It seems that brands sponsoring bloggers is picking up steam.

For influential bloggers, sponsorships can be more lucrative than display ads alone, with payments reaching into the thousands for a multipronged campaign stretching over weeks or months. For the brands, it’s a way to market more conversationally to potential customers as well as exert more control over search engine results.

I’m not sure this is an entirely new thought, but it’s one that I’ve liked for a while now. If it’s done right it’s a great tool for both parties. And, I can’t figure out the difference between sponsoring a blogger and sponsoring a celebrity’s clothing on the red carpet.

Monocle magazine is the pioneer of the brand-fueled content. They have reconsidered the advertiser-publisher relationship and created engaging branded content throughout their magazine and into online media like podcasts. It works very well.

Brand-fueled content is content such as articles, videos and events where a brand’s values and briefs on a product where editorial control is given to the site owner (goal being a conversation started, natch). It seems to be the future. Let’s look toward the Old Spice campaign and “the Response Campaign”. Major success.

Beau Colburn captured my feelings on brand-fueled content (and the Old Spice campaign, more specifically) perfectly.

these video responses feel like a dramatic shift in “advertising.” Putting the word in quotes was intentional because I’m not really sure what this is. These responses aren’t ads. I suppose there’s a proper term like “brand extension” or the like for something like this, but this feels new.

Remember the Influencers in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point? Duncan Watts doesn’t believe that a few influential people create trends.

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn’t think it’s possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex–too weird and unpredictable–to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can’t most companies do it reliably?

Both sides of the argument make sense to me. I’d side more with Watts than Gladwell at this point, but I’m giving him only a slight edge.

Brand utility is, essentially, a brand creating *something* useful that is closely aligned with its product that brings an added value to the consumer. For further information, I recommend this great resource for understanding brand utility.

One of the examples mentioned in the above presentation is the Domino’s Pizza Tracker (created by CP+B). In a recent interview, head of interactive production, strategy and business development at CP+B discusses productized marketing (which I consider to be brand utility).

I’m excited to see more brands recognize that their most powerful brand marketing asset is the product – not the marketing message. Because of this shift in strategy, we’re beginning to see more agencies move into the product design and development space. Agencies are no longer confined to crafting the message but also empowered to create both standalone products and enhancements to existing product lines. Since digital is both media and product, it’s an ideal platform to facilitate “productized” marketing. And this means that we’re spending a larger percentage of our days creating tools rather than the ads. I get excited by the idea that I can actually now ‘use’ the marketing we make, not just watch or read it.

“If I had a fixed budget, I could get more value from a small amount of very influential [influencers], or a lot of smaller influencers, on Twitter,” Mr. Watts said. “If you recruit enough people who, on average, influence just one other person, you could get a much better return on investment if you aggregated them and altogether paid them a tenth of what Kardashian gets.”

Duncan Watts on how he would spend his marketing dollars in Twitter. For reference, Kim Kardashian get’s $10,000 per sponsored tweet. I’ve believed in the “micro” or “mid-tier” influencers for a long time now. As a refresher, here’s a related post about how it’s trust, not influence that matters.

Right or wrong, I tend to rely on my gut for market research as well (coincidentally, I’m reading an excellent book on this topic, Gut Feelings). Although it’s worth mentioning I do perform traditional market research in conjunction.

I don’t know if we do, necessarily, a lot of deep analysis or market research, per se. We certainly do a certain level of research. But again, it is so nuanced and comes back to having your ear to the ground, and having a sense of kind of the ebb and flow of what’s going on out there, at least in terms of retail or restaurants or coffee, or whatever the particular area is. So it’s kind of a combination of, like I said, having your ear to the ground, instinct, and a certain level of research.

So it’s not like we went to a traditional retail-marketing firm and said like, “This is our demographic, and please come up with a list of [laughs] candidates that fit that.” It’s really so much more of a psychographic. It’s more nuanced than that.

Mike Arauz knows digital strategy. Here’s an old excerpt I’ve had bookmarked for a while that I finally got around to re-reading. I’m posting the parts I want myself (and my clients) to remember.

Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client’s primary online objective.

This thought was taken from Gavin Heaton’s two excellent posts last week about digital strategy.

Continuous Digital Strategy

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisited across the lifecycle of any project. …each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case….The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved. The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.

As a small elite group they believe there is a need to provide creative branding solutions across every platform. They can do it quicker and more efficiently then the traditional agency model. They can also do it cheaper without sacrificing the quality of the work. Arguably the work may be better.

I believe this to be true.