A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the distinction between building a brand and leveraging it. In short, building is what you do up to the time the consumer is ready to buy, while leveraging it is what you do when you are pulling all the pieces together to close the sale. The point was / is, that building or leveraging the brand is not about the media, marketers, brand managers or agencies. It is about the consumer and where are they in the shopping process.

This discussion most often comes into play around search and the branded keywords. Too often, marketers focus in the medium, or in this case, the branded keyword. I believe this media-centric dialogue misses the point and mentioned that broadening the perspective goes beyond search:

"While this conversation regularly comes up in search, the same discussion needs to happen around display. Geo-targeting, behavioral targeting and other user profiling capabilities allow us to learn about consumer intent. As they visit sites, they may indicate that it is no longer time to tell them about Honda's great quality, but instead focus on the great gas mileage of the Civic, or even the service and quality of a specific dealer. We have to be more open to the intent in order to provide the consumer with the right information."

A piece in Media Post's Behavioral Insider by Steve Smith discusses how Teracent is helping HP target the message based on consumer's online, and off-site behavior.  Chip Hall, Sr VP at Teracent, discusses the changes in messaging base on real-time data and the progression of message targeting from the very broad when data is scarce, to very targeted when there is more data upon which to base the targeting decisions. It is all consumer, not media, centric.

At no time does this suggest that we ignore brand. It is always part of the equation. But this is how it plays into the message evolution as we learn about the consumer. BT is still rather young. But, its premiss is focussed on what the consumer wants to hear and see given their place in the buying process and not on a binary decision of "this is a branding vehicle and this one is not". Two consumers can get two different messages from the same display space (or anywhere) from the same advertiser. The focus of the message, pure brand or focussed on attributes, will depend on what you know about the consumer at that moment.