How did Custom Media become the new King of Media Strategies?

How can Custom media strategies help your company? Why is Custom Media better than traditional advertising? Find out all the answers to why Custom Media is the real king of Media Strategies right here.

Primitive Advertising

Mankind has always been into the business of advertising. Perhaps, from the very first time we started communicating with crude hand signs. If there’s something we have that’s better than what’s available around us, that’s worth a brag.  It’s not too difficult to imagine what our ancestral primates could have been bragging about to each other. “I. Big. You. Invisible. Ha. Ha.”

But today’s modern age has given us a lot more to brag about. But bragging out loud or keeping things a wee bit subtle, we can call them all Advertising. Well, by definition, advertising is letting someone know you have something that they want. Even if they don’t want it, we’ll shove it down their throat anyways. That’s Advertising.

Enter the cycle of Advertising

We’ve been living in this cycle of advertising for a long time now. Around ten decades ago, there weren’t too many products to advertise. There were a few brands of toothpastes and a couple of colas. Clothes? We had neighbourhood tailors for that. But a few people had a few things that were worth advertising. And a few other clever people came up with ways to advertise things. Today, we call these two categories of people, Big Companies and Advertising Agencies. The decades rolled on, and it started coming closer to the ‘80s and the ‘90s. Advertising was on a high by now. People wanted new things. They wanted colourful clothes, innovative bath sponges, and instant noodles. Oh yeah, they wanted noodles!

Everything was so exciting in the early years. Make a mistake, and you bloody well would have made a creative invention. Blotting paper, dry cleaning, revealing clothes, Jim Carrey, they were all mistakes that we’ve come to love with time. Back then, people were hungry for new products. But good entrepreneurs were only a handful. So any product that was advertised was lapped up in a hurry.

Enter the New World of Entrepreneurship

Today, entrepreneurs are even more common than employers and employees put together! They’re everywhere, so much that it’s become an infestation. We have new products all the time. Create web browsers, and you have a horde of browsers in no time. Create Hotmail, and there comes even more mail providers. Make Orkut, and now Foursquare. Today is a bad time for entrepreneurs and manufacturers now.

But the consumers are having the time of their lives. They’re ridiculously spoilt for choice with all the things that clever people think are “worth advertising”. And that creates competition between the products. A good decade or more ago, all the making-products people and the advertising-products people sat together and hit upon an idea – Advertise more, more people will buy. It worked before. It’s going to work again!

And they increased their budgets and came up with clever ways to draw the customer. And it worked! Customers started buying products because advertisements made it look cool. VIP Frenchie’s “what’s he got that I ain’t got?!” was the mother of all underwear revolutions in India. Life was good.

Enter the Internet

Then dawned the era of the Internet. And with it came internet imagery of women. And mail. And web sites. Life in advertising didn’t change. A little over a decade ago though, people started exchanging ideas over the internet. And around the same time, people started getting bored of seeing more advertisements than their favourite soap operas on the idiot box, and being bombarded with flyers and crashing into billboard hoardings while driving. And any layman would know what happened next.

Money pumping brands started seeing a decline in their sales. They panicked. And pumped more money into advertising. It didn’t work. Advertisers panicked, and started creating innovative advertising campaigns to counter the effect. It worked to a certain extent. But the budgets were unimaginably huge. Something was missing though. People weren’t swaying to the tunes of the advertisements anymore. For the first time, advertisements were made to sway to the people’s tunes.

Enter the Immunisation

People had become immune to the traditional forms of advertising. It just wasn’t working. Mass advertising was passé. The Regular Joe didn’t want to be advertised to anymore, he wanted to be connected to. And thus began the new Revolution of Custom Media. Advertising agencies didn’t understand most of it. To a large extent, they still don’t believe it. But today, it’s been seen time and again that the companies that connect directly with its customers are the ones that are thriving.

And that’s where Custom Media strategies take over the throne from traditional advertising. While traditional advertising has always focussed on the product, the essence of custom media is the customer. By focussing on the customer directly and exchanging ideas and feedback with them through different channels like custom in-house magazines, regular publications, social media drives, or personalised campaigns, etc., a company can create a better bond with the customer and increase brand awareness and loyalty.

If you’re still not convinced, think Redbull, Burger King, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut, or Foursquare. These are brands that focussed on a new and innovative custom media strategy to connect with the people. They didn’t need megabucks to become some of the most powerful brands in the world. They racked their brains to connect with their consumers, they used Custom Media. As long as you have a powerful custom media strategy that’s unique to your company, you can take it to every single consumer that needs it, and make the money! It’s all about the perfect custom media strategy and nothing else. Even mega brands across the world have now started producing their own in-house magazines to cater to their customers. That’s the big difference between custom media strategy and traditional media strategy.

Enter.

While all advertising campaigns have been revolving around creating content about the product, custom media companies across the globe have been creating content that caters to the customer. Traditional advertising agencies may still find it hard to create compelling content around the consumer, but a custom media house is years ahead of traditional media, with experience in creating customised content that sells directly to the customer.

Today, it isn’t an advertisement that sells a product, it’s the customer. If the customer is happy, chances are, the company’s going to be happy too. After all, it’s all about word of mouth and what the company would be willing to do, to go the extra mile for its customer and prospective customer.

The King.

All said and done, the word is out. Custom Media is out there to make a difference in the world of Company-Customer relationships. Custom Media is here to remind the Big Company that it isn’t the brand that makes the consumer bigger, it’s really the other way around. So take a bow, Custom Media, the new King has finally taken its rightful place. And you know what, something tells me the customers are going to be a happy lot too!