The value of the intangible

Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy UK spoke on TED Global about the value of the intangible, and how advertising helps create that value:

Highly entertaining, as usual for Rory. Having worked with Rory in a brainstorming some time ago, when I still worked at Ogilvy, I can tell you: he really is that entertaining. The story about how to make the train ride between London and Paris any more enjoyable I already heard back then, it’s a classic…

For the rest of that talk: I do believe that we’re now living in a world of mass produced commodities, no matter what you buy, the added value almost always lies within the imagined value that you yourself (with the little help of stories created by advertising as well as socially networked word-of-mouth) asign to your individual brand experience…

Ripple Effect – a new book on word-of-mouth by empowerment

Martin Oetting – sorry, Dr. Martin Oetting, as of a short while ago (congratulations!), just published a reference to his newly released thesis: ripple effect (How Empowered Involvement Drives Word of Mouth). The link leads to a page with a small „social media release“, which includes a PDF with a short summary (in German), a video interview, etc.

The key question triggering this whole study was: „how can marketing leverage word-of-mouth for products and brands?“

The answer, in short: empowered involvement, by offering choice and meaning, leveraging consumer competence, allowing for real impact by the target audience. The long answer: buy the book 😉

Here is the video interview with Dr. Martin Oetting (in German):

Social Media Counter showing the growing Social Web

A guy named gary has produced a widget which demonstrates in „real time“ the explosion of the social web. As you can see below, the rate of new content and interaction on the various social sites and applications is enormous! He writes about it:

I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009.

On his site you can see more about his data sources, and you can also grab the source code for the widget.


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