Contentinople - Steve Donohue - Kutcher Coaches Advertisers on How to Use Social Media

Written by Steve Donohue

Tuesday, September 22. 2009 at 06:00 PM EDT Post a comment

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NEW YORK -- Insisting that consumers are more likely to buy a product that is recommended to them by a friend than if they saw it plugged in a random commercial, TV star and Twitter king Ashton Kutcher told advertisers here at the IAB MIXX confab that they should use social media to reach their target audience.

“It’s a continuous focus group,” Kutcher said while reviewing social media campaigns that his firm, Katalyst Media, has developed for advertisers such as Kellog’s, Nestle Hot Pockets, and Mountain Dew. “Instead of delivering a commercial and getting feedback on it afterward, you deliver an ad message or a piece of messaging from your company, and your audience immediately tells you, ‘We like that,’ [or not],” Kutcher said.

Kutcher showed advertisers a campaign Katalyst developed for Kellog’s to raise awareness of the hunger epidemic. It relied on user-generated videos that were edited by his wife Demi Moore into a video that was distributed on Facebook. He also played clips from an original Web series called KatalystHQ, which featured employees at Katalyst talking about Hot Pockets from sponsor Nestle’s.

The recurring theme that Kutcher emphasized: There is a way to monetize social media. “People are spending more and more time within the social Web on Facebook and Twitter... it’s like the unknown frontier. How do we do advertising within it?”

Kutcher, the star and producer of TV shows (Fox’s That 70s Show, MTV's Punk’d) and movies (The Guardian), is the most followed user on Twitter, with 3.65 million followers as of Tuesday afternoon. He discussed the race that he had earlier this year with CNN to be the first Twitter user to reach 1 million followers.

“I was in France shooting a movie, and I came back and put whole thing [1 million campaign] together in two weeks, and I said whoever gets there first, it’s going to be a milestone moment for the Web. I thought it was amazing that one person could have the same viability on the Web as an entire media conglomerate could have,” Kutcher said.

“The amazing thing was, Anderson Cooper was on CNN, pushing it, saying we have to beat him. So I went live to the Web and said, ‘Listen people, we have an opportunity right now to say that one person can have the same power as an entire media network. This is an opportunity to say something about how you want to consume media. You can be your own broadcast network, your own creator.' It really is the essence of this bottom up strategy, which is utilizing the people within the space to build audiences and leveraging those audiences against your brand messaging and your brands."

Kutcher, who beat CNN to 1 million Twitter followers on April 17, said he celebrated by dancing which his wife, which naturally, he broadcast live on the Internet.

Also worth noting from Kutcher’s Q&A with IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg:

Kutcher said he sees a lot of potential from location-based social media applications like Foursquare. “I checked it [Foursquare] out. I think it’s really interesting … It will eventually have social relevance once their audience grows. I think a combination of these social networks is really one of the big future pushes. The more you can geolocate people based on their mobile devices, the more you can incentivize people to participate in different brands.”

• Asked what trends the audience should look out for, Kutcher said the “big thing people will be talking about” is the ability to use metrics to track how social media impacts buying decisions. He said advertisers will be able to measure an “impact metric,” which will be able to detail “the difference between something being streamed through TV or online and being shared with you by somebody that you care about.”

• Katalyst is developing an ad campaign for Mountain Dew that is being completely driven by consumers using social media. “They [Mountain Dew] are allowing consumers to create the next three brands of Mountain Dew. They [consumers] are going to name it. They’ll pick the color... They’re picking the ad agency.” Katalyst and Mountain Dew are using 12Seconds.tv to collect short video clips for the campaign that are submitted by consumers.