We are in the French Quarter. It’s a Friday evening in August; a breeze blows off the Mississippi River as we park and make our way to a restaurant. Above us towers a pair of buildings, gorgeous in that crumbling historic way.

I take out my iPhone and snap a picture.

“Ready?” my fiancé asks, locking his arm around mine and pulling me towards the restaurant.

During the next five-minute walk, as I crop, caption and post my picture on Instagram, here is what I miss:

• The side of a bus shelter proclaiming a hospital’s newest wing
• The outstretched hand of a restaurateur dangling a flyer
• The sunset in its full golden glory (which my fiancé insists I look up for)

As I upload my photo, scanning through my Instagram feed, here is what I glimpse instead of what’s physically around me:

• Ann Taylor’s new pair of (cute!) shoes
• Lululemon’s newest Forme jacket
• My friend’s book making the front page of the local newspaper (yay!)

What I have missed in those five minutes are a dozen traditional marketing moments in lieu of something much different: a personalized digital experience.

Welcome to mobile and its continuous march of disruption. We have only just scratched the surface of how mobile will revolutionize our world online and offline.

But the bigger point? We are in an era where media is fragmented and infinitely customizable. Consumers create their own experiences by amalgamating family, friends and organizations across dozens of disparate platforms. And, some of these platforms? They exclude brands altogether.

I can now watch a full season of my favorite TV show without ever having to tune in live and glimpse a commercial.

And when I do turn on the TV and watch it the old-fashioned way, I’m tweeting with my friends during those commercials.

On my way to work, I can plug my iPhone into my car to listen to my premium Spotify subscription – endless music without advertising.

And those red lights? I’m texting so I’m missing that billboard.

The only way to guarantee delivery of a brand’s message is to make the consumer want it, and to do that, advertising must deliver something important: value. 

Astonishing value. Value to the degree that, when a brand earns one second of a consumer’s attention, that consumer will invest two extra seconds to like, follow or subscribe.

This doesn’t just apply to digital media either. Traditional advertising must be just as extraordinary to lift heads buried in cellphones, eyes glued to sunsets.

Ultimately, this is about creating advertising that people want to consume. Some call it content marketing; I call it value marketing, and it’s changing the way we communicate with our customers.

Here are a few types of value that brands can bring to their advertising.   

1.) Educational Value: Your products don’t exist in a showroom, they exist in the real lives of your customers. How can you help customers better use those products and, by doing so, ensure those products better serve your customers? 

Birchbox, a beauty sampling startup, got this concept early on. It understood that knowing how to use beauty products is just as important as the products themselves, so Birchbox built vast libraries of digital content with how-tos and DIY around the beauty products.

By teaching customers how to use its products, Birchbox is ensuring that customers have the right experience and come back for more. And, it’s helping speed up the sales cycle as customers discover new products and their uses.

2.) Functional Value: Then there is marketing that actually serves a purpose, like this IBM out-of-home buy. Instead of placing an ad in a bus shelter, IBM created a bus shelter where none existed before. Instead of plastering the side of a staircase, it created a ramp to make rollerboard-toting professionals’ journeys easier.

People are lured to lift their heads from their phones and experience the difference IBM is making in their lives this very second.

3.) Emotional Value: Emotions run deep, and advertising that can incite an emotional reaction in us guarantees captivation.

In this Brazilian organ donor campaign, soccer fans were encouraged to become organ donors so that a small part of them – their heart, their eyes, a lung – could live on as an immortal fan.

“I promise that your heart will always beat for Sport Club Recife,” says one woman awaiting a heart transplant.

This campaign hit two emotions hard: Brazilians’ passion and loyalty to sports teams, and the near-universal desire we all have to live forever.

At the end of this campaign, the heart transplant waiting list went down to zero.

4.) Entertainment Value: Effective advertising is no longer just entertaining – it is literal entertainment, media that consumers tune into and seek out.

Red Bull is by far one of the most advanced entertainment brands, as showcased in its sponsorship and broadcast of Felix Baumgartner’s world record sky dive.  Eight million viewers tuned in live to watch Baumgartner’s jump, earning Red Bull tens of millions of dollars in global brand exposure. Its creation of entertainment as advertising was so all encompassing that it has been described as ”a media company that sells drinks instead of ads.”

Of course, many brands execute this concept on a much smaller scale with the creation of games, such as Cheetos’ recent Cheetahpult game, where users could fling Cheetos into the mouth of a prone father. Users played an average of seven minutes and 17 seconds, and tossed 56 Cheetos into a father’s mouth, astounding engagement statistics.

What brands do you know of that are adding value to consumers’ lives with their advertising? Let us know on Twitter. 

Many thanks to Alex Brands, Kimberly Cadena and Alicia Mora for the rad ads mentioned in this article.