Interview of Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Executive Officer, Denuo and Chief Innovation Officer, Publicis Group Media.

In the digital world, search and recommendation engines play an increasing role in guiding people's media choices. What does this mean for media brands?
Forget about media, recommendation of search. Brands are the ultimate navigation device. They're potentially the most powerful because emotions and memory are built into them. Even as a math major, I believe there is a huge role for arts and emotion in an increasingly mathematical world. It's not art or science, it's art and science.
Media brands became valuable because they did certain things. For instance, magazines developed great content, amazing editing and featured great product recommendations. Today we still need recommendations and we especially need editing because there's so much data. Managing the transition from analog to digital is one of the biggest challenges facing media brands.
Would you say user-generated content is mostly driven by technology enabling it to be easily created or by generational factors?
You get to a stage where you wonder how much of that type of content you can take. User-generated content is the hot thing today and there'll always be a role for people to manipulate, retransmit and speak back to media. But it's going to be much more professional than the current purely amateur model.
One of the new models is when established publications and their writers start guiding people. For instance, a reporter ponts toward key issues to look at around the world, provides his perspective, links to other sources and gives his readers the opportunity to respond. That becomes interactive and somewhat user-generated, but most of the content is professional content.

In advertising around the world, optimism and emotion are being used to defuse consumer suspicion toward brands. TNS media intelligence's Semiotic Observatory analyzes this global trend across several industries.

Transparency and ethics, two dominant advertising themes over the last five years will soon become a minimum requirement expected from major brands in the consumer marketplace. Originally used as part of a brand's redemption strategy, they have now been joined by an even stronger trend: reconciliation.
"In the face of a defiant international climate toward brands, we can notice different attitudes. Either this defiance is cultivated, which is the approach adopted by Reebok and Nike, by inciting consumers to be themselves or a connection to the product is built to restore confidence." explains Françoise Hernaez-Fourrier, Surveys Director, TNS media intelligence Creative Advertising Division.
Transparency
The European campaign for telecom operator Alice is a classic example of the transparency theme. Supermarkets have also adopted this approach to illustrate their business model. "The latest campaign from the French retailer E. Leclerc called "everything must show" perfectly illustrates this choice already adopted by Tesco in the UK.
A less active ethic
"In a matter of months, commitment and ethics have lost some of their militant aspect to recreate a connection with the customer and play down a language which is sometimes difficult to hear," says Françoise Hernaez Fourrier. Throughout the world, fair trade brands, organic agriculture and the ethical treatment of animals are all echoes of a more reasonable consumerism. For example in the U.S, Ben & Jerry highlights the production of small farmers in a commercial that elevates their expertise and the quality of their production. Yet it remains a committed message as it also underlines how America loses 330 farmers every week to industrial-scale farming.
Toward Advertainment
"There is also a drive to entertain consumers by offering them short movies on the internet (eg: BMW and John Woo) and parodies of TV genres such as series, TV news and candid camera. The objective of advertainment as well as consumer-generated content is to create communities of consumers. The idea is to create an affinity with the consumer or to encourage him to create a personalized product that makes it unique. Many Web sites offer this option, including brands like Longchamp and nike," concludes Françoise Hernaez Fourrier.

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