How to engage consumers and take control of your content

NEW YORK — September 22, 2010 (iMedia Connection) — The leader of in-text advertising, Vibrant Media, says the future of advertising lies in integrated content. The question is how to do it, and Vibrant has a solution.

At the Brand Summit in Coronado, Calif., Vibrant's SVP of sales, James Piper, explained that brands must add value to the user's online experience. The question is how to do it.

Fortunately, Piper also presented a solution. He pointed to the abundance of content available online that, for the most part, is underutilized. Words are the most prevalent way to navigate the internet — link-following accounts for 45 percent of all page transitions — and users want to be enriched in some way to improve their knowledge. Taking this into account, creating an automatic linking system to surface content across the internet is a great way for companies to employ that copious content and engage users.

Vibrant saw these results when it worked with Toyota in the wake of its disastrous recall. The Japanese auto company needed to combat the negative press, pause and retract all of its basic advertising, and try to figure out a way to engage with drivers to reinforce its safety ratings.

Collaborating with Vibrant on a safety campaign, Toyota employed words like "safety," "brakes," and other terms to connect users with emotional videos and whitepapers. Toyota was then able to tap into both new and pre-existing content to set the record straight and reassure customers.

Piper also called attention to Hellman's "Real Food Project." The campaign's website is filled with recipes and specialized videos from celebrity chef Bobby Flay.

"The better the content, the more users will engage," said Piper, showing slides of similar campaigns. Ragu's search and recipe field, with generic copy and generic images, was passable, but Bertolli's did it better with a partial recipe roll-over viewing and a customer call-to-action button. Hellman's did it even better with an API and a full recipe roll-over view

Vibrant also worked with the following companies:

• Best Buy: The company leveraged in-text to distribute live feeds of its Twelpforce Tech Support, Geek Squad's Twitter feed. Entering words like laptop, desktop, and printer, users can see recent questions and answers related to their specific word search.
• MSNBC: The news organization employed in-text to distribute live-breaking stories with Vibrant's live feed unit.
• Mercedes: The German car-maker used in-text to promote real-time Facebook fan posts, engaging users to talk about their brand new model and the hype on fan pages.

Simply put, if companies have the content, Vibrant will make it discoverable.

Lucia Davis is associate editor for iMedia Connection.

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About Vibrant
Vibrant is a world leader in contextual technology, aligning billions of words across the internet with relevant video, information, tools, and advertising. With over 4,000 premium publishers, reaching more than 170 million unique users per month (comScore 2010), Vibrant gives top brand marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted advertisements within premium Web content and offers publishers premium editorial tools to re-circulate users throughout their websites. The company, founded in 2000, has offices in London, New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and Hamburg. For more information, visit: www.vibrantmedia.com, www.vibrantmedia.co.uk, www.vibrantmedia.de, www.vibrantmedia.fr.