In order to get a brand on social media it isn’t about dropping brand assets on social channels but thinking about what it actually means.
Distillation of this process is likely to appear on a social media document:
It contextualises why social, there must be a business and brand reason to be there beyond ‘well everyone is on Facebook’ in order to get a brand on social media
An explanation of how to use the document. Those involved need to view the document as a ‘north star’ for social. It needs to be clear that the document is a set of guidelines, but not immutable
In order to get a brand on social media, you need to understand what what will look and sound like
How the brand manifests itself on social:
What’s the brand’s tone of voice on social media channels. Does it want to want to sound like an everyman, does it want a bit of distance and gravitas, does it want to be an authority on a given area?
What’s the personality? If it was a person, what kind of person would it be. This frames the content, what questions it will answer and the view point that it will take. It’s adding extra dimensions that won’t necessarily be applied in public relations, print or even TV advertising due to the nature of social channels
What are the content pillars? Think of this as the core messages. Every piece of content created and shared will demonstrate at least one pillar. These are typically things like organisation innovation, heritage, values, point of leadership (thought leadership, authority / expertise, style leadership etc)
Cross channel rules:
How will you handle hashtags
How ill you handle localised domain names? (Will their be local domains?)
Who has the right to publish what first? For instance if you look at sports brands like Nike or New Balance; you’ll see that soccer related content first appears on their specialist football channels
Should local channels link back to ‘global accounts’?
Are there any sponsorship or IP-related watch outs? When I worked on New Balance; any club kit related content had to feature a minimum of three players. Otherwise there would be problems with the players other sponsors (notably their boot sponsors and their agents who would be looking for another pay day). Who needs to approve use of sponsorships and how long will approvals take? Can you do a flow diagram to provide insight into the process? How do you handle successes or set backs of partners?
How do you handle rumours and speculation? (New iPhone launch or renewal of sponsorship deal with Tiger Woods)
How do you handle images that might have a competitor brand in shot?
Do you ignore controversial news?
Will you share partner content? What channels and handles are legitimate partner content to share?
What kind of tools will you put in place? Large brands often use an intermediary platform like Percolate that provides measurement, asset management and an approvals workflow as needed. It even allows the localisation of content by the local brand team
Social channel-specific rules
How often will you post on a given channel? This might be dictated to you by the kind of account you have on some channels like WeChat. With most others it will be driven by audience content consumption. Twitter generally lends itself to more frequent posts than Instagram or Facebook
Specific channel aims over the coming year
How will the channel be used? Are there particular segments that it is good at reaching?
What kind of content can be published? Example content categories. Best practice executions from other (non-competing) brands to get best practice ideas
Social crisis response
Crisis like accidents have an incident funnel marked by small events, the more of these that happen, the harder it is to climb out of the funnel. The trick is to limit these before they take you down the funnel.
Have a clear workflow in place to handle negative criticism. The US Air Force had a really good workflow to borrow from.
Real-time monitoring should highlight things before they escalate. How is this intelligence distributed and to whom?
Who is going to be part of the decision group, you’ll likely need people from: customer services, product expert, public relations, management. How will you ensure that employees and the supply chain speak with one voice?
My week was dominated by Social Media Week. I got to see Battenhall’s opening presentation and catch up former colleagues from past agency and in-house lives. A lot of Social Media Week is useless, its like as if the industry doesn’t move on from the late 2000s. I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to see Ogilvy’s presentation on Twitter cards, which look extremely useful. So will have to make do with Slideshare:
Twitter cards offer opportunities for marketing consent and building audiences. James Whatley’s presentation for Social Media Week covers the possibilities offered by Twitter cards really well.
American rock band The Eagles are known for being extremely difficult and unpleasant. As I was once told, if you were a festival organiser and where offered stage four cancer or The Eagles – the cancer is preferable. Don Henley and Glenn Frey were allegedly horrible excuses for humanity. The world is reputedly better off now that Frey is dead, after a decade and half of being seriously ill.
For instance, it is impossible to clear samples or have their tracks played on television. David Letterman takes them to town. It absolutely destroys them. This clip was originally run in 2014, when Letterman was the host of The Late Show.
JJ Abrams reinvigoration of the Star Wars franchise includes a Millennium Falcon with a Batman tumbler easter egg
I love this advert for Hong Kong app / service GoGoVan; chock full of memes and Hong Kong cultural references.
Finally Slate wrote a great ode to the font Futura.
I was watching this video and thinking about taoism and social media. The video is by Irish-Chinese film maker Edwin Lee on the refurbishment of of the Wong Tai Sin Temple in northern Kowloon and thought that it was an excellent metaphor for something I’d been looking to talk about for a while.
Sik Sik Yuen is the Taoist organisation who look after the temple were faced with a challenge. They were renovating a hall of worship, but didn’t want to see their handiwork be adversely affected by the smoke of traditional prayer offerings. Their solution was an ‘electric’ temple that signifies the offering being accepted. The prayers are then burned in the traditional way by Taoist priests elsewhere.
So what does taoism & social media have to do with each other?
Well if you’re like me you’ll have heard a number of times that ‘we need to do something on <insert the social software platform of the day here>‘ or ‘we need to have a <insert owned social media platform here>‘.
It’s hard to get people to think about things the other way around:
What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Is it a new problem or an old problem?
If its an old problem, what is wrong with the old way? (If there is nothing wrong with the old way, apart from the fact that its old, is the realpolitik of the new worth it?)
How can you solve it and fit into the lives of the people who you are trying to solve the problem for?
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for innovation and I am quite happy to sell someone the new new thing – particularly if I can use it as a case study to sell other people the new new thing at a later date as well. But a significant amount of the time innovation occurs for all the wrong reasons, delivering little and wasting marketing resources.
Does your brand really need that latest, greatest Facebook commerce application or are their easier picking to be made optimising what you already have?
Is there a better creative vehicle rather than social media for what you are trying to achieve; like creating some sort of real-world experience or web-of-no-web application to knit offline and online together?
Warped media constructs as an idea originated from a few observations I made. The first was an article by Magic Numbers that examined the distribution of marketing spend across various media channels compared to the percentage of profit they generate. It was based on a piece of research done called Profit Ability 2.
A chart in the article caught my attention. While all channels contribute to profit, some have more comprehensive long-term effects than others. Any channel below (or to the right of) the red line represents a greater proportion of contribution to overall profit returns than the proportion of the marketing budget allocated to it.
Based on this chart: linear television, radio and podcasts and print advertising offer the best value for money for businesses.
What’s interesting is that two out of three of these channels are viewed as legacy media that brands are keen to move away from. When I worked at Unilever, the global media spend for the brands I managed amounted to about 92 per cent on television advertising. Some markets allocated even higher percentages.
The second influence for this post on warped media constructs was a post by Tom Goodwin.
Goodwin spent the best part of a decade working in senior roles for media buying businesses in very technology-centred roles.
It’s only just dawned on me that the reason Traditional Advertising is quite good and Digital ads are uniformly terrible is this.
Media owners always knew they were in the business of selling eyeballs.
Digital media companies think they are in the business of selling clicks.
Our core competence becomes how we see the world.
If you were a traditional media owner , your “job” was to attract , to respect , to inform, to tantalize, to satiate attention and repeat business
If you were a digital media owner, you were a tech company using algorithms to trick, harass, optimize, chase , game, attention by trying out any one of Billions of bits of content , made for free by users.
So while TV companies and traditional media owners are selling attention and eyeballs.
Digital media companies are selling clicks and data that show they create success.
The philosophy of traditional media is actually far more useful for longer term business success with advertising
For MOST companies of any scale, taste and longevity, digital media thinking is entirely wrong
But tech thinking swayed the market , they became so dominant and valuable, and profitable, nobody has the balls to call out how dumb this actually is and how much it’s degraded advertising.
I just wish we could apply the thinking of traditional media , the need to respect , to seduce , to value , to reward human attention , to digital media , because that’s where most people spend ALL of their time.
His post made me wonder about why such warped media constructs were widespread, when the flaws of lower performing media were readily apparent?
What does the data tell us about media?
The Profit Ability 2 research is a robust study of the UK media market. It took data from five media buying agencies looking at 141 brands in 14 sectors. it was based on a three-year media spend (2021-2023) and across ten media channels. Over a third of the brands matched pre-and-post COVID.
Retail media is one area that I would have liked to see examined in a bit more depth, given its rising popularity and ability to challenge generic PPC and online display advertising.
Media that is often the most lionised and championed by media agencies, notably paid social and programmatic display media were outshone by media types that have been declining investment by marketing teams over the past two decades.
This isn’t a new phenomenon as Ebquity research back in 2018, showed that there was a considerable gap between what marketers and agencies thought were effective, versus real-world evidence.
Secondly, this data indicates that brands are not using the channels in the best way for the long term interests of their business. There is also a correlation with declining campaign effectiveness rates.
Why do we have warped media constructs?
This pivot towards warped media constructs has benefited everyone but advertising agencies. And it would be reasonable to hypothesise that agencies chasing incremental growth, enterprise software vendors and consultancies have been leading large corporates up a digital focused route that provides data and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and marketing ROI.
Agencies’ legacy businesses are fading as the vast majority of incremental marketing spend is directed online. Digital growth is accruing to leading publishers, enterprise software and consultancy firms, while technology enables marketers to do more in-house. Market share loss is already evident in slower organic growth, but trading multiples fail to recognise the heavy dependence on M&A. Fragmentation. Almost 80% of every incremental advertising dollar spent globally accrues to digital. As their legacy traditional media businesses are fading, agencies are failing to capture digital growth, resulting in a lower market concentration in favour of new entrants empowered by technology
Redburn Atlantic (equity research paper): Ad Agencies Marginalised (2016) by Bianca Dallal, Matt Coupland and Mandeep Singh.
Advertising industry commentator Michael Farmer alluded to this change in his newsletter Madison Avenue Insights back in 2020.
Creative agencies have mastered the requirements of integrated campaigns, from TV to online video, websites, Facebook, Instagram, ad banners and e-mail marketing. It’s a pity, then, that this victory is being undermined by agency price-cutting strategies that leave agencies understaffed and underpaid. Senior agency executives need to create winning business practices – they’re losing the business war.
Platforms like Facebook have repeatedly tried to prove that they can substitute for linear TV in advertising campaigns since the late 2000s with varying degrees of success.
The Devil is in the details.
Remember the question about what the data tells us about media? Let’s examine the data in more detail.
One of the key phrases on the slide plotting out the different media sources is ‘full profit returns’. This term is quite important to bear in mind. Consider how these media channels work.
Long-term memory model or brand-building channels
Linear television adverts
BVoD (Broadcaster Video on Demand)
Radio and podcasts
Cinema
Online video
Print advertising
Good brand building content that we are sufficiently exposed to can stay with us for decades and even become part of culture.
Short-term brand activating channels
Generic PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
Paid social
Display advertising
This means that once you have clicked on the ad and gone to a destination, the advertisement has largely had its effect.
The Long and the Short of it
Now if we look at the performance of these media types over full payback, sustained payback and immediate payback we see that each these media channels serve short-term or longer-term goals. Time matters, Profit Ability 2 found that 58 percent of advertising’s total profit generation happens after the first 13 weeks.
If you are a digital-first organisation, or looking at ‘last-touch’ attribution, your measurement is capturing less than 40 percent of profit generated by advertising depending on the marketing mix of the campaign. Your organisation’s marketing culture could be leaving substantial marketing generated profits unharvested with an overly short term focus and less efficient over longer timelines than a financial quarter.
Binet and Field established some useful heuristics for thinking about marketing spend, which can help shape media choices from a macro perspective of brand-building and brand-activating activities.
Immediate payback – profit derived in the same week as the advertising.
Sustained payback – profit derived from week 14 to 2 years of advertising.
Full payback – profit derived over the full 2 year period.
Anything above the yellow line makes a positive contribution relative to the proportion of marketing investment. Linear television works when used consistently and has a long-term impact.
Paid social media is about achieving immediate results, being a very tactical channel by nature.
Print advertising is unique in serving equally well across immediate goals, sustained campaigns, and delivering long-term results.
Each media channel can play its role based on the communication objectives. Their effectiveness also depends on how they work together.
A second consideration is the channel’s reach in the population. Print is interesting as a universal channel for consumers who read print publications, from older Telegraph readers to Monocle magazine-toting hipsters. However, it’s less useful if you’re looking to reach a football-mad teenager. Ebiquity in its analysis of Profit Ability 2 talks about a related concept called saturation:
The study analysed the saturation point for each channel, which is the last point where every pound invested in a channel generates at least £1 profit.
It found that TV has the highest saturation point. Advertisers can increase investment in TV to a higher level than other media and it will continue to generate a profitable return.
Based on immediate payback (i.e. payback within one week of investment), Linear TV advertising on average hits saturation at the highest spend level – £330,000 – nearly triple the equivalent scale of the next largest channel (Print) and over 8-times the scale of Online Video.
Profit Ability 2: The new business case for advertising | Ebiquity
Reflecting on my experience at Unilever: I wasn’t brought in to help digitise the marketing mix away from television because digital was an ineffective channel, but because linear television wasn’t as good a platform for reaching busy young mums as it had been previously. We had to broaden the media mix to reach them, which meant more investment in online video and paid social media. In retrospect, we focused on reach, deprioritising consideration of the communication objectives. BVoD, radio, and podcasts might have had greater weighting if I were to do it again.
This might all change
If a channel became more expensive, you would get less value for your money; it would be equivalent to raising the yellow line. Conversely, reducing the cost of the media would be equivalent to lowering the yellow line.
Cost inflation
Price inflation for larger clients likely endangers cinema, display advertising, online video and BVoD in client budgets first. There may be a strong case at present to allocate more spend to channels that would encourage branded searches, to improve the effectiveness of a reduced PPC spend. Examples of these channels would include public relations, print advertising and television.
Job to be done / payback period
An emergency locksmith will have a very different budget and timeline for marketing return compared to an aftershave brand. The emergency locksmith wants to rank top in local search on mobile devices to get a call-out; they are far less likely to consider brand building and word-of-mouth. The exception to this rule would be at the top of the market, like Banham in central London, which would be providing more of a concierge security service.
Regulation
I have worked with pharmaceutical clients where most of the communications we were doing had to be addressed directly to healthcare professionals. In that case, you have a much more limited palette of possible communication channels.
You face a similar situation if you are looking to market regulated consumer products like sports betting, gambling, alcohol, cannabis and tobacco-related products or vapes. The channel limitations are based on screening off protected audiences or reducing the chance of positive brand attributions. Regulators don’t want smoking to appear cool.
So what’s the best media channel based on our warped media constructs?
It depends. The good news is that all advertising channels analysed in Profit Ability 2 generated a positive payback from advertising when sustained effects are accounted for.
Mediatel: Newsline: Starcom: TV is now twice the price… but not twice as good -“There’s still nothing better than [a 30 second ad],” Dan Plant said on a panel at Future of TV Advertising Global. “Unfortunately it costs twice as much now – and it hasn’t got twice as good at what it was doing. You pay twice as much to achieve the same thing.”
The playground behind the interviewee before it was refurbished in the early 2000s used to have a roundabout that I was thrown off at a tangent while it spun around when I was about 3 or maybe 4 years old and landed straight into a puddle. I wore a red hooded anorak made of a red sherpa fleece fabric with an elasticated hood, cuffs and bottom which soaked up half the puddle like a sponge. The photographer had his back turned to Grove Road and what is now an Iceland supermarket. Back when I fell off the roundabout it was a Kwik Save.
Struggling
Even back then it had a reputation of being a hard neighbourhood. Local shops such as Griffiths the butchers catered for a customer base struggling to make ends meet.
To the photographer’s left down the road a bit would have been a social club for (former) members of the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence Corps itself had been stood down in 1968. It was a solid working class area full of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were employed either locally at the Lever factory next door or on the Mersey from the shipyards of Birkenhead to the chemical industry of the Mersey basin and assorted factories further afield.
Community spirit doesn’t pay the bills
By the 1980s, it looked worse for wear. There were few jobs, fewer still that paid well. And that was before unemployment and the heroin epidemic took their toll. As the economy picked up in the 1990s, the benefits didn’t make it to New Ferry. The one bright spot was a pirate radio station ran by community DJs playing house and techno records every night of the week close by to Grove Road playground. I’d held a couple of small (250 people) all night parties (acid house and garage) in the Civil Defence social club, with the blackout curtains keeping the noise and lights away from nosy neighbours and police patrols.
The people who ran the club put on breakfast for the revellers after the main event. We played ambient music from CDs supplied by a friend’s older brother (Tangerine Dream, The Orb, Vangelis, Kitaro, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Abba’s Arrival) mixing between two Discmans as the tired revellers drank tea and ate bacon ‘bin lid‘ sandwiches while sprawled out on the floor.
Tickets were sold in advance and the venue details given out on the night by ringing an answerphone. Everyone involved broke even if they were lucky.
Despite being really hard scrabble there was a certain amount of community dynamism going on in the village hall. My Mum used to travel down there to go to knitting classes with older women, some of whom were Irish like her. They would knit for charity.
But all that won’t keep social decay from the door while the community is underemployed and underpaid.
No easy answer
The social decay described in the article isn’t something that happened overnight but over decades. There is no quick fix to the social decay of bad behaviour and feral gangs of children. It is not clear whether there is the commitment, investment, government will or the way to resolve this social decay.
The most individually logical thing to do in a time of social decay is thinking more about personal safety.
Techno-utopianism of early 2000s
Looking back the technology adoption of the 1990s and early 2000s was phenomenal. The mainstreaming of the cellphones, the PlayStation, home PC computers and internet access creating immediacy.
The changes wrought by mobile phones in particular are still rippling through the developing world.
Driving in Japan
I am a huge fan of walkabout and driving videos because you can tell so much about the environment looking at retail spaces, brands, clothing and social interactions going on around you. For instance Japan’s apparent rejection of the electric car for now, favouring hybrid vehicles instead. This particular one of a rural Japanese town gives you a good idea of where Studio Ghibli‘s work comes from.
Fintan O’Toole on Ireland
Great talk by Fintan O’Toole at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
