At AD:TECH Chicago August 5, Wendy Aldrich of Disney Parks and Resorts mentioned how Disney uses digital media to engage consumers wherever they they are. Her comments provide a fitting pretext for an August 6 announcement from my employer, Avenue A | Razorfish, and Pluck Corp., to develop a new hybrid digital marketing and social media offering that will help marketers better engage with consumers across the digital world.
The offering, code-named AdLife, will inject social media features like customer comments and user-generated content into digital advertisements such as banner ads or microsites – in effect, turning mainstream ads into social media opportunities distributed across the digital world.
For instance, let’s say you’re Disney Parks & Resorts, and you want to promote a new attraction at a theme park. With AdLife, Disney could launch a banner advertisement that enables consumers to review the new attraction itself by clicking on the ad, as well as read feedback from other vacationers, without ever leaving the point of display for the advertisement. Disney then might use AdLife to link that ad (plus user-generated content) to its own branded microsite, the Disney YouTube channel, or other properties where Disney consumers play.
AdLife is not a substitute for the cool experiences that Wendy shared, like the contest on YouTube where you can upload your favorite Disney park memories. What AdLife does is give Disney a way to combine mainstream and social media properties to engage consumers — and help them engage with each other — across the digital landscape.
The next step is for Avenue A | Razorfish and Pluck to work with marketers to do beta testing before making AdLife available. Meantime today’s news is a sign of how social media and advertising are converging. The enterprise has a rightful claim to employing social media and influencers to achieve its marketing and business objectives (what Avenue A | Razorfish calls Social Influence Marketing™). AdLife will help them do that.
For more information, feel free to contact me or my colleague Shiv Singh.