The hottest topic in media (advertising, marketing – take your pick) is Native Advertising. It seems everyone is going native when it comes to their brand spend. This wild enthusiasm is only matched by the total confusion about what exactly is Native Advertising. There are a bunch of definitions flying round. The most all-purpose definition is probably something like “Brand promotion messages or content on the internet that fit so well into the context in which they appear you hardly know or care whether you are being sold to”. So this will span everything from Google Adwords (ads appear alongside natural search results in exactly the same format) to sponsored stories, videos, images, music on respectively facebook, youtube, pinterest or spotify and their ilk.

Native can include the internet version of an “advertorial” – an on-line publisher will include some story about a brand in their normal content flow, some bloggers will simply get paid to write stuff about a brand or company. These are supposed to be clearly indicated but many are not and many would claim that no-one cares. If it is a good read, it is a good read, and it’s not like you paid for it. The Red Bull case study gets trotted out over and over again. Red Bull promote its energy drink by associating itself with derring-do – whether Formula One Sponsorship, Extreme Sports or some bloke parachuting from a great height. The point about the latter is this specific, fully Red Bull funded, stunt found its way into a gazillion blogs and newsfeeds on the web. Good old fashioned PR? Well yes, but specifically designed and presented for the on-line publishing world.

What is behind all this? Simply a frustration with banner ads. I’ve mentioned before that advertisers have done the same thing in digital that they did when commercial TV came on the scene. They adapted what they knew for the new medium (in the case of TV they ran radio ads with pictures, in the case of on-line publishing they ran press ads) rather than learning new tricks or at the very least re-learning and reframing old tricks.

Advertisers’ willingness to pay for banner ads here, there and everywhere allowed any old crap blogger to make a bob or two out of their sites and gave major off-line publishers the false idea that they could recreate their business model on-line. But what is the one dominant feature of on-line? You can measure almost everything and pretty soon everyone has figured out that “You have more chance of surviving an air crash than clicking on a banner ad”. Native advertising works better, brands and agencies are prepared to pay more for better results, the trend has caught fire. There are new agencies who know how to do it, new platforms that know how to get it out there, new opportunities on every major social media site, all looking to cash in with numbers and metrics to back up their case.

The old guard will say – as they always do – that there is nothing new here. With the right connections, budgets and brand stories you could always lean on editors and journalists to big up you brand. The Gold Blend ads (I know I am going back a while here) worked because they were a brand relevant 30 second soap opera that got flighted in the ad break of, yes, a soap opera. How native is that? What is the difference between sponsored content and event or celebrity sponsorship?

As soon as attention and eyeballs move away from one activity to another, brands will eventually find a way to shoe-horn themselves into that new activity be it watching TV, surfing the net, keeping up with friends and trends or playing games. Yes fundamentally it is the same game but scale, data, algorithms, real-time metrics, fragmentation, pace of change and user empowerment make it a game with new rules and new potential to win or fail.

I try to keep pace with all this and am lucky enough to spend most of my time with people who know a lot more than me because they are out there building new marketing tech businesses. One person I keep up with on a regular basis here in Cape Town is Will Mellor. He is better known (and he is very well known) as Seth Rotheram, the alter ego he created for his blog site, 2Oceansvibe. Except when he started the term blogging had not been created and the software did not exist. He began posting pictures of the Camps Bay in-crowd with amusing little stories and gossip. He started to add cool lifestyle content he found on the internet. In those days he had to take the site down and then reload it every night because there was no WordPress. His popularity and unique visitors grew, he could start to get all manner of freebies and some cash to talk about brands, events, restaurants. No-one cares he is getting paid because 2OV is just such a great read and the first place to go to find the funniest and sauciest stuff on the net. He has also always featured brands and magazines for which he does not get paid simply because he thinks they give his brand the right vibe. He then launched an on-line radio station, relaunched the blog as an on-line magazine and is currently re-naming and rebranding all the neighbourhoods in Cape Town – the Hoods Project – and in the process creating a whole new geo-cultural cluster.

Will, aka Seth, has not just understood celebrity he created one, he was blogging before we knew what blogging was, he turned this into the new model for on-line publishing and is at the forefront of on-line media. And yes – he has been making money (funding his lifestyle) with native advertising long before the rest of us went native. He is the ultimate local/global and now micro-local. If he was in London or New York he’d be mega rich and famous. But as he says – work’s a sideline, live the lifestyle.

And the lifestyle is good in Cape Town, at least for the some of the natives.

Best course Unilever ever sent me on was one on advertising (that’s what we called it back then). It was a 2 week residential course held at a very swanky hotel in the home counties which was great for a hard-up twenty something but that wasn’t what I meant. There were three things that stood out for me. Firstly, the course was 50/50 Unilever brand managers and agency account execs. They weren’t literally our opposite numbers but they were our peers and they all worked in what we referred to as the ‘club agencies’ i.e. the select big agencies Unilever used. Secondly, they managed to get a stellar selection of the brightest and most experienced people in advertising to come and talk to us. Finally and most memorably they made us do a role reversal project where we were given a creative brief and had to give our response to a judging panel of the senior agency stars. My syndicate’s brief was how to promote the Great British Pub, the client being some fictitious industry body and the background being that the pub trade was down and many, especially the village pubs, were closing.

I can still vividly remember our ads. We set up a series of situations such as a couple getting engaged, someone scoring 180 at darts, a guy getting a big promotion, high emotion occasions when the only place you wanted to be to celebrate was your local pub. But as the people in these situations looked around them their pub faded and they were left celebrating on their own because the pub had gone. The pay-off line was “The great British Pub – get there before it closes” (back then all pubs closed at 10.30 pm, hence a double meaning). Cut to same people now happily in their local pub sharing their moments. Classic advertising technique, depict a world devoid of whatever it is you are advertising to dramatize the unique benefits. We won the top prize, as it happens.

I felt a bit like that in Terminal 5, Heathrow, last week. A visit to HMV was part of my pre-flight ritual and now I was looking at a boarded-up space where HMV used to be. Should I be surprised? On more than one occasion last year I returned home with CD’s and DVD’s I’d bought at HMV only for the family to inform me they’d already downloaded them. How stupid did I feel? And yet I would still have spent time in HMV last week because I enjoy browsing a record store. Trouble is browsing doesn’t pay the bills for HMV (or Jessops).

WHSmith have announced they are to go back into CD’s and DVD’s – smart move, but is that the future for WHS? The last place you can go to buy occasionally what you most often buy on-line. I remember asking an American friend who was returning to the States after a few years in the UK what he would miss most. WHSmith he replied, he and his family loved the high street store but like me he couldn’t put his finger on why. It doesn’t exist in the States and has a unique bunch of ‘stuff’ was the best he could do and like me he is a career marketer.

Pubs contracted in numbers for years, just like high street retailers, but have recently enjoyed something of a revival. The reason for their decline was easy to see. Cheap booze in the supermarket, drink driving laws and a fundamentally male-oriented offer in an increasingly female/family oriented world. What saved them was not some cute bunch of ads that reminded you about what you used to like without ever really putting a finger on why. What saved them was keeping some elements of their unique magic but then fundamentally re-engineering the offer – more/better food, more choice and diversity, more unisex.

I think HMV could have done the same, in fact I think they were trying to do precisely that but clearly it was too little too late. Pubs found an offer that for most people on some occasions could not be equaled at home. HMV needed to find some things – product, service, experience – that beat on-line shopping for most people on at least some occasions. In their case they also needed to find a way to migrate to some kind of synergistic off-line and on-line offer. John Lewis seem to have managed that well as their results show. I’ve used them a lot recently (furnishing a new flat) and they hit a great sweet spot for range/quality/price, with well-motivated, helpful staff (we all know why – they own the business). I sometimes look on line and go to the local store to buy. I sometimes browse the store and then buy on-line. I sometimes buy on-line and go to the store to pick it up. Simple, brilliant.

What is the future for WHSmith? Could it be as simple as putting food and drink into the mix – coffee shops in bookstores seems to have worked and food worked for pubs? Maybe that plus some other unique in-store experience and a symbiosis between on and off-line. Who knows?

But I do know I miss HMV and I’d miss WHSmith if they were gone.

There has been a development in the “what lies at the heart of marketing’ zeitgeist over the many decades since marketing began – which as we know was long before it was actually called marketing. It started with trust. You branded something (literally in the case of cattle) with your signature, a logo or name, so people could recognize it as the one they knew and trusted because, and this will never change, people don’t trust what they don’t know in everything except religion.

I won’t go through all the various marketing zeitgeists – I am not old enough to have experienced all of them first hand and too old to recall the ones I did with any accuracy. So let me just pick out a few. When brands became disintermediated – e.g. you chose them yourself off a super-market shelf rather than had them commended to you by a shop –keeper – USP became quite popular. Marketing was all about creating a unique point of difference. Somewhere along the line it broadened into a value proposition and this was believed to have some kind of emotional/functional ying and yang.

More recently, in the dawn of the “everything is a brand” age, we came to focus on the brand story and the brand ideals. The PR folk claimed this was good old reputation management but nobody listened to them because their ‘brand’ was somewhat tarnished by the likes of Max Clifford and Alastair Campbell.
I recall a brief rally around the idea of Love Brands. Marketing was all about delight and love and exceeding expectations. Hard to argue with that other than perhaps to point out that 99.999% of brands are picked through inertia, hunch and familiarity rather than love (as opposed to only 50% of life partners).
Right now I’d say engagement is the mot du jour. Marketing is all about creating engagement – less through didactic, interrupt and repeat marketing communication and more through what brands actually do and how it gets reported in social media. Earned media is brand engagement’s marketing pay-off.
What’s coming next? What is going to become the ‘focus of marketing’, the ‘when it boils down to it, this is what marketers really do’ consensus among the chattering marketing classes (who chatter quite a lot).

Might it come full circle back to trust? The focus of marketing – apart from getting more people to buy stuff more often for more money or perhaps as a means to this? – might become earning, sustaining and building trust in a world that is increasingly mistrustful, or to dig a little deeper, in a world where trust increasingly comes from ones large and growing social cohorts and decreasingly from just about everything else. You can’t trust anything or anybody these days.

Forget the establishment, the police and politicians, they are a complete busted flush pretty much worldwide. Celebrities lie like a cheap suit, some trusted family favourites have been revealed as kiddy-fiddlers. Every month brings some new story about drugs or corruption in sport. Newspapers have the morals of a gutter-snipe and the self-discipline of a recovering alcoholic in a brewery. BBC Director Generals resign having betrayed the trust of license fee payers. For goodness sake, even Tesco, the pinnacle of successful British Business, have been caught selling horsemeat in burgers (which as it happens means lots of young girls realized their secret dream of getting a Little Pony sadly without ever knowing it).

All around us trust is breaking down faster than Kate Winslett at an awards ceremony. You can trust what you read on Facebook or Twitter but very little else. Apart from, I would hope, your favourite brands if they are well managed by good marketers with good values and reflexes. (Regular readers will both know that this is a favourite theme of mine – good marketers have good reflexes).

Job one of a marketer is creating, deepening and widening trust. If I was running a large marketing department these days (unlikely I’ll grant you) I’d have that in a big sign above the coffee machine (or the Fusion Vendor). And when asked whether this is just a ‘point of parity’ rather than a ‘point of difference’ (assuming they were familiar with Kevin Keller’s simple but powerful positioning approach) I’d say point of difference. That is not because I am 100% sure it is, it may not be enough in itself to drive preference, but rather because a) it is more than enough to support inertia and b) if you get complacent and dismiss it as ‘housekeeping’ you risk losing it.

The challenge of being a Trust Manager not just a Brand Manager is that it has to be earned in lots of ways over a lot of time. It cannot be asserted. It requires that hardest of things, consistency, and this has to be maintained in a fast fragmenting and disenchanted world that pays more attention to the modern day equivalent of the ‘bloke down the pub’, i.e. social media, than anything else.

Trust me. I’m a Doctor. Well not since Jacko’s experience does that carry any weight. How about, trust me, I’m a Brand manager?