Editors around the country have the perplexing conundrum of choosing which page of their newspapers to run the Tiger Woods story. Sports? Business? Main news? Lifestyle? The gossip column? All of the above?
Tiger—along with the sad story unfolding around him—is the object of convergence. He is relevant as a sports icon, a celebrity, and a brand endorsement machine. This same trend toward convergence is also seen in as unlikely a persona as Ashton Kutcher. An actor of minimal accomplishments, but with 4,000,000+ Twitter followers, he recently made the cover of Fast Company magazine. The cover story describes his savvy ambitions for digital conquest through a convergence of Hollywood movie production, a traditional ad agency, social media, and consumer product sponsorship.
“The program,” says the Fast Company article, “is a collaboration between Katalyst (Kutcher’s production company); Slide, a Web company founded by Max Levchin of PayPal fame; advertising titan Publicis Groupe; and Nestlé, which owns Hot Pockets. It has been a huge hit, with millions of reposts of the videos on Facebook, each one reaching an average of 65 friends.”
The focus of this effort is viral marketing for Hot Pockets—yes, those crusty, over-processed, handheld, food-like pouches as seen on TV. This is viral marketing supersized by Kutcher’s star power and social media engineering at its best.
Tiger’s and Kutcher’s stories point to the larger version of convergence: that of the four great power centers of the American economy: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. This grand convergence is made tangible technologically by the increasingly blurred lines between the computer-phone-television-radio.
Yet another form of convergence is taking place in Comcast’s takeover of NBC—the convergence of the means of distribution and the means of content production. (You gotta have something to watch on your converged media device, right?
The ultimate implications of convergence for marketers aren’t entirely clear, but some guidelines are emerging:
1) Think cross-platform with all new marketing initiatives. Before you kick off a campaign or launch a new product, think carefully about whether an iPhone app, social media, billboards, or crop circles are your best media. The combinations are endless.
2) Don’t wait too long to sail the seas of convergence. You won’t get a new multi-platform marketing initiative right the first time, especially with all the new emerging technologies. Better to learn by doing on some lower risk efforts, than wait for the perfect timing and knowledge that may never come.
3) Creativity rules. Creativity of concept and expression are the only real guarantee of getting traction and differentiation.
Gotta go…my Hot Pocket’s almost done warming in my iPod-microwave-radio-lawnmower.