I am grateful to Chris Arnold in his latest Brand Republic blog for introducing me to a new consumer empowerment buzz word – Enfacing … by which he means the positive adaptation or customisation of a brand’s advertising, as opposed to ‘defacing’, which is purely destructive.
The Bubble Project he describes is the logical extension of Naomi Klein’s attack on the invasion of public spaces by commercial brands. The Project aspires to ‘transform these annoying corporate monologues into open public dialogues’, which all sounds a bit worthy for something that is essentially providing a platform for people to try their hand at writing funny captions.
There are already plenty of examples of advertisers providing opportunities for consumers to interact with creative content. One of my particular favourites is the Mini print ad, which was accompanied by removable stickers to allow readers to customise their own Mini.
As with all of these co-creation concepts, it is something that should be part of the creative mix, but not the only option. Consumers increasingly want to be given opportunities to interact with the commercial output of their favourite brands, but this doesn’t mean that they will automatically reject the next 60 second commercial epic. Consumers may be empowered, but brand teams cannot abdicate complete control of their brands to the crowd.