CROSSUMER: THE ONLINE CONSUMER

The consumer has changed his mind from the Internet beginning to now. Specially, his mind changed when marks and companies discovered all the possibilities that they could use in the virtual space. The companies have developed a new model of communication with the consumer, improving their results of sales. Also, consumers are happier with the innovations that we are going to study, because they are able to be part of the campaign.

Front of the book "Crossumer" 

We should to keep in mind one definition: crossumer. The word is composed by the two main references of the marks target: cross and consumer. Publicity is no more unidirectional on the Internet, this line has been passed. Announcement does not need to shout to generate interest when the old consumer did not look for products to much. Now, the consumer is not only the receptor, he can cross from one side to another of the campaign being the generator and, at the same time, the receptor. Consumer cross through the campaign.

Ian Davis, British technology entrepreneur

That reality comes from Web 2.0. By Ian Davis (Talis, Web 2.0 and All That), “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services”. It is a social space where information, communication and knowledge have a special task. In this way, the reality of publicity has completely changed.

In brief, the Internet has produced a new consumer called crossumer. He is very active, he participates in the advertising campaigns, he also is able to create adverts, he can share information and he decided if the campaign is good or not. In fact, sometimes the Internet is only a part of the campaigns that is completed with street marketing, traditional publicity and etcetera.

So, users are not only used like receptors, but also like creators. It is a very interesting part of the new role of consumers in marketing because of the Internet. Contents generated by consumers are a tendency based in the creation of ideas for marks and products by consumers. The main goal is try to involve the user/spectator/receptor with the mark. It appeared five years ago in the Super Bowl. As you sure know, an advert of 30 seconds of duration cost millions of dollars (more concretely, 4.000.000 last year), price that is profitable to big companies, according to the tremendous audience of the event (more than 111 million spectators in 2011).

In 2011, cost of a spot increased tremendously

In that time, Doritos invented a new way of marketing. The campaign was called Crash the Super Bowl and the winner was a video called Live the Flavor. Doritos received more than one thousand videos and let people choose the best five. These finalists received ten thousand dollars each one and the winner video was finally performed on live.

So Doritos produced a new trend in publicity that some people thought will not succeed, but they were wrong, because Doritos achieved the call were answered. Other marks like Nestlé, Pepsi or Nokia tried the same.

The main features of contents generated by consumers are the main target composed by young people; the spots have to create good opinions with the goal to publish them in TV and on the Internet; they allows the announcement to know the necessities of the target; it is possible to achieve a good link with the mark; it is not sure to achieve more sales with this type of marketing, if the companies abuse of it; it is necessary to take advantage with the user. The dilemma wrote by Raimond Williams about TV is very active again. Does the Internet change consumers and advertising agencies or are they changing the Internet?

In conclusion, the Internet is a field where advertising agencies can liberate their ideas and projects. They have produced a new model where consumer is also creator of information, as we have seen with the contents produced by consumers. It was the type of publicity we have focused on, but there are other several types also very effective like, teasers, contents with the appearance of not professional but they are, viral communication...

Finally, we must be conscious of our responsibility in that framework. A new era of communication is growing and we are its producers and its results.


Isaías Blázquez Rosales

#Loewe's viral experience

March, 14th

“Do u wanna laugh for a while and/or feel embarrassed? Watch the new advertisement of #Loewe” by @pathernando.

“The documentary about special education of #Loewe is great” by @cot_julia.

“All of you hate #Loewe’s new advertisement, but, all of you talk about it. Do you know what viral marketing means?” by @October_Lee.

What does viral marketing mean?

Viral marketing means advertising, it means money, interactivity, and above all it means social networks as means.

Just imagine a virus. A simple flu will serve. Yesterday you went to a hospital and you, unknowingly caught the virus. Later, you went out with your fiends whom you, unintentionally, transmitted the virus. They came back home and transmitted it to their families. Parents went to work and brothers and sisters went to school. We already have an epidemic. All infected.

Now, replace the flu with an advertising message and the hospital with Youtube. The key: to transmit = to share. Like.

This is viral marketing, an advertising strategy that seeks the rapid spread of a message to potential consumers of the advertised product.

Viral marketing is no new. Do you remember mouth-to-ear (word-to-mouth)? These are the roots. Nowadays, mouth have been replaced with “Notification on your wall” and ear with “Share on a friend’s timeline” or #let’screateaWorldwidetrend. Today, the Internet and social networks are the mean and the propagation is quicker and more effective.

A company hides an advertisement within a provocative idea in video format that make viewer’s opinion came up et violá!, for the modest price of a video uploaded to Youtube for free, it got to manage to thousands of people. And everything without paying for spots on TV or radio. Economic ¿right? Yes it is, and much more when traditional media publish pieces of news about the success of the viral campaign. Total media convergence. Just one text, many media.

This is precisely what Loewe, the Spanish firm of luxury goods, has achieved. Let solve the unknown factor. A company: Loewe. A message: gold collection 2012. A provocative idea: try to represent the Spanish youth with a sample of "supercool” young people."The results: #Loewe, Spain trend in Twitter, 730,000 views on YouTube, hundreds of posts on blogs, articles in national newspapers, parodies on YouTube... and most important, thousands of young Spanish people speaking about Loewe, even if it’s only to criticize and satirize. But... how true the idiom 'let them talk, well or bad, but talk' is?

Media Panics and the Internet

Throughout the centuries ever since a new medium would enter the society, the panic about it would follow. This trend dates back to as far as the Ancient Greek times. One of the most famous philosophers of the time Plato commented on the ability to write in this manner: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks“. Moreover, the publishing J. W. Goethe’s masterpiece “The Sorrow of Young Werther” resulted in a chain of suicides, as young men in the 18^th century found the course of action of the hero of the book worth following (Werther, the main character, killed himself because he loved a girl who loved someone else). These tragic deaths forced the governments all across Europe to ban the book in the 18^th century. In later publications, Goethe addresses the reader with the words “Be a man, do not follow my example”. Similarly, there were fears surrounding the 19^th century dime novels and dance halls about 100 years ago. There are some more recent examples as well, regarding every single medium one could imagine. Reality TV, explicit music lyrics, movies like Clockwork Orange or Child Play 3, video games – you name it, every one of these had difficulties with entering the scene without causing a heated discussion. These types of societal reactions are called “media panics”. In this post I will try to take a look at media panics that were caused by the internet and its many applications.

But before doing so we have to define what a media panic is. Oddly enough, however different the mediums might look from one another, the panics about them are quite similar. As Danish professor of the field Kirsten Drotner once put it, media panics always happen in the same manner, they have the same cycle. Firstly, the discussion starts, then some sort of governmental or industry self regulation is introduced and finally the panic disappears. This pattern can be applied for all the above mentioned panics. Another similarity is that these fears are always caused by the introduction of a new, unseen media that more often than not are created for the entertainment purposes. Finally, media panics are always about the young users.

Media panics arise from reports about the shocking cases of a possible abuse of new mediums. To make this clearer, let’s take an example of Columbine school shooting. 15 people were killed and 24 were severely injured when two students arrived to the school armed to the teeth. Until this day the general opinions make out that the killers were influenced by a first person shooter video game Doom. Many other factors – such as drugs used by the perpetrators or their acquisition of guns – are left aside. This tragedy was a big hit to the FPS developers’ industry and not to pharmacy or gun industries.

So by now the reader probably understands what is meant by the term “media panic”. Let’s take a look at the internet. Created in the second half of the 20^th century it started to become massively used in 1993 with the introduction of the World Wide Web and the internet browsers. The internet firstly was looked at as a perfect field for communication. It was a place for virtual communities to be established, people could experiment with their identity and the possible reach of it was not seen ever before. However, it was not too long until the first panic took place.

“Researchers find sad lonely world in cyberspace” – shouted a press release from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The quote was immediately caught by the New York Times, CNN, BBC and other press corporations. In the year of 2009 it was used in 1633 academic papers! “The Internet has the potential to make us socially isolated, lonely and depressed”. Well, of course it has! A cat has a potential to kill its owner in his sleep but is it likely that it will do it? It was also found that the internet usage may result in decrease in family and social contacts and that the teenagers are the most vulnerable societal group. It is vital to know that in 2002 the participants of the survey of 1998 (on which the results were based) were revisited and had to answer the same questions. It was found that the aforementioned effects of internet usage are not likely to happen. This second research that denied the results of the first one did not get a press release. Ever.

Current academic consensus on the internet usage stresses out that online communities build on offline communities; online contacts are related to offline contacts; and that family and friend networks are maintained. The internet is seen as reinforcement to strong and weak ties rather than a thing that can make us alienated and lonely. Its importance for dispersed groups (such as migrants or homosexuals) is invaluable.

Rarely a talk about internet and its’ many evil sides can happen without mentioning online predators. In the USA an extremely popular show called “To catch a predator” has been broadcasted on the national television. You can watch an excerpt from it here to see what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZhsfT9wGp0 . Even though this show seems to be doing a good job of hunting down possible peadophiles and other types of bastards, it usually draws away from facts. It is a proved fact that most of the cases when teenagers meet adults that they met online, they know what they are doing, they know that they were talking to someone who is a lot older. The problem about chatrooms and online predatoring is a bit different thatn adults hiding behind the curtain and pretending to be of the same age as their victims. The real problem is that the teenagers are curious about meeting these people. And again, it‘s not the internet that is to blame for that, is it? According to, for example, UK law (where this problem has been in the spotlight for a long time) cases like that look more like statutory rape ("consensual sexual relations that occur when one participant is below the age required to legally consent to the behavior”) than predatoring.

And finally, we move to our beloved Facebook and friends. In April 2009 several publications were printed in the British newspapers (Daily Mail, The Guardian, and Sunday Telegraph), causing a media panic about social networking sites. “Social network use may alter the brain structure” – said Susan Greenfield: a member of parliament, a professor and a baroness. Moreover, Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster said that “Social network sites produce transient relations that can cause trauma and even suicide when they collapse”. I would suggest to focus on the words “may” and “can” in both quotes. It basically is the same argument once again: social networking may make you feel lonely and depressed (like the internet itself in 1998) and can alter your brain structure (like the video game that has been blamed for the Columbine tragedy). Even though this panic is still happening and the cycle is not yet finished, one can try to foresee its finish. There will probably be some industry self regulation (it is already happening with, for example, checking of photos that are uploaded on Facebook. I simply am expecting the wider range of these actions). There will probably be some tragic event that SNSs will be blamed for (actually, one already took place in Lithuania this winter, when a psychologically unstable teenager killed a girl. You can guess where they met each other). And in the end this panic will die out. It always does! Who knows, maybe we’ll hear people talking about the harmful effects of Nintendo WII (“it teaches our kids the robotics of unwanted actions like shooting a gun”), maybe the new iPad will be torn apart. I will conclude by simply putting it this way: the developer of The Next Big Thing, brace yourself and be ready to be under attack. Because you will be.

Businesses in the Internet

How to earn money in the landscape of new media?

As in every market, the business model need some time to get maturation. This is even a more determinant factor in the context of new media, where the constant evolution and the changes are the engine of progress. Internet embraces two main business challenges, the ones related to the enterprises that emerge after the apparation of the Net and inside this medium, and the entrance of old communications companies which try to diversify their services and adapt themselves to the new media environment.

In many aspects, not only in the economic one but also in the social and creative, and in all the sides concerning the ways of production (creation of contents), distribution and consumption, old models usually doesn't work, is the case, for instance of the newspapers that tried to make the users to subscribe to their websites as the only way of reading their news and articles. Internet brings a new paradigm, where the citizen participation is farther bigger than in previous media. Manifestos about this topic like Wikinomics (Trapscott and Williams, 2006) and We-Think (Leadbeater, 2007) talk about the importance of collectivism, creativity (added value in production in a crowded market) and participation like the keys of business in the Internet. Van Dijck explains the economical theories of these two books: "these mantras (collectivism, creativity and participation) not only inform the new business models of the digital economy, but their declared cultural roots suggest and ideological paradigm shift that is about to restructure postindustrial societies and post-service economies."

The main problem in the business of new media is the huge expectations about the possible profits on it; these expectations don't use to become true, so the investment of the producers become big monetary losses. During the first and second year of the current decade, many businesses, result of the merging of 'traditional' media companies with new media enterprises, failed. This phenomenon was called the popping of the dot-com bubble: in a few years the valuation of the stock market of these enterprises increased enormously, producing a great overvaluation; as a result the value of the shares was unbalanced.

One of the best exaples of the collapse of dot-com enterprises is represented by the telecommunications company, Time Warner, with businesses in television broadcasting, filmed entertainment and publishing, which after two years of merging with the Internet service enterprise, America online (AOL), in 2002 had to face the greatest economic losses in the history of the company.

The failure of the management in the businesses on the Net caused a radical change on the speech of many academics about the possibilities of a great social and economical shift due to the digital technologyes of communication. Henry Jenkins points out in his essay, Convergence Culture, that after the general disappointment caused by the dot-com crash and the first reaction of skepticism avout the possibilities of digital revolution is based on the cooperation and interaction of old and new media in more complex ways than was supposed to be at the beginning, that is simply the absorption and displacement of old media by new media. "The digital revolution paradigm claimed that new media was to change everything. After the dot-com crash, the tendency was to imagine that new media had chenged nothing. As with so many things about the current media environment, the truth lay somewhere in between".

Most of the current successful businesses have to do with the collectivity and the participation of users. This is for instance, the case of Youtube or social networks like Facebook, whose young creators are now multimillionaire. In many ocassions this websites don't have a particular business model, apart from the value that are used for millions of people, and even if they have advertisements (banners or any other kind of publicity) obtain the greater profits, when they are acquired by bigger groups. The aforementioned firm Youtube, was bought in 2006 by Google for 1.650 millions of dollars.

On the other hand, we are doomed to repeat past mistakes, and some sectors of the industry of new media still has to crash in order to improve the management. Some analysts have predicted the popping of the Tablet bubble for this year. Maybe Apple with the iPad will not be really who lose out, because it has a preminent position in this market. However, the fact that the supply will be propably much greater than the demand (almost the double according to the predictions) means that other companies like Motorola or RIM will have to face important losses.

As Pierre Lévy says referring to Collective Intelligence, "the more we are able to form intelligent communities, as open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagination and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure our success in a highly competitive environment", and this is completely applicable to the new media. The possibilities of success are greater here than in old media, make a business is accessible to anyone who has an idea.

Henri Jenkins, Convergence Culture

Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence

VanDijck and Nieborg, Wikinomiks and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos.