Does The Crowd Decide?CrowdCulture in Video Advertising

A woman with a camera on screen in front of a crowd

Within the vast world of social media, content creators and video marketers may find themselves at odds with how to market to their audience. How do we know our videos reach the desired crowd? To understand this, we need to understand Crowdculture and how it can be used for video content advertising and content creation.

What is Crowdculture?

The first step in creating this marketing strategy is understanding what Crowdculture is. Coined by professor and leading expert on cultural approaches, Douglas Holt, in his article, “Branding in the Age of Social Media”, Crowdculture is a term used to describe the groups of individuals from “the margins of society” who challenged the status quo in culture. These groups, Holt states that social media connects these once “geographically isolated” groups, allowing them to form connections instantly, influencing their impact on culture.

The Types of Crowdculture

Holt considers two distinct types of Crowdculture: Subculture and art worlds.

• Subculture

Groups that create new “ideologies and practices”.

• Art World

Groups that create impacts in the entertainment industry.

Old Concepts In a New Age

As much as the Crowd Culture seems to be accurately used to describe predominantly online participants, the concept itself is not new, and has existed before the rise of social media. According to Holt, social media has simply made the process of connection for these groups convenient and more impactful, as they are able to connect and form much faster than their geographically separate predecessors. With the increased spread of these groups online, video advertisers need to understand how they can create content that will utilize crowdculture.

Art worlds: A Video Advertising Homebase

The existence of art world crowdculture has impacted the types of media created and consumed. In the past, video creators sought out groups and events to show their work.

Now on social media, there are not only new creators appearing seemingly at every moment, but also the quantity of content.

Social Media has streamlined the platforms for digital content creation and advertising, allowing creators to showcase their work from a single upload. Holt states that this allows all artists to collaborate, compete, and improve. This means it can also help video advertisers to connect not only with their audience, but also with others in their field.

How Crowdculture Impacts Video Advertising

As video advertisers, it is important to acknowledge the impact of Crowdculture on the art world and how it can be utilized for active advertising campaigns. Take a look at this example from Pine-Sol, a cleaning solution company that has recently utilized the crowdculture of online memes for its social media advertising.

The advertising shifted, featuring a product that was previously marketed to older generations, to Gen Z audiences by implementing aspects of the art world, such as anime-styled characters, meme references, and jokes about finding motivation to clean their room.

Why It Works

This style of video advertising works because it knows the target audience and knows how to showcase a product in a language and format they understand. This style of marketing is possible because what was once niche groups of meme and anime enthusiasts are now trending topics online, and they are able to connect with it instantly through social media. Pine Sol is able to post this sort of advertising due to the groups that dominate platforms like Instagram, thus creating a space where the marketing has a higher likelihood of being positively received compared to a platform like Facebook, where the userbase may not resonate with it.

What Will You Do?

With your understanding of crowdculture and its influence on the digital world, you now get to decide how you implement that knowledge into your advertising. Do you create meme-related content for your Gen Z audience? Or should you cater to an older audience with less knowledge of internet memes? The decision is ultimately up to you, your brand, and of course, your crowd.