Marketing to the Gods in Real Time - Connecting Two Big Ideas with Social Archtyping™ - Tom Troja

Last week at Digiday Social in NYC we had two of our best thinkers express powerful ideas that are worth connecting.

Rishad Tobaccowala Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, VivaKi talked about "marketing to the gods" and Shiv Singh, Global Head of Digital, PepsiCo extolled "real time marketing". They both prefaced their ideas as a little crazy but also right, true and urgent. I agree.

Rishad explained that we are "Marketing to the Gods." (Paraphrased below, which you can also watch at http://www.livestream.com/digiday.)

Brands and markets are built because people choose with their hearts and use numbers to justify what they just did. Our biggest challenges, opportunities and issues will be connected to realizing people have emotions and feelings and companies that empower people, make people feel real good… like gods… will win.

Shiv talked in detail about Pepsi and offered a strategy that he is "betting his career on"… "Real Time Marketing".

There is a new imperative driven by fact that Pepsi has to compete with the people's 30 billion status updates every month on Facebook for attention. What we need is real time marketing that goes from strategy to execution in 9 minutes or 9 seconds, not 9 months. It is our responsibility as brands to push this through, real time interaction centered in social.

THE HEART OF OUR CHALLENGE

When you put these two ideas together, we get to the heart of our challenge. How do you market to gods… effectively interact with people that want to be treated like gods, who expect and demand more for their attention, in real time, hour by hour, day by day?

It starts with answering the question, who are you? Or more specifically, what gods are you? You must be as interesting as they are, as their friends are, to compete with 30 billion updates. You need to think like gods to market to gods.

The gods I'm referring to here are those of mythology. Joseph Campbell talked about the power of myth and the universal stories of god like heroes, explorers and rulers that are innate in people's DNA, born inside of us. He spoke of these gods as archetypes that everyone relates with and gives their attention to.

ARCHETYPES REPRESENT GODS FOR BRANDS

These are the gods, revealed through archetypes that brands use in real time marketing. We have been developing this approach called Social Archetyping™ and writing about this, most recently with Archetypes are the Magic Bullet for Brand Social Identity - Tom Troja. Archetypal marketing™ provides what people envision, feel, sense and want, told in human voices on this new social stage

Without these archetypes, what are your sources, your foundations for real time marketing? What gods are you based on, what is your identity? How do you help your people effectively inspire and move others in the moment, day after day, hour after hour?

Shiv's example of real time marketing is seeing Lady Gaga walking with a Pepsi, he takes a picture, emails it to Pepsi real time production team and has it pushed out in 9 seconds across all social platforms. Nice… but who can wait for Lady Gaga? Who of us can just count on things happening that we can only react to?

PEOPLE ARE THE GODS OF THEIR OWN ATTENTION

Gods don't wait. Gods rule. Gods create. You will need to behave like a god if you expect gods to listen to you. People are the gods of their own attention and they are giving less of that attention to marketers everyday. This is the battle brands need to gear up to fight in this new social world to sell their goods and services.

Real time god work isn't easy. You have to be sure of your sources, your inspirations and your archetypes. You must have well trained, creative people who know this intuitively, can react in the moment based on a flexible and fully formed social identity that tickles the gods out there.

Tom Troja CEO and Founder Social Symphony, Tom can be reached at tomtroja@thesocialsymphony.com

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