"Consumers aren’t going to FHM looking for marketing messages.”
“As a matter of fact,” he added, “it’s a bit of an intrusion.
“What we really want is to go from consumers looking to avoid our messages to consumers seeking out our brand and our content.”
So says Dave Genel, director for media services at the Miller Brewing Company in Milwaukee, to Stuart Elliot in an article from today's NYTimes Biz Section. And in a nutshell, he hit it on the head. Advertisers at current state are plagued with consumers doing almost everything they can do to avoid advertising. This is occurring in most traditional ad venues. It is up to marketers to figure out a way to not only get consumers to pay attention, but in fact to engage and want to contribute to the brands they are interested in.
FHM, which has a huge audience of boys, men and those in-between, is running this contest with Miller where FHM wants it's readers to upload photos of guys violating "Man Laws" as are stated in the recent slew of celebrity Miller ads.
The good news, it is the right forum for such a user photo submission contest. The bad news? well to date there seem to no user submitted photos in there. So we will see if it has traction.
Another interesting tidbit here is that the magazine came up with the campaign, not the ad agency. Is this another example of how brands are starting to feel like their agencies are not contextually relevant? Or is it simply that the medium (FHM) knew more about what their readers' behavior would be.
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