Active Customer Engagement (ACE)
About 7 years ago, Mark Perry at NEA got me involved with a company that was then called CGTime, later renamed Cariocas. The Founder was a Stanford Game theorist called Yoav Shoham. He had created a collection of game theory based “games” for Active Customer Engagement (ACE). The company was too early, not very well managed, in the middle of the market crash, etc. but I liked the concepts in it.
Ever since the social networking phenomenon emerged, I keep going back to what I learnt at that company as the monetization strategy.
Thus, I was pleased to find this Ad from Pepsi on Facebook. It invites Facebook members to “play” and “engage” with their brand in creative ways, and design the next Pepsi can artwork.
The advertising industry has always been great at coming up with “brand engagement” strategies. I remember, during my teenage in India, we used to still drink ThumsUp (since purchased by Coca cola) from the bottle. Inside the cap of every bottle used to be a cartoon drawing of the face of a cricketer, and when we drank enough ThumsUp to complete the entire Indian Team, we could send it in for a cricket bat autographed by all the players.
The difference between the ThumsUp Campaign (which is also a great example of a brand engagement campaign), and the Pepsi one, is that in the latter, the Consumer is being invited to participate in the future evolution of the brand itself.
I would say, that takes brand engagement several notches higher.
Also, please read this piece for another take on the social network monetization strategy:
Online Focus Groups.
Hi Sramana,
ACE is the best policy to involve prospective consumers.I define media as information, and any information in which you seek to inform people is best executed by having a 2 way communication(interaction).
And once you start doing that, like pepsi is doing, you are way ahead of other players.of course pepsi has so much money that it can invest in these technologies,but companies who provide online ads are facing a lot of competition and we will see a decline in these technologies too.