I am at the Ad:tech conference in New York, where everything from the coffeecups to the floors are branded. People walk around with flatscreens attached to their bodies, and you can definitelyfeel the sense that brands guardians -and that includes ad agencies– are feeling the sense of urgency to become more relevant.

The discussion here is not so much about brands, per se, but about things that are changing branding forever. I’m talking of issues such as social media latforms, mobile access and the anywhere customer, viral distribution of content (whether or not they are ‘ads’) and gaming.

This session on viral and word of mouth campaigns has standing room only. Three case studies are being discussed. One of which was Philips which introduced ‘body grooming’ because 50% of the target audience consider body grooming (defined as ‘shaving below th neck’) as important. They knew that he media advertising was not going to cut it in building this brand. The goal wa to develp word of mouth, or ‘word of monitor’ for the concept. How did they reach 25-45 year olds?. They had traditional agencies, and PR as support.

To create the buzz, they launched a website, shaveeverywhere.com, with a highly watchable story on the landing page.  Traffic from pasalong was 32%. Sales skyrocketed to 300%.  It won a Gold cyber Lion, to boot.

How did they do it? No seeding, was done, but simply organic. It was featured on 500 blogs, and got 103 reviews on Amazon. Behind all this was researh and testing that indicated it would be well received. But Philips credits the creative team behind it who understood the consumer sensibilities, and took the problem (or opportunity, in this case) head on. Let’s face it, bodygrooming, that shaving below the neck proposition is not something you can easily dance around. But unfortunately that’s what many brands do, because people who manage or dare we say ‘control’ brand messages, are trained to phrase things in brand language, not consumer language.

Today that era is passing away. Just to segue to another part of the floor I was covering, there are blog tracking companies who can tell you what customers ares saying in real time about brands. Just today, they are tracking the politicial brands that will make it or flame out by the end of the day! Customers don’t talk with feature-infested vocabulary, but in what the product does well or doesn’t. The blogosphere is suddenly becoming a down and dirty way for brand managers to have a ear to the ground, as some 100,000 blogs are created by ordinary people everyday.

So yes, we may obsess about our brand messages in the right font, surrounded with the exact pantone as specified in our brand guidelines, but ultimately, the reputation of a brand, whether is as a result of a word of mouth campaign or not is ultimately what the consumer defines. As someone who’s always been at the forefront of branding, this is unsetling, but heck, it’s creating a lot more exciting opportunities for all of us.