What Sympler thinks about...

New technology always cops a beating from the complaining class. We are perennially bombarded with doomsday scenarios where infantilizing new tools render us intellectually and physically flabby. From the calculator to spell check. GPS to Googling (your assignment’s answers). In most cases, I don’t consider myself a complainer. In fact, I believe that most of these tools remove unnecessary admin, allowing us to think and connect better with other people. 

But there is a technology that sits underneath these that may be doing more damage than we thought. Big data. I’m not here to scold big tech for stealing our data without our consent. That is being worked on. There’s a more insidious side effect of running all our decisions on one kind of data. And it’s been driving a decline for two decades. 

In the year 2000 Google made research binary. By coining the term ‘A/B test’ and birthing a culture where all tech innovation was based on it, they precipitated an era of myopia.  Until then, there were many methods. A/B tests (or ‘randomized controlled experiment,’ as I knew it) was just one of the less sophisticated ones. The A/B test was less pluralistic, but quickly became the golden goose for fast-growing tech players to print a parade of new products.  Through its radical simplicity and seemingly infallible usefulness it began to drown out other forms of research. This simplicity also drowned out the need for qualified researchers, who it pushed out of the lab. 

The result was a generation of tech bros (and a few ‘bro-ettes’) wielding simplistic data tools and no one to teach them how to design or interpret their data.  Speed and simplicity win over depth and nuance. And, as the companies who propagate this began to dominate every aspect of our lives, so did their approach to data collection and empathy. 

It’s easy to see the effect of this in today’s factious political environment. 

Many factors are blamed for today’s societal malaise. Underpinning the most oft-cited contributors of education, economy and media (especially its newest forms) sits a more powerful puppeteer. You guessed it: data technology. I am a researcher, so I have no bones with data. Quite the opposite in fact. But, it is when a two-dimensional form of data is sanctified as the Divine truth that material problems appear. 

A/B testing is a form of quantitative data collection that was historically used in concert with other methods. It is our single-minded reliance on quant that makes us dumb because it doesn’t allow us to see (or even ask for) the whole picture. This same tunnel vision and absence of curiosity is driving today’s culture wars and political balkanization.  There are three reasons for this. 

Firstly, an undue focus on quant drives inequality. This is because big data is expensive, giving the rich an incumbency advantage. Once you have it, it’s hard for others to unseat you, producing a data wealth gap 

Secondly, an unbending obsession with ‘the number’ strips us of an intellectual wealth we once had. Every human is equipped with her own data science department that we choose to use or lose. This is our innate power of perception, judgement, and critical thinking. The more we use it the better it becomes, especially when used in conjunction with more empirical datasets. As a research student I would be chastised when not triangulating my data sources. So why then are we so comfortable with single sourced data today? Is it because data just got so damned big? 

Humans are innately equipped to collect and process qualitative data.  Traditionally most big datasets were accompanied by the probing, intuitive qual to add context, color and meaning. With the rise of ‘big’ (even the term became more monosyllabic) data, this thoughtful little cousin (qual) was banished from the boardroom. When you banish qual, you kick out reason, nuance and debate. Eventually, quite existential human qualities like cooperation and empathy exit too! We can see this happening in the way social media algorithms channel us into overly simplistic bubbles and spew news at us that peddle increasingly binary narratives. But more worrying is that it’s turninh our formerly nuance-reading brains into less analytical, dopamine-craving, binary-happy empty vessels. 

The moment ‘big; became the value by which we judge the usefulness of data, this binary narrative took over and forcibly evicted reason. By muzzling qual, we’re stunting the development of the next generation of critical thinkers. The daily inclusion of qual into each conversation about data used to exercise our brain’s instinct to think and reflect. Qual was the swan’s legs oscillating frenetically under the surface to maintain the grace and order above it. The tremendous cognitive work to discern meaning from much smaller data kept us sharp and sane. 

The last time society was this fragile was before the birth of nationhood over 250 years ago. So asserts a recent episode of BBC radio’s Analysis program which demonstrates how a nation’s ability to build ‘imagined communities’ through storytelling is the foundation of a stable society. Without a strong and trustworthy media landscape today, we have lost the main instrument with which to weave national narratives in the first place. And without a story our community is weakened. Trust of media by Gen Z is as low as by Donald Trump! But could one of Gen Z’s other habits be a fix?

When I started my career, I gleefully exalted the demise of broadcast, with its monotheistic and autocratic status quo. The new interactive, Web-enabled ‘narrowcast’ era promised people-power and a long tail of eccentricities that would finally promote the unsung ‘weirdos’ and little people. This would usher in a more pluralistic, happier world, which could only be better for all of us. 

And for a while it did appear to be better. Content became cheaper, choices broader and weirdos got ‘famouser’. For most of the last 2.5 decades I cheered this progress, as did the marketers who could target more accurate messages at ever-sharping consumer subgroups. In fact, it was marketing zeal (and budgets) that accelerated our digital scramble for societal subdivision. 

The 20th century’s march towards the cult of the individual broke into a sprint in the 21st. And in doing so it lost touch with reality. How can we really all be so different? How much further can this social cell division go? 

The fragmentation that I so applauded during the web’s infancy has sprouted horns. The celebration of individuality, difference and diversity has been weaponized and we’re moving from ‘everyone has their in-group’ to a proliferation of out-groups. We went tribal again. 

In the process, we’re forgetting the bigger groups that we all used to be a part of – including our nations. In fact, the very concept of nationhood became coopted by one of the more aggressive tribes. Patriotism itself produces a weird feeling to many these days

One of the unintended consequences of the democratizing forces of the web was to blunt the potency of big, national and global stories that united large groups. Conversely the identities of micro-communities have been emboldened thanks to social media. 

Humans have an instinct for tribalism, so we don’t need that much encouragement to form enemies and start fighting now. 

At Sympler, we’ve seen how each new tech era informs each generation’s behaviors and beliefs. Gen X was first to be defined by Web 1.0, they stole music on Napster and stuck it to ‘the man’. There was something slightly off-grid and underground in the way they connected. Gen Y was the opposite in many ways, using Web 2.0 to build their personal brands and publicly flaunt their identity and signal which tribe they belonged to. 

Gen Z are different again. They are the first generation to wield digital tools in ways that can build and secure their internal worlds. The latest forms of media allow for more intimate and discreet forms of self expression. They grew up with Snapchat which acts as a sandbox for social play & experimentation. At the same time, their education was filled with more self-work so they have arrived at adulthood with a greater sense of who thy really are, so have less need of external validation. It is is no surprise that it’s this generation that’s shunning traditional roles to be ‘non-conforming’ in more than just gender. 

2021 is the 40th anniversary of the so-called ‘Brixton Riots’, the race-triggered days of unrest that took part on the streets of London’s Brixton – London’s Jamaican district and home of the famous Electric Avenue, immortalized in the 80s Eddie Grant song. 

I have a special bond with Brixton as it’s where I’d hang out when I first arrived in London and where I bought my first house before moving to America. So, when I heard some very moving interviews from protagonists of the era to mark the anniversary it put today’s race debates in America into a context that I could empathize with more deeply. 

Brixton still bore scars of that time when I lived there over a decade ago. My local pub – the Effra Hall - still had a dividing wall that was purported to separate the two communities, and echoes of the unrest persisted in local folklore and even mentioned on the survey when buying our house (evidence, perhaps, of its gentrification). 

The interviews on the BBC intrigued me for their disarmingly frank and self-aware discourse – especially in the context of today’s public debate on the other side of the Atlantic. Much of what I read and hear today barks its heartfelt, ossified opinions from one bubble-wrapped pedestal to another. But this was a conversation and both parties were in the same room, speaking softly and openly. While emotion was involved, this served to deepen the understanding of events as opposed to concealing it behind outrage. The chat could even be described as vulnerable, which made the humans on both sides more compelling and sympathetic. 

As a result, I heard a story that I’d not heard before, and certainly not one I’m witnessing in today’s media: that these two people – a white policeman and a black resident of Brixton had been friends.  

Now in their 60s, the two men talked candidly about their starkly changing their emotions from the beginning of the dispute to the end. At first neither had felt any hatred towards the other group. There was even a sense of shared community. The policeman freely admitted to the police force’s idiotic idea to mandate quotas of tickets and fines – tying them to officer bonuses. He articulated how it led to mistrust from his Jamaican neighbors. While there was a huge failing on the behalf of the local police, both narrators were able to paint a similar big picture from their current position. They could both see how and when emotion had entered that picture and why. They explained how, once that emotion was embedded, there was no turning back. Former friends, allies and neighbors were now sworn enemies with a thirst for blood. 

The podcast format, the interviewer and the four decades of reflection clearly played a role in this candid rationalizing of the events, but it made me ask whether we could bring this level of honesty and vulnerability to more conversations like this? And do we really need to wait 40 years to start them?

Time isn’t and shouldn’t be the only means to quell passions. Today we have an embarrassment of riches in how we communicate, reflect, confess and debate ideas. Not all of them need be public. There can be a more measured way of releasing ideas.  We work with conversation in the private space of chat. And I saw echoes in the confessional, reflective tone of the London cop and local resident in the conversations that we elicit. These range from such topics as parenting taboos through to unconscious bias in organizations. But what they all have in common is that they include candor, emotion and vulnerability. 

Ultimately everyone wants to talk. This explains the pace of social media’s rise in the last decade. We all have a duty to enable that talk in a way that produces clear and reflective understanding of the multitude of narratives that are happening. Much of our current channels don’t allow for this nuance so we’re thrown into a societal ‘fight mode’. But there are channels that can bring the volume down to a whisper, that give the heart time to feel, contemplate and see the complexity of situations and give them time to consider that right course of action (if any).  

Younger audiences have little reason to trust the media like their parents once did. For the latter group, the fourth estate provided a democratic force built on the principles of truth, integrity, and reach to keep an honest eye on the elected powers. Developments in technology helped to strengthen these pillars, enabling truer truths, greater reach, and consistent quality. But somewhere along the way, this model stopped delivering returns. Transparency and truth appear increasingly subjective, reach is available to anyone with a sex tape and an Internet connection, and consistency looks more like farce in the era of epic flip-floppers.

If you can’t trust the established media, where do you go?

You go home. Media needs to come home, get into bed with us, court us, cook us dinner, listen to our gripes, and let us be us. Our youngest audiences, known as Generation Z, are already there, ditching so-called "social" media for the more sociable, safer, and private "dark social," where they might chat freely and express themselves from the comfort of their own small cliques. This shift is led by the growth in mobile messaging apps, with platforms seeing smaller groups coalesce around more focused topics. Mass media is out. Niche, intimate dark social is in.

The key to credibility in the era of conversational media will be to get more personal. Rather like the disembodied avatar in "Her," media will be a gentle voice whispering intimately into your ear. After centuries of mass media and advertising barking at you from its respective box, book, or banner, media is about to humanize. Fueled by data science, AI and NLP, it will now be able to mimic our own positive traits of listening, sensing, and empathizing in order to better itself.  

I like to call this "sentient marketing." Four skills will allow brands to become more sentient in this developing space: intimacy, presence, empathy and vulnerability.

1. Intimacy

Since the creation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the Internet has been voraciously connecting the fringe interests previously ignored by the mainstream. The true power of this medium has been in its ability to unite people with common areas of passion, no matter how niche. In the messaging era, users can go even deeper, exploring and developing their passions without fear of being judged or misunderstood, as their actions don’t need to be kept for posterity as with social media.

Reddit has built a network of rock-solid communities precisely because they aren’t mass or mainstream. With their strict policies, secretive names, and insider lingo, Reddit communities aim for deep understanding and connection rather than widespread acceptance.

It is no coincidence that the largest and fastest growing online medium is messaging, as it lends further personalization and depth to connections across all subject areas. Messaging now has 3.6 billion users worldwide, exceeding social media users by 1.2 billion. Unlike on social media, users are not expected to parade their socially pre-approved talents and perfect lives in the messaging space. Rather, users on messaging platforms increasingly "share feelings, not information," according to meme-making agency founder Steve Bartlett.

It is here that we now share our most private, personal pieces of ourselves.

As such, brands must tread carefully in the messaging space, making sure not to violate this intimacy. You are not just entering homes, as TV does, you are engaging people on a deeply personal level.  Lower your voice, listen, be gentle. Most importantly, don’t overstay your welcome.

2. Presence

The growth of VR and AR is allowing audiences to play with their sense of place and inhabit spaces that weren’t available to them before. "The Matrix" may have been science fiction when it was released, but today it is closer than ever as reality-enhancing tools feature increasingly in our everyday technology. 2017 was the year that "Live" video dusted off its variety show image and shot back into fashion as Periscope-like services were added to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. This development brought fans closer to the objects of their adoration and gave publishers ways to make audiences feel more involved in events without actually attending them.

The expansion of technologies such as live video is blurring the lines between celebrities and fans. Users can converse with celebrities that aren’t actually there through the miracle of chat bots. They can even experience what it feels like to be famous through new technology on platforms like Snapchat that allows you to assume the likeness and personality traits of your favorite star. Access, exclusivity, and experience can now be downloaded.

The proliferation of messaging channels has enabled an unprecedented level of proximity to anyone we choose, more or less around the clock. The voyeuristic social experiments of the '90s such as Big Brother and the Real World felt overblown, but today seem almost quaint as features such as Instagram stories have us living in each other's lives minute by minute. Similarly, Generation Z has popularized Houseparty, Hangouts, and Live.ly, which enable group fun to be initiated and experienced remotely.

Brands would be wise to think of the latest digital channels as experiential, with the ability to bring consumers into new worlds. With these technologies, brands can offer the depth, authenticity and proximity that consumers crave.  Voice-enabled assistants bring brand and celebrity voices right into your living room or headphones, creating an intimate, personal connection between brand and consumer.

3. Empathy.

For more than a decade, social media and online advertising companies have been building large data sets around our "likes" and behaviors. With machine learning, we can now aggregate that data from across multiple customer interactions, making automated conversational interfaces even smarter than their human counterparts.  The question, however, is how to leverage this data to connect with consumers on their terms.

A person can only experience so many things, but a chatbot can assimilate data from every customer exchange in a fraction of a second and become much more "thoughtfully" responsive as a result. Empathy and the power to leverage it will become a huge and valuable commodity as we move deeper into the conversational era. While there has been much criticism of the unrealistic expectations placed on bots, those that play within their field of expertise can successfully express their "intelligence." National Geographic rolled out a bot on Facebook Messenger to celebrate the launch of a TV series on Albert Einstein. The Einstein bot could chat with NatGeo followers about a variety of topics, entertaining and educating with amusing responses.  Capitalizing on these new technologies can allow brands to blend humor and humanity into consumer interactions.

In the age of empathy, consumer research should be conducted differently as well. My company already delivers "conversational research" on behalf of brands, going beyond social listening to learn about the motivations behind the statements, turning more interactions into sources of consumer information. Conversational research is designed for a generation not only more comfortable in messaging, but one that’s able to express more deeply as they’re equipped with tools that empower them visually and metaphorically.  It makes sense, therefore, for brands to start building that empathy and courting consumers in the places that they will ultimately be delivering marketing messages (if we can call them that now). We believe that conducting marketing outreach and research separately will soon be a relic of another age and bringing the two together will illuminate "dark social."

Finally, that same machine learning can help consumers make better calls on what, when, and how to chat with their friends. Not only will companies use empathy to generate better customer experiences but they will also bestow it upon consumers themselves. We won’t simply be reminded of our friends’ birthdays, we’ll also be presented with exactly the right GIF to share with them at exactly the right moment.

4. Vulnerability.

It seems like Snapchat has been a victim, not just a conduit, of cyber-bullying this year.  Last month 1.2 million users and Kylie Jenner weighed into a brawl that began with investors, advertisers and the brutish Facebook empire.

The fight, at its core, is about authenticity. Who is really your ‘friend?’ Evan Spiegel wants you to know that celebrities certainly aren’t, which has bloodied the noses of both fans and celebs. Jenner was credited with wiping over a billion from Snapchat’s share price after a drop in fan adoration stemming from relegation to a secondary part of the platform.

Snapchat had stood firm in the face of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, who’d clamored for a traditional media model where publishers might buy their way into consumers’ attention.  The app’s rapid growth occurred precisely because it refused that model, choosing to give the youngest users of social media a place to be more honest, unpolished, and vulnerable. Yes – one of Donald Trump’s banned words of 2017 represented an unexpected shift in direction for an industry more commonly associated with image preservation. Perhaps this is why the investment and marketing communities struggled to make sense of it. But the second-most downloaded iOS app of 2017 spoke to a new type of media relationship where the brands didn’t own the lion’s share of airtime. Money didn’t dictate who consumers hear. Intimacy did.

The magic of Snapchat was that it let us experiment, probe boundaries, make mistakes, ask questions, or just try out silly faces. It is in this sandbox that millions of young users developed themselves and their relationships. Authenticity was easier to achieve than the ultra-polished Instagram and it is less risky when only your inner circle of trusted friends are watching.

But what if you want Kylie Jenner in your inner circle of friends?

Social media brings people such unparalleled proximity to stardom that we’ve become accustomed to following the micro-actions of the rich and famous and believe the best ones to actually be our friends. While scale and perfection were the old battlegrounds of marketing, both Snapchat and Instagram now compete around values of depth, connection, humanity, and friendship. Snapchat had a lead on Instagram when it allowed "influencers" to be followed as friends, surfacing their stories side by side. But by stripping the Jenners of their "friend" status, Snapchat removed this advantage. While Spiegel’s crusade for authenticity is an admirable one, we feel that there is a middle ground.  There is genuine power in building bonds through vulnerability.  Snapchat stands to gain by remaining a conduit for this, so should consider rewarding publishers, artists, and even brands that promote honest, unguarded, and vulnerable behaviors. Only those that foster the types of connections that made Snapchat a success can be included as friends. All others should live in the "discover" section.

Marketing just got tougher. A new, smarter medium emerged and it’s belittling your old ones. It’s also taking your youngest, most attractive consumers with it. The medium is mobile messaging, and publishers and marketers are falling over themselves to reach its natives as they retreat into the most intimate and private space media has ever known. While this is a new and more powerful medium, it is essential that marketers don’t treat it like those that have gone before it – and this includes regular social media.

Context is more important than it’s ever been. Just because 1-to-1 has now become a reality, it does not mean that hyper targeting is going to be easy. This new space requires a level of humanity, empathy and social awareness that has never before been needed. This shouldn’t be a surprise – as the more intimate the context we move into the more we need to show the utmost of consideration and tact. We are dating our consumers now – not shouting at them.

Brands must intuit what moves consumers in this space or risk completely losing contact with the largest chunk of their consumer base. To get them started Sympler has been interviewing young messaging users and has three lessons to share.

1. A well-placed GIF is worth a thousand words

If you’re going to play in mobile messaging you’re going to need to give good GIF & emoji. Texting has become our most frequent form of communication but it is famously fraught with misunderstanding. We know this from making dramatic faux pas in our social or dating lives. Brands are no different so should heed the same lessons.

As we navigate the intimate world of messaging GIFs and emojis have stepped in as security measures to avert the dual disaster threats of offense or, worse, tedium!

While still unsophisticated as complete languages, with only nascent and informal rules, GIFs and emojis are airlifted into textual conversations looking for assistance – to stop, start or punctuate chats.  Their greater emotional dexterity can help users energize dull conversations or diffuse potentially risky ones – acting as conversational cushions that pure text lacks.

"Emojis limit the awkwardness of the conversation.” (Kristin, 19)

By harnessing the external social associations of GIFs & emojis, consumers can avoid misinterpretation.  And the ability to soften a message by conveying playfulness can humanize things, fostering closer relationships

”Sometimes I’ll throw a GIF into the middle of a group chat if I think it’s getting a bit boring. It always wakes things up and gets people chatting more!" (Corey, 18)

As GIFs creep into more platforms, they’re being co-opted as stirrers of conversation. By injecting cultural references we incite greater participation in our conversations, which are especially important when they’re group chats.

Takeaway: The right GIF at the right time is worth a thousand words.  In this space a brand has a fraction of a second to make the right impression. View GIFs and Emojis as powerful conversation aids by connecting to context and encouraging active participation in chats.  Knowing how to utilize these well is extremely important when communicating with young consumers.

How is your brand a springboard or an emotional mediator between consumers? Answering this well can garner even deeper engagement than other channels and prevent you from being tone-deaf in this one.

2.  You’ll be judged by your emoji game.

93% of us are now using emojis so you’re no longer speaking to teens just by breaking one out. It’s how they’re being used that really counts. And its not always how you’d think. While parents may believe them to be shorthand for terms that could be voiced or written, the most prevalent users (and therefore those that define the language) reject the literal usage of this format. .

Parents regularly fall foul of this when chatting with offspring – misinterpreting the linguistic codes.

“When people use emojis too correctly, I just roll my eyes. My mom uses each emoji in a deliberate way and that's not how you're supposed to do it. “ (Hannah, 19)

And it’s not just parents getting it wrong. Apple misunderstood emoji culture when it launched iOS 10 where certain words could be automatically replaced by emojis. Young consumers did not play along, as they weren’t looking to replace words. Emojis help us play with meaning, be ironic, stupid or euphemistic. Far from simplifying our language, emojis have become a perfect tool to add depth, metaphor and complexity

Takeaway: Counter to the childish follies we once took them to be, emojis and other messaging tools can be a trove of meaning. So be careful how you wield them. If you’re serious about communicating as a peer to younger consumers, be sure that you know the codes and how symbols have been co-opted and played with. Assume nothing. Do your research.

By understanding the complexities around usage of emojis, you can create native branded content that seamlessly fits into conversations and enables self-expression.

3. Design for GIFfability

Young consumers are watching and reading less traditional media, yet pop-culture phenomena still seem to emerge and dominate. These phenomena are filling new channels in different – often much shorter – ways and formats, including the GIF.  

As consumers harness new technology to express themselves they’re increasingly dipping into the world of entertainment for reinforcement. We’ve always quoted our favorite artists, actors or poets. Today we can literally get them to do the work for us. This, in turn, creates a new platform for the artist who is now being disseminated via an unofficial network of doting ‘quoters.’

In the new medium of messaging a brand or artist is as successful as he is quotable, GIFable or memeable.  Drake famously tapped into this by designing his music videos to be deliberately broken down into smaller chunks and ‘GIFfed’ to (and, crucially ‘by’) his fans.

This is just as true for brands as it is for artists. The best brands have always been bywords for larger ideas and are regularly used in conversation – from ‘Kodak moments’ to ‘gives you wings.’

Messaging is not only where today’s consumers create cultural meaning and language, but it is where fame is groomed and amplified. But this is a symbiotic relationship, as the fans (and non-fans) are hungry for the best tools of communication, so successful players will give them the fodder to fuel their cravings.

"I sent a GIF with a caption that had a quote from The Office. If I had just sent the quote, it's possible my friend wouldn't have understood the reference. I needed the visual component with the quote to make it all come together and prevent any confusion"  (Bobby, 20)

GIFs create relevancy for the pop culture productions they are taken from.  With the right snippet of content they can turn the success of a one liner from one place (a show or a commercial) into a comedic icon that thrives and reproduces exponentially.

Takeaway:  Messaging, GIFs and memes create a new set of rules for brands looking to be part of pop culture. The creation of the right assets can lead to its pervasive use, making the original content more relevant than ever.  However it’s

With WhatsApp reaching 1 billion daily active users this week and Facebook Messenger and WeChat not far behind, there is no question of the importance of messaging. In the last 12 months we’ve met with over 100 different brands, agencies and publishers curious to see what all the fuss is about in this burgeoning but enigmatic new medium. In doing so, we’ve identified some common misconceptions, some of which we’ve found surprising, so we thought we’d share some rules in the space.  These are intended to shed more light on messaging and how we, as a community of innovators, marketers and investors can work together to build best practice and lasting value.

Five rules for messaging marketing:

1. KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND MESSAGING

It only feels like a few years since we got to grips with the shiny new medium that is social media. With its promises of greater sharing and user participation, social media gave rise to new specialists heralding new tricks, but the resulting advertising has become strangely reminiscent of traditional formats. We are now plagued by pre-rolls on YouTube, interstitials on Facebook and product placement on Instagram.

In the last two years mobile messaging has emerged as the new medium to watch. It has over 2bn users accessing it from smart phones globally. While the top 4 messaging apps are all now above or close to a billion monthly users, only 2 of their older social media sites surpass or even come close to this number.

But, while messaging grew from within social media, its characteristics are very different. Social still pushes brands to a content-consuming audience. Messaging practitioners however must design for what the Wall Street Journal calls ‘Chatvertising’.  Everything must enable conversation because nothing is one way. This makes the job of selecting content a very different one.  Your brand’s content must have an enabling role between one consumer and another. Game of Thrones built yet more hype on Snapchat by enabling their (seemingly countless) fans to transform themselves into White Walkers in anticipation of the new season.

Takeaway: Think of your brand as a living, socializing, conversing asset. Know that consumers spend more time chatting than any other activity, so find the right moments to enable and uplift those conversations. ‘Chatify’ your brand’s content and get into where those chats are already happening

2. MAKE MESSAGING A HABIT, NOT A CHANNEL

In 2016 we heard that anything could be done from within messaging: we can chat, inquire, browse, book and even buy. In 2017 we’ve been looking at how messaging can also be added to any other digital medium. With the rise of conversational interfaces (bots and more bots), consumers no longer need to be in a dedicated chat platform to converse with each other or with brands.

Messaging is now ubiquitous. It includes everything from native SMS to Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, G-chat, and chat interfaces that can integrate into a brand’s owned and operated channels. Messaging isn’t a single medium, it is a whole form of communication that is distributed across multiple channels and devices. So while we’re just seeing how messaging is growing to be larger than social media this only begins to hint at the pervasive force that messaging will become. We should be viewing this as an entire marketing discipline rather than a quirky little channel.  Dunkin Donuts took on this perspective for National Donut Day by engaging fans with interactive lenses and chatbots across messaging platforms Kik, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger.

Takeaway: Consider all of your channels and touch points with consumers as opportunities to spark conversations. Expand your idea of messaging into an objective across the marketing mix.  With the right tools, you can enable conversations from your owned, operated or bought channels. This includes everything from bots to custom web messengers.

3.  DO NOT SEE THIS AS DARK SOCIAL

Much of the trepidation around messaging is due the unknowns around tracking.  As a medium still in its infancy, messaging doesn’t have a formalized infrastructure yet. So while advertisers can feel its importance, the lack of approved analytics across the system can be a barrier to beginning a campaign on this channel. This is changing however. The messaging players are beginning to offer better and more consistent tracking and those brands that have used the medium have seen much better engagement rates than from digital or regular social, which are increasingly plagued by spam and ad blockers. Recently Snapchat has made large strides toward ad measurement tools.  They are currently capable of audience targeting for up to 60 groups based on the content users choose to view in the publishers section.  They have also successfully tracked brand awareness, purchase intent, conversions and app install performance data.

Takeaway: Analytics is present in messaging even if sometimes the metrics appear different from other media. This is a good thing as success in messaging is more than about just eyeballs. It is about the chat value that it generates.  You know you’re well suited to messaging when your content gets batted back and forth multiple times.

4. YOUR CULTURE-DEFINING ADS BELONG IN MESSAGING, NOT ON TV

As we meet more clients considering ‘messaging marketing’, it’s clear that those most suited to this channel are typically seeking fame and pop-culture relevance.

Which other screens do we routinely see last thing at night and first thing in the morning? This is the only medium that sparks withdrawal when we’re separated from it. We have come to treat our phones like a trusted human. It is our friend when we’re unexpectedly left alone, our company when bored, and our advisor when in need of help. The obvious reason for this is that mobile messaging connects us to our real friends, but no other medium inhabits our most intimate moments nor has the power to profoundly effect our emotions. This is where brands’ culture-defining, buzz-maximizing, emotional campaigns should be taking place. The contemporary consumer develops and hones their language, identity and perspective on the world through this medium, so brands must position themselves in the heart of it as conduits and enablers. Hollywood and the record business has already caught on here. The rapper, Drake, famously shoots his music videos to be easily co-opted as GIFs and memes – shortcutting the process of him building online, as well as offline fame.

Takeaway: Think about the emotional space your brand occupies and how your content intersects with the rules, language, and trends within messaging.

5. START PILOTING NOW

Few brands or publishers we’ve met are in any doubt about the increasing dominance of messaging in the lives of their consumers. As consumers ourselves, we can’t deny it either. When we don our marketing hats there emerges a familiarity gap however. Raymond Loewey famously observed that the secret to a great new invention and design is the perfect balance between the familiar and the new. Messaging has many familiar components, and, to consumers, it has just enough newness to shift them from other media. But as marketers on the other side of the curtain attempting to engage consumers, messaging looks more foreign than familiar. The overall shape of delivering marketing into this space feels unfamiliar: the assets, the formats and the measurement are all new to a brand manager at this stage – especially when synching it up with the rest of the marketing mix. The task is to remember we’ve really been doing this for years as consumers. It’s simply a question of integrating slightly new features from messaging with our existing communications strategy.

Last week Sympler helped Queens of the Stone Age promote the release of their new single 'Evil has Landed'. By asking fans to scan a ‘Snap code’ that the band posted on their social channels, a conversation was sparked that let fans receive exclusive snippets of the upcoming single on Snapchat. This generated 3 million fan engagements and 700K unique sign ups. And this was for a band whose fan base skews older than Snapchat’s core user - exactly the demographic Snapchat is trying to grow on their platform right now!

Takeaway

A short compilation of what people made on the old platform.

http://sympler.co/

Featured: