Multiscreen Mad Men – Advertising in a Post-TV world:

„Robert Rasmussen: A brand could tell people what was cool because there was less freedom of choice in media. A brand could say, “This is the latest thing, and everybody’s doing it,” and if the message was persuasive enough, you might believe it. Now you can check on that on the Internet and see whether everybody actually is doing it. Brands have become transparent, and that’s changed the tone of advertising. Now you have to try to be more authentic – even if it’s just authentically acknowledging that what you’re doing is advertising. (…)

Rasmussen: So advertising is by necessity a fractured narrative. We have a story we want to tell, and we use different media channels and different touch points to tell it. We have to rely on the consumer to pull the story together.

Palmer: Marketing has actually always been very comfortable with the notion that a brand story can exist in multiple forms. Even before the Internet, advertising had to come up with a point of view that would work well in a magazine, on a sign, along the side of a bus or on TV, all at the same time. We needed to be able to tell a story that could exist in fragments, and no matter which fragments people saw and in what order they assembled them together in their head, it still added up to the same message. Now that’s happening with content, too. People are consuming all their information and their stories from multiple sources and putting the pieces together on their own, and sometimes the content is not written to hold up to that kind of fragmenting and reassembling. But advertising has actually always been made to hold up to that. So the way people put together marketing is actually the way everybody is absorbing new forms of media now. (…)

Bastholm: (…) Now our job is to have a conversation with your consumers about whatever story it is you want to tell about the brand.

Hitt: Which companies do you think are having that dialogue successfully?

Bastholm: EA Sports, the video-game company, is a good example. On YouTube, someone posted a clip of himself playing the company’s Tiger Woods golf game. He put it up as a joke, laughing at EA Sports, because he had discovered a glitch in the programming that allowed Tiger to walk right out onto a pond next to the golf course and shoot his ball from there. So the company saw the video, and in response, it uploaded this ad to YouTube that said: “It’s not a glitch. He’s just that good.” The ad showed the real Tiger, in live action, actually walk on water and shoot a ball. That’s a great example of responding to how consumers interact with your brand.“