising side. ... They do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook."

Mr. Hornik, after being contacted by P&G over the weekend, did backtrack on one big number -- a projection he had attributed to P&G that Facebook would reach 5 billion members globally. That 5 billion is actually the number of consumers P&G hopes to reach globally, up from the current 4 billion.

By whatever count, however, P&G's outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier than Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation, portrayed in a talk to a digital-marketing forum in Cincinnati in late 2008.

"What in heaven's name," he asked, "made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?"

"Who said this is media?" he said. "Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren't trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. ... We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it."

He went on to say, noting it was personal preference rather than company policy, "I really don't want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook."

He also expressed discomfort about the level of personalized targeting available through Facebook, though he said that Facebook applications are potentially valuable vehicles for advertisers.

In an e-mail, a P&G spokeswoman wrote that Mr. McConnell was speaking for himself, not the company, at the time. "P&G sees the value of digital and social media in consumers' lives and we want to connect with consumers in the environments where they are spending their time," she said. "For example, Facebook fan pages for brands [are] an easy way to engage with consumers in a forum where they've chosen to engage with us. (i.e. Pringles' fan page has over 2.8 million global fans). We don't have social media figured out, but we are encouraging our brands to include digital and social media into their holistic brand-building strategies."

She said the intended perspective on Twitter is that it's "a communication platform that is good for 'one-to-many' communication, similar to TV. Additionally, some of our brands are using Twitter to engage with consumers one-on-one when they have questions. We also view Twitter as a valuable listening tool."

She also clarified that what was referred to as an Innovation Center on VentureBlog is a "Connect & Develop" office near Palo Alto "to increase our presence in innovation hotspots," but is not the size of the sprawling complexes that P&G typically terms "innovation centers." Connect & Develop is a longstanding P&G program which seeks to solicit innovation from outside companies and consumers while also licensing its own technology to outside companies.

Forbes cover a great case study on how Threadless built a community.  Interesting points made are that it is more about quality than quantity - and that quaity communities are grown organicaly, not by campaigns and media spends.

Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless

Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company, sprang to life a decade ago with the idea that employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. The Internet-based company asks consumers to submit shirt designs they've created--it gets as many as 300 submissions a day--and allows its large fan base to vote on the ones they like best. It pays winners, more than 300 each year, $2,000 for their creations. The company picks the best of the most popular T-shirt designs, screens them for copyright violations and obscenities, and sells them on its site within three to eight weeks for $18. It aims to release seven new designs a week.

The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Threadless, with 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 100,000 fans on Facebook, is also masterful at using social media to promote its designs and designers--and to keep its community engaged.

Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless, shares more on the company’s community-building strategy.

Forbes: You stress "community" over crowdsourcing. Why?

Balzer: Crowdsourcing is antithetical to what we're doing. That's because crowdsourcing involves random sets of people who suddenly have a say in how the business works, but that's not how Threadless operates. We've got a close-knit group of loyal customers and have worked hard to build that. The people who submit ideas to us, vote and buy our products aren't random people, and they aren't producing random work. We work closely with our consumers and give them a place on our site, the Threadless forum, where they can exchange ideas with one another--ideas that go beyond designing T-shirts. We have consumers who have voted on 150,000 designs, which means they've spent hours interacting on our site. People who do that aren't jumping into a random crowd. They're part of the community we've cultivated.

How does Threadless use social marketing to promote its business and to generate sales?

Like other businesses, Threadless launched before Twitter and Facebook. We've embraced both sites by injecting our personality into them. We send out news to people when new T-shirts are available and information on new sales when they start. We also tell customers about the music playing in our warehouse and about the interesting people stopping by our office. The investment in Twitter has bumped our traffic. Sales from Twitter alone are in the high six-figures.

What advice do you have for other companies looking to build their social media strategies?

The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.

The other key is that we act like humans on our own site and social networking sites. We act like we're interacting with our friends, posting videos of our employees talking about their favorite bands. It's not all direct promotion; it's human.

How do you keep your consumers engaged?

For us, the idea of fostering creativity is a key one. We offer design challenges. A timely example of that is that we ran a design contest around the Las Vegas consumer electronics convention, CES. The challenge we posed was to get consumers to submit designs that highlighted innovation. We looked for a theme that we knew our consumer base, who tends to be interested in tech and the Web, would love. We've done other challenges asking people for ideas on zombies and monsters, because we've seen from the forums and other popular T-shirts that our customers are interested in monsters.

The takeaway: Know what interests your consumers and build on it.

What are limitations for the business?

The community anchors us to a certain extent. They've got perceptions of who we are and how we'll act. They determine our future. With that said, they are receptive to seeing Threadless grow. We've been exploring retail distribution and we've asked our designers (who are the employees and customers) where they would feel comfortable selling and buying the T-shirts. We thought the options would be limited based on their answers, but we've found a sincerely open-minded group that is eager to see growth.

We've also learned that an important part of expanding is giving credit to our community members. We started selling specially designed iPhone cases last year and were very deliberate about our packaging. Each case gave descriptions of the product and its designer.

What was your best-selling T-shirt design last year?

It was a design called "The Communist Party" that featured Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro, in party mode. The designer was Tom Burns of Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Brands are moving budget to social media marketing at the expense of traditional media such as print and TV

Chances are your overall marketing budget was hit hard by the economy in 2009 and the prospect of recovering a substantial portion of these funds in 2010 is not very likely. Still, there is good news for social media marketers.

This chart shows that social marketing will benefit from significant budget increases in the year ahead, regardless of what industry your organization is in. What this chart doesn’t show is where these increases will come from.

As a relatively new and rapidly emerging tactic, social media is generally funded by either increasing the overall budget or, more often than not in the current economic climate, by shifting funds from other marketing line items to social media.

Social marketing budgets are growing at the expense of other tactics and a deeper dive into our 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report will show you which ones and to what extent.

Download SocialMediaMarketing2010 exec summary

The human factor will account for nearly 60% of social marketing expenditures next year including staff salaries for blogging, content development, social monitoring, etc. Another 20% of the budget will go outside the organization to agencies, consultancies and other social marketing service providers.

For additional research data and insights about social marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.

A Good List of 10 ... "How Social Media Changed Our Thinking"

Of the many lists done at this time of year  - thought this was one of the best ....

 

Ten Ways Social Media Changed Our Thinking in 2009
by David Berkowitz , Tuesday, December 22, 2009 From the MediPost Blog

All the top trend lists this year have been a blur. There's lots of talk of Twitter and Michael Jackson, but I wanted to dive deeper and think about what we really learned. In many ways social media managed to change our thinking about what happened, what's going on, and how the world's changing.

I'll focus on 10 ways in particular. Not all are exclusive to the past year, but many of the milestones from the past 12 months may well shape how we perceive the road ahead.

Democracy: The Green Revolution, Iran's populist attempt to reject the summer's election results, was a global eye-opener for how a tool like Twitter -- so easily dismissed as frivolous -- could change the world. The result may have been underwhelming, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad maintaining power -- but for those who saw the tweets from Iranians, often retweeted wildly, it will leave its mark. Contrast this with other movements, such as when Philippines voters used text messages to mobilize and oust President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The Philippines revolution followed a peer-to-peer model. In Iran, though, the tweets were largely public, and instant commentary on those tweets was publicized further, shattering the barriers between those who were taking part and the spectators hanging on every character.

Death: We now mourn in public. Michael Jackson inspired millions -- billions? -- to grieve openly. Myself, I stayed silent on Jackson but had to express public disbelief over Billy Mays' passing. As I write this, friends and strangers are opening up about Brittany Murphy. The self-expression becomes more problematic when it gets personal, as a Floridian mom learned when she tweeted about her son drowning. This led to the headline " Twitter played no role in drowning of military_mom's son Bryson." We don't yet know how to grieve publicly, and many such as military_mom will learn that others aren't ready for it. But in time, perhaps even by this time next year, stories like this won't be newsworthy.

Sales: Dell has tracked over $6.5 million in revenue to Twitter. There are several  morals to the story: 1) It's possible to track sales from Twitter. 2) It's still in its infancy; Dell earned $61 billion last year, so its Twitter sales will barely cover the Post-it notes used at the 75,000+ employee company. 3) Those are only the direct sales, and every time the press reports on Dell's model, some consumers will go to Dell's outlet site without bothering to check what's happening on Twitter. Bottom line, though, social media is making an impact on sales, and this year we finally started to measure that effect in earnest.

Searching: Google, Yahoo, and Bing committed to giving real-time search valuable real estate in their results pages. Sometimes it will be higher up and sometimes further down, and it will surely be much bigger than Twitter, but now it's here. Most people aren't going to think to search Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare, but they will visit Google or Yahoo or Bing, and they'll access the real-time links if they're relevant. We're still learning when it's relevant, but there's little doubt now that it matters.

Local marketing: So, how did you find out about that restaurant? Did you see a special for mayors on Foursquare? Did a friend check in via Gowalla and share it as their Facebook status? Were you walking down the street with your iPhone out while you augmented reality with Yelp's Monocle or Urbanspoon's Scope? Okay, augmented reality may be more gimmicky, but the social services are starting to help people find each other -- and help people find local hot spots. The fusion of mobile, social and local started to create real opportunities to change consumer behavior. What was true for early adopters in 2009 will apply to the fast followers in the year ahead.

Celebrity Access: In January, Ashton Kutcher joined Twitter. He was followed by Ellen DeGeneres in March and Oprah in April. We got to see what they saw, from Chris Brown's view of 90,000 fans in Manila to Chad Ochocinco's view of his opponents' football field. Vin Diesel posts a couple of times a month on his Facebook page, where he has over 7 million fans. And after Kanye West started a new Internet meme by grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, he apologized on his blog. Yes, we have ghost tweeters and plenty of opacity, but now that fans have this direct, personal, and occasionally even unfiltered access, it's not going away.

Fan participation: This summer, two amazing events happened in the arts world simultaneously. Here in the U.S., the rock band Of A Revolution (O.A.R.) crowd-sourced song lyrics on Twitter, crediting fans for their contributions to the song that became "Light Switch Sky." Meanwhile, London's Royal Opera crowd-sourced lyrics to an opera through Twitter. In the process, Twitter became a curation tool, and both curators here used other forms of digital media such as blogs and online video to further engage fans. Want to hook your fans? Give them a stake in the content.

Gift giving: Thought you were doing something special for a Facebook friend by giving them one of those little icons as a gift? How about giving them something they'd be really excited about, like an MP3, a charitable donation, or a "gourmet feast" gift basket? Yeah, that last one runs $85, but they are your friends, right? Today, those goods are provided through the Real Gifts application. Tomorrow, it may well be Amazon. What I'd really love to see is gift recommendations tailored to recipients' profile interests right when you're sending something virtual or physical.

News-sourcing: Journalists were among the first to embrace Twitter. Will they similarly lead the charge with Google Wave? They're starting to, anecdotally at least. Mashable loves covering these stories, from the Seattle Times posting a Wave to find a suspected cop killer to town squares hosted by the Austin American-Statesman. Google Wave itself may or may not be the platform of the future, but it's opened the door to news ways for the media to interact with their audience.

Gaming: In November 2009, over 6 million gamers (and their loved ones) bought the blockbuster "Modern Warfare 2." That same month, about 70 million gamers played "Farmville." I know I'm stretching comparisons here, but the notion of what a blockbuster game is continues to shift. Is it a game that millions of people pay $50 for right when it comes out, or a free game played by tens of millions of people, where a small percentage pay small sums over time for in-game upgrades? There's room for both models, and there's room for new thinking on what a successful game is.

That's just a taste of how our thinking changed this year, and it only leaves me hungrier for the new perspectives ahead in 2010.

How Saatchi & Saatchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded

Here (from Australia's Mumbrella) is a great case study of the dangers of letting your tradditional agency (in this case Saatchi & Saatchi) design and run a Social Media campaign.

This comes back to the point I blogged about before - earned media requires a differnt mindset from bought media .... Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi  lerned this in public.

"......Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.  

It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.

And as Saatchi & Saatchi has demonstrated, it now goes without saying that you actually need to understand social media before you start. You can’t start learning on the client’s time.

For Toyota, I still think that running a live social media pitch with the five competing campaigns was a good thing. Even without this week’s events, it will have learned a lot. And by doing it in the public arena, the entire marketing industry got to learn too.

Where it went wrong was in giving too much leeway to an agency with little apparent social media experience and seemingly too little risk control to accompany that.

As an aside, it was interesting to note that another agency on the shortlist was Oddfellows, a long term partner of Toyota. A traditionally based agency, Oddfellows didn’t have the hubris to claim to be able to understand social media on its own. It partnered with social media agency The Population.

Saatchi & Saatchi apparently decided it could fly solo. Rather like many media planners think they’d make a good creative, I wonder if Saatchis thought social media was easier than it was.

It began to go wrong for Saatchis very early in the process. For starters, a film competition is such a tired idea. There was no twist. The brief was simply: make a film featuring a Yaris, and win a relatively small amount of money.

The accompanying Facebook page felt that it was being moderated by somebody who had just discovered the internet, and was catching up on the last few years’ memes. It posted links to the likes of the OK Go treadmill music video, the Johnnie Walker Robert Carlyle ad and “Guy catches glasses with face”. All great virals, but also familiar to anyone who’d spent much time online in the last year like the target audience. It didn’t position the Facebook group as somewhere to go to catch the latest and hottest.

No wonder then that as rival agencies’ Yaris campaigns began to get up stream, the Clever Film Comp got stuck on the grid. Facing the embarrassing prospect of no entries, the agency abandoned the idea of genuine user generated content, and with it what many would consider social media authenticity.

It forwarded this email to production house contacts:

From: Rob

Subject: Clever Comp

Hey creative people

I’ve got something that you’ll (or your housemates, brothers, sisters, artistic friends etc will) be interested in.

It’s a film comp in aide of promoting Toyota Yaris.

“A film comp? I don’t have the time!” you may say, but listen up. So far, NO ONE has entered and it has been open for more than 10 days and closes 1st December. Voting is done on hits and comments so if you’re in first you have a huge advantage. And you don’t have to make an ad, just put a Yaris in somewhere a la the ‘number 8′ or ’spring’ in Tropfest or something

First prize is $7,000. $3,000 for second and $1,000 for 3rd. At this stage, you could enter a picture of your cat playing in his kitty litter and win 7 grand.

Details are in the attachments. If you win, I’d love an all carbon fibre road bicycle for Christmas.

Cheers y’all.

-Rob

As a result, this skewed the entries. If you promote the competition as an ad agency to your production house contacts then what you’re going to get back are slick would-be commercials, rather than short films. This was, as we now know, to prove important.

It certainly suggests that by this point the agency’s aim was to avoid the embarrassment of having very few entries for its contest, rather than to run an authentic, engaging competition.

.... "  more

Tom Fishburne of BrandCamp Nails it Again

Bought Media will never become Earned Media

It sounds so perfect: you put a "share this" button in a banner ad and suddenly even stodgy, old display media becomes social media. Pay for the impressions and get the viral effect as a bonus. It's the future of advertising!

There are just two catches to this: it's been done before, and it's not the future of anything. It's a bell, a whistle, or maybe a bell and a whistle if executed well. But it's not going to fundamentally change advertising, social media, or anything else.

The latest entry in the space is TweetMeme's Adtweets, announced in late November. TweetMeme, which has become the go-to Twitter aggregator and the most prominent source of "retweet this" buttons around the Web, is allowing advertisers to add a retweet button to standard ad units. You can't blame TweetMeme for overselling it: "The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts..."

 While it sounds rather charming with the British accent, it's not going to improve ad quality. Instead, it might put more pressure on advertisers to attempt to create humorous or captivating ads that may do nothing to help their brand. Evian's "Rollerbabies" ad just earned a Guinness World Recordby becoming the most viewed online ad ever, with over 45 million views, yet I have yet to see any coverage of the record that mentions Evian's market share or any other success metric from the brand's perspective. Maybe a needle moved, maybe nothing happened, but it's hardly a clear-cut case that a viral ad means it's successful.

The concept of sharing ads through social media isn't new. Google Gadget Ads launched in September 2007, and I don't know if I've ever seen one in the thousands of hours I've spent online since then. Clearspring and Gigya have also offered such functionality, and Spongecell makes it easy to "share with friends, or the world - without leaving the ad." I love that this functionality exists, but most of the time it's not necessary.

Here are four reasons why this isn't a game-changer:

1) Most ads aren't worth sharing. There are always exceptions to this rule -- the DVR-proof ads on TV you'll look for on YouTube and the newspaper and magazine ads you'll rip out and save. The same applies to banner ads, but that's relatively rare.

2) Sharing often isn't the best call to action. Are you trying to get a consumer to buy something? Request more information? Go to a store? Watch a TV show or movie on a certain date? Learn more about a new product? Get exposed to a new brand name? Think more positively about a brand? In any of these cases, sharing competes with the primary call to action. And if the primary call to action is to share the ad, what's the purpose?

3) Network-specific ads work best within those networks. Consider Facebook's Engagement Ads and Digg Ads that can be voted up or down. Each of those advertising experiences is customized to the publisher. Yet a Facebook ad wouldn't work the same way on the homepage of Forbes.com, and visitors to WebMD would generally be thrown off by Digg buttons on ads running there. As for tweetable ads, targeting can help -- a tweetable ad on TweetMeme.com or TechCrunch will find a more receptive audience than if it ran on a mainstream publisher. But such ads will still need to clearly illustrate why such sharable functionality makes sense in that context. I'm skeptically inclined to think advertisers will slap a "tweet this" or "share this" button on less discriminately, and then call it a social media campaign.

4) Most marketers and agencies don't plan earned and paid media together. That makes the value proposition a harder sell. Consider a marketer running display ads to drive traffic to its site, and (generously) 1%  of consumers click the ad. Say that marketer adds sharing functionality, the click-through rate (CTR) drops to 0.8%, but another 0.7% of consumers share the ad with their friends. In the latter scenario, that can be lumped together as a 1.5% engagement rate, but instead the marketer will be held accountable for the 20% drop in CTR from 1% to 0.8%. If you're still with me, let's take it one step further. The shared version of that ad (shared 0.7% of the time) would need a 29% CTR to generate enough clicks for those marketing strategists to keep their jobs. Then they have two choices in this admittedly oversimplified scenario: they have to demonstrate the value of the ad's pass-along rate, or they have to go back to generating clicks as efficiently as they can.

I still love the idea of sharable ads. It will become more common, and I'm sure a lot of marketers and agencies will use it in ways that achieve their goals. But it isn't going to make advertising better, any more than YouTube has made TV advertising better. It's just one more option marketers have online, where some pioneers will get great PR for it, some followers will ride the hype coattails, and most others will consider it -- if and when sharable ads make sense for them.