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I’ve seen a lot of live shows but many of the most memorable have come from a single guy: Jon Brion. Brion used to play every Friday night at Café Largo in Los Angeles and I was there for a ton of them. What made him so compelling was that he always took the stage without a playlist. His set ended up being a mix of whatever inspired him at the moment and requests shouted from the audience. Some nights would be comprised mostly of ragtime and moody jazz. Others would be giant singalongs – the greatest hits of The Police with Brion accompanying on xylophone, for example. One night he asked the audience to name a song. Someone suggested “Dream On” by Aerosmith. Then he asked for a genre. Someone yelled “Bossa Nova”. Brion picked up an acoustic guitar, cued up a samba beat, and did it on the spot.

You truly had no idea what to expect when you walked into Largo every Friday (and neither did Brion).  The concert was unfolding in real-time as a collaboration between performer and audience – a marked contrast to the overly-choreographed shows we normally see. There is a reason he sold out every week and has become something of a living legend in clubland.

Now humor me as I segue into marketing: to what degree do your brands engage without a script and how important is it to actually do so?

I like to call this act of marketing spontaneity “living breathing media”. What is Living Breathing Media? Good question because I just made it up.  I would define it as any program or initiative that:

1. Requires a brand to change direction on-the-fly (in real-time or very close to it)
2. Reacts and adapts based on the will of participants/customers
3. Does not have a specific end in mind and begins to take on a soul of its own

It has to meet all three of those criteria. We’re not talking just about real time, i.e. a campaign that adjusts creative based on the winner of the Super Bowl (that meets criteria #1 but not 2). And we aren’t talking about contests that air the commercial with the most consumer votes (#2 but not 1). Living breathing media are programs and platforms that literally evolve and grow almost instantly based largely on where people want to take it. Lastly, these are programs that take on a soul of their own. You have a strong framework in place for the initial approach but can’t know at the start what the finish will look like.

It’s not an easy decision to make because doing so is dramatically different than most current approaches. It takes a lot of time and flexible resources. It requires fast decision making. It forces brands to cede even more control than most other situations. And it certainly isn’t appropriate for every part of a marketer’s mix to suddenly go real-time.

That’s probably why we’ve seen it used to date primarily by those with no better option. The most obvious example is political candidates who continually tweak their message and strategy based on polls and numbers (despite emphatic denials of being influenced by any such thing). The John McCain running before the collapse of Lehman Brothers was a markedly different candidate from the McCain afterwards. We’ve also recently watched Toyota and BP scramble in real-time to communicate their way out of PR crisises.

But I would argue it’s becoming increasingly important for most brands to proactively get experience in Living Breathing Media for 4 key reasons:

1. It’s how your customers increasingly live
2. It drives involvement and loyalty
3. It teaches you as it goes
4. It’s thrilling and unexpected

It’s how your customers increasingly live

This one is the most obvious. We’ve watched our audiences move from consuming media carefully scheduled into set time slots to taking in a constant stream of news, links and content. It’s getting harder to fit an old-fashioned commercial message into our customers’ new habits.

It drives involvement and loyalty
Yes, it’s more work but your customers will recognize the difference and pay more attention. Look at the engagement Leo Burnett drove a few weeks back with their David on Demand experiment. It was a simple enough premise: a Burnett employee wanted to attend the Cannes Festival, his bosses immaturely (and brilliantly) agreed to send him so long as he strapped a camera and computer to himself and agreed to do whatever people tweeted him to do. The majority of messages directed to David that weren’t dares were variations of either “I love you” or “I can’t stop watching!”. People were hooked.

It teaches you as it goes

Living breathing media offers a constant torrent of feedback, allowing you to grow smarter much more quickly and adjust your approach. As long as you have a solid idea to begin with and are willing to be flexible, I’d argue it’s harder to fail vs. traditional efforts because consumers tell you where you’re going wrong and give you huge credit for fixing it. Denuo is in year two of the – a giant purple truck that travels the country handing out free Taco Bell.  By communicating on Twitter, we gets lots of information on what’s going to work before we even get to the next stop. We are increasingly relying on our fans to tell us where to stop and what to do once we get there.

It’s thrilling and unexpected

I would argue that living breathing media done well is more compelling than the average message we ignore on our screens and skip on our Tivos. But it’s also far more fun for the marketer. You have to really nail your strategy and reason for being but, with that in place, it allows you to operate a bit without a net, taking to places you hadn’t anticipated. And a program that fires up the people who work on it is a pretty good indication you’re on to something.

Start experimenting with living breathing media. It’s a key tool for building relationships with your customers and an inevitable direction for marketing going forward. And next time you’re in LA, check to see if Jon Brion is playing. will hold you over in the meantime.

UPDATE:  Great article that explains what’s behind the Old Spice You Tube videos – an example that launched the same day as this post and is probably the best example to date of what I’m talking about: http://bit.ly/adL96t

 

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