Adverghetti Junction

In January, Coca Cola and Unilever announced that they would be shunning campaign media sites in favour of social media based marketing. A bold move, and one many others have followed since. However, I’m not sure it’s right to ditch one method of marketing in favour of another without fully understanding the consequences of doing so.

Let’s look back a few years. The Internet is the next big thing. Paper would disappear. People would communicate not by picking up the phone, but by email and IM (anyone remember ICQ?). Email marketing became the next big thing, and very quickly, businesses realised they needed somewhere to send the people who were getting their emails. Those places: campaign media sites. I’m not suggested that these mini sites are a good or a bad idea, but they exist, and to a greater or lesser extent, they work. So why break what works? Would you consider that offline (print, radio, TV amongst other formats) advertising had had its day now? Wrong.

What the industry has comprehensively failed to remember is that different businesses and different audiences communicate and consume the world in which we live in drastically different ways. If you ditched all advertising in newspapers and magazines because you decided that the next big thing was the back of your car because more people you knew saw the back of your car… well you just wouldn’t.

Offline marketing is just as important as online. Sometimes more so. Yep. We’re a digital production company, and I just said that. The Internet enables a new form of communication, not a better one. Because we live in a digital age doesn’t preclude the possibility for some amazing trans-format campaigns that truly encompass our social sphere, whomever we are, and however we choose to consume it. Because you have a Facebook account, does that mean that word-of-mouth advertising is now irrelevant because you can reach everyone’s friends through an application, or by looking at where people have checked in? Not likely. More, Facebook as a marketing platform should be used to augment and enable a more engaging experience than is currently being offered by the vast majority of brands. This is return on investment. Investment doesn’t mean cheap, and cheap doesn’t mean higher returns.

We’ve spent some time over the 10 months intrigued by just how many applications for social networks we’ve been asked to build, for some pretty high profile brands. That’s not to blow our own trumpet, but it is to serve as a warning thus: not one of those applications had the response expected of the people involved in creating the strategy. And again, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done, but they should be created as part of a larger strategy. The only time these social media campaigns do work is when they truly engage the user in something that user is actually interested in. If you are a brand manager and you are asking how your brand might engage in these environments, I urge you to think carefully about the bigger picture – how does social media fit into the overall ethos of the business, and how does that ethos portray itself externally? Does the brand in question already have a loyal following? If not, why not, and could it realistically build one in an intangible world? If it does, how does that following consume the brand presently, and how would you engage these people to become your advocates? By the way, social media doesn’t automatically mean digital. Take the example of the neighbour’s lost cat. Muddles’ photo is plastered on every tree in the neighbourhood, and not a single email or Facebook group has been created. Turns out, Doris at number 83 had taken pity on Muddles and given her some milk. She saw the poster one day and came and knocked at the door, but you were out, so she knocked next door and next door again until she found someone who answered the door in the middle of the day. So starts the Chinese whisper of social media.

I’ve gone off on a tangent a little, but the point is clear (in my mind at least). Advertising today seems a little too “follow-the-leader” in its approach. What happened to the truly creative campaigns that took you from radio to TV to something in a shop window to the Internet and back again before realising you were deeply involved and so were all your friends? And why does a campaign need to have a use-by date? Surely a good campaign (and the brands that get this truly get it) is one that stands the test of time. And just as importantly, a good campaign isn’t one decided on by someone saying “we need more social media”, but by someone coming up with an amazing idea, whatever the medium. You need to reach your customers, not mess around with what everyone else is doing.