Monday, April 13, 2009

Snacklish in Action - Adaptive Targeting


A colleague of mine has been keeping me up to date through Facebook on the brilliant Snickers "Snacklish" initiative. What it represents are the first initial steps to interweave social media elements within a more traditional campaign construct. Everyday non-descript items are replaced within Snickers billboards and posters and the "adaptive" messages - really conversational points - are streamed through social nets like Facebook and other photo-sharing platforms.

There are two things that are absolutely cool about this:

1. It turns the notion of display advertising (of all types) completely on its head, making it dynamic; and

2. It allows consumer advocates to develop messaging alongside the brand, as well as see it displayed in more "organic" or "legacy" environments.

So in trying to avoid a deep-dive into semantics, we can also look at this as a new form of "adaptive targeting". Adaptive is the operative word here because the communication mechanism goes beyond a push feature that is location or content-based, and into a realm where conversation drives messaging in more of a ubiquitous sense. In other words, the medium really is the message, and that can exist just about anywhere and at any given time.

This is also an exciting peek into how "offline" media is starting to resurge, in large part due to the influence of social media. Just wait until real-time feeds (like those through Twitter) create more widespread activation...the possibilities are limitless!

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