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Ernie Mosteller is a video and film director who gets great performances from kids, adults, clowns, cinematographers, editors, animators, real people and the occasional frog.

An ex-interactive creative director and creative director, he understands traditional and new media — how they’re alike, and more importantly, how users use them differently.

He has directed hundreds of national and international commercials, and if pixels had any weight at all, a ton of web content. He has also created web and social media strategies for major brands. He writes and speaks extensively on the power of content in today’s media landscape.

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Real time not the only time for brands

Written on
Jul 23, 2009 
Author
Ernie Mosteller  |
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Real time not the only time for brands

realtime_small.jpgADOTAS — Last month I wrote about how Twitter has ushered in the cultural awareness of what’s possible in real time on the web. The real-time web, while still not searchable, is, in fact, here. And for a marketer, it’s difficult. And that’s putting it lightly.

Truth is, it’s hard to keep up with the regular changes on the regular-time web, never mind the real-time one. And if you spend time thinking, and possibly over-thinking, the situation — especially when you’re overloaded on client projects, or pitching as much business as you possibly can in this economy — the prospect of shifting to a higher gear, full time, is a bit daunting.

Yes, the real time web is here, and in terms of work, it’s a lot. But as for creating and maintaining most brands, it’s also not enough on its own. To build lasting relationships, and solidify brand images that stand the test of time, you need more than 140 characters. You need 140 characters, now, to be sure. But you also need the other stuff — the things you layer those 140 characters on top of.

While everything we do in advertising of any kind is pretty transient, social media is uber-transient. A blog post lives forever, but people (mostly) only read it when it’s new. A Tweet is even more fleeting, especially if your followers follow lots of people. For this reason, social media — in real time — makes a great layer to add to a multi-platform brand effort. For pure long-term brand building, even a constant stream of tweets is somehow missing key elements. But combined with a steady stream of all the other stuff we as agencies can produce, those tweets wield some serious power. Sometimes the best brand images are born in real time, but live on when sustained efforts are applied.

As I am frequently wont to do, I’ll use a non-advertising example to illustrate my advertising point. Partly because I think it kind of fits, and partly because as I write this, we’re approaching July 20, 2009 — the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

When you think of Apollo 11, chances are, the images and sounds that come to mind have something to do with a combination of how old you are, and how much brand work — yes, brand work, whether intended as such or not — has been done for both NASA and Apollo over the years.

If you’re about my age, maybe you have (varyingly fuzzy) memories of watching live as Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. If you’re older than me, you likely conjure images not just of the moon landing, but of President Kennedy’s speech that set the course for the space race in the first place. Or, perhaps your man on the moon imagery has more to do with a guy with an MTV flag. Or a Tom Hanks movie about a different Apollo mission. Or, maybe, it’s a memorable side note from a grade-school lesson about the space shuttle.

Whatever your immediate image, it’s a product, not just of the real-time event — but of the countless images, films, videos, websites, books, patches, decals, visitor experiences, and all the other stuff we as advertising agencies get paid to produce for brands every day. Yes, the stuff created around Apollo 11 is there because it’s an historical event. But, tell the truth — aren’t you pretty much always attempting to turn that next product launch into some sort of historical event?

Now, let’s layer a real-time element over top of all of the above. Whether you heard it when it was first broadcast, or have only heard it in an historical perspective, the recorded transmissions between the lunar module and mission control add texture, and an emotional quality, that cannot be ignored. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It is the sound track to all the moon images you’ve ever seen. Without the imagery, the real-time audio has power, but not as much. Without the audio, the pictures — ditto.

When you think of social media as an ongoing, real-time, text-based soundtrack of sorts, it starts to become easy to see how much stronger it can make all your combined efforts in other media. By itself, it’s strong — but combined with everything else you’re doing, it can help produce something that could stick for forty years.





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