Yesterday we introduced our four part series of posts directed at the brand advertising community: Branded Software Experiences – A Cost-Effective and Critical Component of your Brand Advertising Mix. Today we’re delivering part one.

Brand advertisers have known for some time that the internet (also referred to as “online” and “interactive”) is a key place to get out your message. But more than just another destination for converted print ads, savvy marketers know that the internet’s interactive capabilities are a unique asset in terms of getting an audience to not only listen but engage and empathize.

The bulk of opportunities offered to brand advertisers off the shelf are not far beyond the traditional world of display advertising. The brand advertiser pays to fill a rectangle in an existing online experience. The ad that fills that rectangle can be anything from an adaptation of a print piece to a fully interactive mini-game or video. But ultimately, even with the interactivity, it’s essentially an online billboard.

Some advertisers are realizing that there are more possibilities for engagement when the message goes beyond the rectangle offered by most ad networks. To that end these marketers often end up creating their own entire sites. Unlike the “official product website” these sites are more interactive, less-focused on educating and more focused on engaging the audience. While a step in the right direction these sites often have one or both of the following characteristics that come with their own drawbacks:

• They are dependent on produced content. Producing high quality content is expensive. And even if you can get away with cheaper content, it often gets stale quickly. The production costs, which can be high, become excessive when they turn into recurring costs.
• When they try to go beyond passive enjoyment of content and engage the user to extend their time with the site, the interactivity can often be relatively shallow taking the form of things like simple flash games and the like.

There is nothing wrong with these techniques per se. But given some of the drawbacks listed above there are alternatives that are worthy to explore (and to be clear, many marketers are already heading down these new paths).

User-generated content is the key alternative to produced content. In addition to being much less costly to produce, not to mention potentially engaging, it can (when a result of a critical mass generating enough breadth) keep the experience fresh and new. Much has been written about user-generated content and clearly distribution and getting to critical mass are key components that enable a UGC ecosystem.

What’s truly new is a focus on what we’ll call “software” as opposed to mere interactivity. While an excellent complement to a UGC ecosystem, having real software or advanced interactivity is a potential source for serious engagement of an audience. We define software as going beyond what commodity sites provide. Don’t just enable users to upload their own videos, but create video editing tools that let users do interesting things they wouldn’t be able to do anywhere else. Don’t just let users post journals from their trips to exotic places, but let them plot their trips visually using photography and pushpins on a map of their journey.

We define software as the advanced business logic, tools, and capabilities that let users do more than the garden variety activities as part of an online experience. Software is interactivity on steroids. Software, done properly, has the ability to make the advertising dollar exponentially effective by engaging users in an experience beyond what content can accomplish on its own.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get this software built. Most of today’s interactive agencies (or interactive units at advertising agencies) while producing excellent work do not always have the technical talent in-house to deliver the kind of advanced software experiences that deliver extended minutes of engagement. And often (though not always) traditional contract software development houses don’t have the design expertise and understanding to deliver experiences that make an appropriate emotional impact on an audience.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how to identify the right software vehicle for your brand message.