Advertising just got personal.

It seems like paid advertising has always been a poor substitute for word of mouth. But in this age of social media and personalised marketing, brands are increasingly being defined not by the advertiser’s message but by what consumers say about them. Technology has opened up content creation to the users and advertising has never looked more authentic!

Way back in the deep, dark past (before advertising) we probably had plenty of advice when it came to making a purchase. There was the collective wisdom of elders, family and friends, and the opinion of experts if it was something really important.

Then salespeople appeared, spruiking their goods and great ideas, earning our trust by appealing to our imagination, our intellect and our most powerful fears and desires.

At some point someone realised that trust could be appropriated by actors, radio and TV hosts and even sportspeople if they had a connection with the consumer. Any and every way possible has been tried over the years to deliver the advertiser’s script. We still have face-to-face ‘interviews’ on morning television with brand representatives posing as experts in their field. And we still have actors: those aspirational and authentic looking people masquerading as our friends and colleagues, who know exactly what it is we want and what we need to buy.

Well, everything actually.

We’re sitting on the cusp of major change. Micro-influencers, UGC, targeted EDM’s and tracking bots have become the new normal. Technology is the enabler and there’s no turning back.

A fleet of tools now available to marketers monitor customers behaviour online. Personalisation, the tailoring of messages to consumers based on their actual behaviour, provides an incredible opportunity to engage directly in the target market during the buyer’s journey and at point of sale. This is often clumsily pursued through paid ads or intrusive and inappropriate messaging which risks turning the customer off forever. Nevertheless, the ability to identify ever more specific demographics and behaviours has opened the door to a level of customer intimacy never seen before.

The other thing is that smartphones and UGC have evolved at a rapid rate. Highly sophisticated, billboard-quality images are being made in the devices that consumers carry around with them every day. This, more than anything else, is transforming the advertising industry and the nature of marketing campaigns.

Then there’s the blurring of lines between brands and the business savvy influencers who recommend them. In 2013 we started to follow ‘strangers’ on social media; people who were not celebrities but valued sources of information and entertainment. Influencer marketing boomed as millennials turned to these online friends for advice and personal validation. The larger circles of influence enjoyed by celebrity influencers gradually intensified to smaller, more trusted pools of followers for whom authenticity, familiarity and awesome content became the more valued currency.

Consumers no longer want just relevance in advertising, they expect authenticity and useful advice. Any campaign that feels remote from the average person just doesn’t cut it anymore.

On Instagram over the last few years the standard of creative in UGC has grown noticeably. You’re seeing entire campaigns (both on and offline) built around content made by actual consumers of the product.

People-powered marketing is all about automating the ability of brands to connect and commission influencers at scale and personalising the mass marketing message. The advantage of this kind of approach is that brands can source content faster and in greater volume than ever before. With the help of technology you can literally get hundreds of pieces of content submitted in hours rather than days — at a fraction of the cost.

So, you might argue, the actors are just being replaced by Influencers who’ll pose for any brand that pays the right price — and eventually we’ll get sick of seeing those #Ad posts on our feed.

The fact is, for micro-influencers, authenticity is much more important than disclosure. These are everyday people who’ve built intimate but highly engaged audiences (about 3,000 to 100,000 followers) around a particular passion or expertise. Whether they acknowledge a post is a paid #Ad or not doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to them or their audience. They’re not going to recommend something they don’t use because they’re simply not interested in eroding the trust they’ve built up. If a micro-influencer is going to send a commercial message to their followers they need to make sure it’s relevant.

When we’re looking for a place to travel, a restaurant, a brand of clothing, or a household appliance to buy we’ll still seek the advice of a friend, a buyer’s guide or another respected authority. In the same way micro-influencers represent both a community and a culture to the consumer, paving the way for the most authentic mass-marketing relationship in history: the consumer as content creator.

What does everyone do when the ads come on TV? To a large extent, the ‘first screen’ is the smartphone now. And Live TV, unthinkably, doesn’t have the same authority it once had. The advertising spaces it sells don’t command quite the same amount of unblinking attention.

We’re bombarded with messages all day long and we’ve gotten very good at being selective. Today, marketing is all about helping the customer solve their particular purchasing goal, engaging with them and offering advice whilst educating them about your product. Gone are the days of blunt, repetitive messaging. Consumers are too smart, busy and connected.

Inviting your customers to be the creators of your content is one of the most intimate, non-invasive ways you can reach the consumer. Essentially you’re asking the people who already use and love your product to create a post that tells the world how and why they recommend it.

As this generation starts to take over the marketing suite and begins making decisions about campaign budgets, we’re likely to be hearing a whole lot more about peer to peer advertising.

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