THINK INSIDE THE BOX

ROCKDOTROCK IS A COOL NAME, no doubt about it. But I’ll be curious to see how cool the reaction is from consumers to Symantec’s experiment with what it’s calling “the world’s first adverband.”

The band comprises five professional musicians from New York and the songs are written by them and the computer virus protection company’s ad team, The Night Agency. According to Adweek.com “RockdotRock sings and plays original songs … about the dangers of Internet fraud.”

They get points for transparency. Night’s executive creative director, Scott Cohn, told Adweek.com that they want to be honest about their goal of spreading an “advertising message in the most rocked-out way possible.” RDR was scheduled to perform last night at a NYC club, with bloggers and journalists invited to attend for free, but a search of the Web this morning didn’t turn up any reviews or mentions. In fact, I couldn’t find anything about the band on Symantec’s own site. Too bad, because I’m genuinely interested in how this idea will play out (pun intended). Lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the essence of three concepts – credibility, authenticity, and transparency – as they relate to marketing communications, and this “adverband” seems like a good way to explore all three.

These days, within the PR world it is accepted, almost a priori, that the nature of credibility has changed. Where once it was the domain of cultural monoliths (think Walter Cronkite) and the automatic currency of major media, today consumers are more likely to consider traditional, established sources suspect, and find independent, peer-driven sources to be more credible. But what’s a bit more elusive is the role authenticity and transparency have in engendering credibility.

“Authenticity” has become a buzz word with little concrete meaning, especially when people strategize oxymoronically to “create” an “authentic” persona for something. To me authenticity is a way of describing characteristics of an organization or individual that are spontaneous and organic … personality traits that are as present when that organization or individual is “alone” as they are when it is in view of others. It’s what we recognize as “real.” I believe “transparency” occurs when an organization or individual gives others relatively uncontrolled or unfettered access to its inner workings and motivations.

I think Symantec is right to be transparent about the band. However, I’d be hard pressed to call their dot-rockers authentic. And I think that’s at least one of the characteristics necessary for credibility. Consumers may get the message that Symantec is out to protect them from unsavory digital forces, but that’s building awareness, not trust. Consumers’ trust in Symantec – the degree to which they find it credible – will likely be based on other things.

I’m interested in what others think about credibility, authenticity and transparency as I plan to write more on those topics in the future.

© 2006 John Armato
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under PR & Marketing, Credibility, Brands & Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.