EDITORIALS
Social Media Hasn’t Failed Advertising, We’ve Failed Ourselves
So the other day I read with interest the AdAge article called “Do Campaign Failures, High-Profile Firings Signal the End of Social Media?” It chronicled the downfall of Pepsi’s Refresh Project and Burger King’s many failed social media attempts, and it was the talk of digital and social media agencies everywhere.
Now let me be clear – I do not subscribe to the conclusion of the article that social media is a failed experiment when it comes to affecting sales. However I do believe that these examples are case studies in where we’ve gone wrong as an industry.
But let’s back up a bit and talk about how we got here.
Back in the days of paid media, you forked out big bucks to get the audience you wanted – be it print, TV, whatever. You were guaranteed roughly 30 million households watching your commercial every time you bought the Cosby Show. That meant the number of eyeballs were not a metric, they were a given. The metrics ad agencies were actually held to were real business results. Did the client see a sales bump from the campaign? Did product move off the shelves?
However with the rise of social media, the audience was not a given. We had to build an audience from scratch – it wasn’t as simple as writing a check. And so suddenly, metrics for ad agencies went from hard, real sales goals to things that had no direct connection to selling.
Video views, “Likes,” number of fans or total reTweets became the ends instead of the ends to a means. We, as an industry, forgot what we’re really here to do – sell shit. And clients, in their attempt to quantify their efforts to their bosses, latched onto the easiest metric everyone understood. Both sides voluntarily lowered the bar and now we’re all paying the price.
Burger King has continued to fall behind McDonalds despite industry-lauded social media efforts. Diet Coke trounced Pepsi and knocked them into third place despite tens of millions thrown at Refresh.
Social media fansboys will shout “But Refresh was to build brand affinity, not sell more Pepsi!” If you can show me a company that is loved but doesn’t sell anything – I’ll show you a failed company.
I’ll also show you a failed industry.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as we’ve seen the rise of social media, we’ve also seen the rise of client dissatisfaction and the drop in marketing campaigns that have actually affected the bottom line. When we celebrate videos for hitting a million views instead of selling a million shoes, we’ve lost our way. When the number of “Fans” we get on Facebook is more important than the number of people who actually buy our clients’ products, it’s no wonder we’re seeing results like we’re seeing.
Now it might not be as fun to create some crazy video that millions of people will “Like” just to see… and then have them never think twice about buying your product. But there’s nothing to say that social media can’t be used in the same way all other advertising should be used: to communicate a consumer benefit, convince them why they should choose you over the competition and get them to actually buy your product.
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Matt Morin is a freelance creative director in San Francisco and the author of The Dog & Pony Show blog. This piece was cross-posted from The San Francisco Egotist.
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One of the most overlooked aspects of marketing today is the truth behind the product. Consumers are becoming more and more educated and are able to look beyond the smokescreen and call a companies bluff, case in point are the McDonald commercials that portray McD's as healthy. There is a paradigm shift happening, especially in the States where products need to have an real intrinsic value to be sold, although hype continues to sell, its days are numbered. I find that most of the social media marketing methods are part of the hype group that lacks intrinsic value. Organic food is a great example of intrinsic value, coupled with truth it became this unstoppable movement that effects commerce and even politics, it utilizes the apex element of the social media movement, word of mouth.
Nice piece, agreed. I wonder how Skittles did with their "Licking" vid... Did you run out and buy a pack of skittles after that? Didn't think so.
No doubt. It is still a field in development. Not every product belongs on it other than a support function. Band-Aid is on facebook and over 2,000 people like it, as to how it would increase sales, we'll never know.
I think social media is failing as advertising but it's not failing in other areas that are critical to business. Social media is not like advertising on TV where you will ever be able to dump $200 million into it and see an immediate noticeable (albeit very temporary) spike in sales but social media can help to humanize brands and change the way people think about them. This is anecdotal and hardly universal but my experiences with airlines like Delta and JetBlue on Twitter have completely transformed my relationship with those brands in a way that just wasn't really possible before social media. It's more customer service than advertising but I'd argue that it's great marketing.
The problem with social media is that the behavior hasn't caught up with the promise. People got used to dialing a 1-800 number and ordering stuff off TV and it became a viable direct marketing channel. In terms of social shopping or people following the daily missives of every brand they support, it's just not a real part of our media habits yet.
Additionally, not all brands are inherently social. Like inorganik said, he's not buying Skittles after the "licking" video. Why? Because it's a cheap impression that doesn't affect your affinity for the brand or the probability that you will recommend it.
Social media may not have a persistent place in advertising but it can still be great marketing.
Good point Jimbo. I agree social media is an excellent customer service channel, and can definitely improve brand experience.
So maybe social media can improve sales for service industries in a much more direct way than it would for a company selling a product.
A half-dozen comments in and I haven't been ripped yet. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing...
Anyway, my point wasn't necessarily that social media CAN'T work for selling products or services, it's that more often than not, we simply don't make it work.
Too frequently it's "Come "like" us to watch our Super Bowl commercial" and... that's it. Or "Come "Like" us to enter this sweepstakes" and... that's it. We almost never actually ask the consumer to buy the product. We just cross our fingers and hope that magically they'll switch from Coke to Pepsi because they spent 2 minutes entering a contest on Facebook.
Sure, bad success metrics (likes, fans, followers) play a part but it's also that advertising is a campaign driven business and building relationships with stakeholders is a long term commitment. At SXSW Gary Vanyerchuk criticized W+K because they didn't sustain the Old Spice YouTube campaign and essentially left all those engaged consumer hanging. It's a somewhat valid criticism but that's not how an ad agency like W+K operates...they produce campaigns and measure results, just like every other ad agency. You can make a splash with social media if the creative is good, as many ad agencies do, but building lasting value that speaks to a lot of criticisms in this post is something that is part of ongoing relationship building that ad agencies have absolutely zero experience with.
But what good are "lasting relationships" if those consumers never buy anything and are just there for the fun and games you supply?
No one ever got rich building relationships that don't go anywhere.
All we're doing now is building one-way relationships: marketers offer content, sweepstakes and entertainment via social media but never get anything in return because they never require it or even ASK for it.
It's like those parents who don't want to parent but want to be their kids' best friends - they're usually horrible parents. We're marketers who don't want to market but want to be in "relationships." It's no wonder we're now horrible sellers.
I think you hit it pretty square, Matt. "Social" media has a place in the marketing mix. McCluhan's "the medium is the message" has long been misunderstood. The medium effects society, but the message always remains the content that does the work. Advertising is advertising, it hasn't changed since the first pimp of the worlds oldest profession. It'll be the same in a thousand years. The mechanisms will evolve, and people will get drawn up into making it about executional tactics. But the bottom line will be, "do you know how to AFFECT the audience... do you know how to sell."
the mechanics will absolutely evolve, especially as the lines
between social media/streaming media/broadcast become more blurred and better integrated- and as that happens, maybe the discrepancies that exist for how things are marketed for broadcast and web wont be as disconnetcted . it seems we are quick to forget how young all of this really is and even the 'experts'
are still green in the grand scheme of things. Give it another decade or two or three.
IMO, social definitely has it's place in the grand scheme of things and the challenge is how to bridge it with the product and the overall experience. It is an important touchpoint that customers expect now that the bridge has been set by companies that do it right. When a company does it wrong or doesn't do it at all it leaves the user feeling dejected or ignored. Social is the user's outlet for the product and service experience, so you better be there with your customer service hat on and some quality content that isn't necessarily meant to drive sales, but meant to drive loyalty. Like what Matt was saying, too often the social strategy is to paste a "like" or "+1" button and expect the user to take over from there. That's just bad customer service.
The best expample off the top of my head who is doing it right is GoPro HD cameras (http://www.facebook.com/goprocamera). They just celebrated reaching their 200k facebook fans benchmark. It's not the number of fans that is important, it's what they did to reach and build 200k fans. They post "videos of the day" from their customers, run contests, have a huge library of photos and videos, take part in discussions on their wall, etc... All this combined with a quality product built a large, loyal fanbase. I wish I had some sales figures to correlate to their rise in fans. With how many videos you see on youtube, vimeo and their facebook page that are shot with GoPro cameras, you can tell they are selling a ton, though.
One more example. The #jeeppuzzle video that was posted here on TDE a while back (http://www.thedenveregotist.com/news/national/2010/october/31/jeeppuzzle) seemed like a very interesting way to reach fans. It was a new method of using twitter to solve puzzles similar to those 1-15 slide number puzzles you did as a kid. I don't think this was really meant to drive sales. It was just a way to engage with the brand in a fun way (at least I hope that was the meaning of it all). I solved one of their many puzzles and was instructed to wait for an announcement while others solved puzzles... and waited... and waited... Finally, one post was made that the contest was over, and everyone then waited for another month before another announcement was made that the prizes were t-shirts. Cool, free stuff. But did they have to leave their fanbase in the dark for so long? It created a negative sentiment that everyone was left in the dark, and it was discussed on twitter using the #jeeppuzzle hashtag without any acknowledgment by Jeep or Leo Burnett Iberia, the agency behind the puzzle.
Sorry. Long story, I know. My point, there can be big successes and big failures for brands in social media.
When do we get PKD's vision of advertising beamed straight into people's dreams?
Nice grass sign Matt!
Initially, I thought of the Chryslar employee that got fired for 'Tweeting': People in Detriot don't know how to f_king drive. It was an Ad Article that I can't seem to find. It went into bounds of company brands employing twits and agencies self-housig them.
Social Media is a major waste of time suckage! It is not cool to get a 'liked' because you personally advertised to someone who cut your hair! 'Tit for Tat', but is a good funny! You guys provided great examples of success & suckage!
I'm just glad I didn't have to go viral to get my 'Bieber' houshold name!
No Reallly, another great blog about this subject on AdAgeDigital, by B.L.Ochman, is 'Most Fortune 50 Brands Still Hiding Their Social Media'; In which she stats...'This is the first in a series of posts that will examine how many of the Fortune 50 have really evolved past the toe-in-the-water phase, and how many are still in the head-in-the-sand era.'
It is a given that camera companies can be succesful w/social media, since that is todays medium of self-doing & sharing on the internet. I guess there are people that participate to send pictures/videos of themselves w/products to be in commercials & on TV Shows?..I am not one of them!#winning
I think this is a great article, and agree that so much of the time it seems that we have forgotten that it is our job to sell. If we can do that, and be entertaining, or enlightening, or educate, then all the better.
In regards to social media, perhaps it's time to re-think simple. One of the easiest 'rewards' I've found was in looking up movie times—I went from their website, to their FB page, 'liked' them, and got $3 off my movie tickets, and a free popcorn. I bought their product—and I will go to that theatre again
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