AdAge's Andjelic: Digital Branding Needs Work

In "Time To Rewrite The Brand Playbook For Digital", Ana Andjelic has some important thoughts for anybody considering producing effective display advertising - especially for those undertainking self-service advertising for brands.  Long story short, Andjelic is on the patrol against old thinking in the new medium.

She puts the new media landscape under a microscope and does a great job finding not just the right questions but identifying the wrong questions our industry all too often asks without recognizing the rules are changing. Great and provocative stuff.

Third wrong question: How should we use the internet to build brand value?

By asking this, we reveal that we still think of digital media as yet another channel of communication to be added to the already existing roster of mass-media channels traditionally used for branding. Instead of treating digital as an additional venue to display brand messages, you need to ask, "What is valuable on the internet?" Twitter CEO Evan Williams likes to say that many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible: How fast you run, how many followers you have, who you know, where you go, what you buy -- everything is visible these days. But digital does not stop there. It also reveals the non-obvious and unexpected relationships between people and products and technology. Because our thinking about branding has been based on our awareness of the obvious relationships, digital media are much more than a simple evolution of branding. Think of Lufthansa's MySkyStatus or Whole Foods on Twitter or branded tips on Foursquare or Blippy. By making more and more things connected via information, brands in digital can increase chances for serendipity.