Dan Wieden, successful award-winning American advertising executive who co-founded Wieden+Kennedy, suggests that both online interaction and more traditional broadcasting are required to establish strong relationships between companies and customers.

Television used to be a campfire gathering everybody around it. Now, as the interactive relationship is critically important, the campfire is formed of diverse more or less intimate channels. Often messages and conversations attract more attention when initiated first through television. As an example, Wieden uses a campaign his company did last year for Chrysler to help reposition the brand by creating a sense of what the brand values and what Detroit, the world’s former automotive capital, stands for.

According to Wieden both broadcasting and interactive online conversation are required to create strong and provocative relationships. There is no use choosing between a left and a right hand when both can be used.

“The new generation of consumers is not going to accept the products and their message as the marketers present them,” reminds Wieden. Instead they wish to be more included – part of action. Companies need to learn to listen and present themselves more profoundly.

Digitally run interactive campaigns are applied more and more but the art of storytelling persists. One-way communication broadcasted on television that tells a touching story remains an important channel for companies to express what they stand for and what type of relationship they can provide their customers with.

(via PSFK)