Digital advertising is a bit of a minefield. The average user has an expectation that everything will be free. Advertisers want to do their best to reach users, but users have retreated behind ad blockers or have built up a sort of immunity to common advertising methods, often referred to as ad blindness. But brands can’t give up on advertising on the Internet. The Internet has become too important a part of too many people’s lives to be ignored. It has made major inroads into supplanting advertising’s old go-tos: TV, radio, and print. So there exists this tension between brands trying to find ways to reach their potential consumers in the digital space, and those consumers actively trying to avoid those brand messages while still benefiting from the free stuff that the brands are supporting.
One of the ways this has evolved over the years is that brands have begun putting more of their focus on platforms instead of ad buys. Why buy a bunch of banner ad space on some blog site that no one is going to see, when you could make yourself an undeniable presence on a social platform that millions of people are using? And even if you’re not getting enough free attention there, most platforms have options to pay to promote your content. So we see companies set up pages on Facebook and Twitter, and advertising agencies scrabbling to find ways for brands to inject themselves on Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, Yik Yak, Kik, Snapchat and so on. Brands are all afraid that if they are slow to adopt one of these potential advertising platforms they are going to be left behind. This is an incredibly dangerous way of thinking, for a number of reasons.
It creates an environment that thoughtlessly chases the new. Many marketers see repurposing technological innovation as the panacea for their fear of being left behind, fostering a culture of innovation for innovation’s sake. This makes them hyper-sensitive to every latest trend. It also makes them favor working with advertising firms that seem cutting edge, so agencies try to find ways to prove their credentials in these areas by designing campaigns that use technology to create style over substance, while giving little thought to why the campaign needed to exist in the first place. It’s this kind of thinking that was so expertly spoofed in Creative Fuel’s video for “The World’s First Crowd Sourced 3D-Printed QR Code Live Streamed Via Go Pro To A Smart Phone Or Tablet Device Drone Delivery Ticket System Project.”
Chasing the next big thing also incentivizes a shotgun approach, since there are so many potentially useful platforms vying for attention. This leads to it’s own problems. The first of those relates to manpower. It takes a certain amount of time for creative teams to make executions for a brand’s various platforms. While many of the platforms have overlapping functionalities, like the ability to post text or pictures, each one is optimized differently to fill different niches, so not tailoring content for each platform’s strengths and weaknesses creates mediocre results. To keep up with demand for frequent quality content across many platforms, marketers either need more people or more time. Many companies are either unwilling or unable to do either, so they just spread their existing team thin across multiple platforms. This leads to a second problem: lack of focus. By trying to cover so many platforms, brands run the risk of not maintaining the brand promise across them all. For something big like Coke’s “Happiness” that might not be as likely, but trying to invent ways to make P&G’s “Thank You, Mom” work on Snapchat might just end up diluting the brand. The Law of Expansion from Ries’ 22 Immutable Laws of Branding states “The Power of Brand is Inversely Proportional to its Scope.” I believe that is just as true for platforms as it is for brand positioning.
An aggressive approach to participating on every new platform can also open a brand up to more opportunities for gaffes and faux pas. Everyone in the marketing world shudders to think how quickly things can go south thanks to an ill-advised Twitter post, like DiGiorno’s inappropriate use of #WhyIStayed or, more recently, Clorox’s blunder involving emojis and bleach. When a social media team is stretched thin, it is easy to see how these things happen. A twitter analytics program dumps #WhyIStayed into a social media managers feed, and they write something clever without checking the context of the trend. Clorox sees an opportunity to inject itself into the conversation about new emojis, with cleaning products being added to the roster, but doesn’t take the time to consider all the potentially racist implications of their tweet. We are all so enamored with the immediacy of sites like Twitter that we forget there is a cost to real-time responses. And for what? How much were Oreo’s sales really increased by their “oh-so-perfect” tweet during the Super Bowl blackout two years ago?
Don’t get me wrong, platforms are very much the future of digital advertising. Digital’s old methods, like banner ads, pop-ups, and auto-playing flash ads, have too many flaws to ever overshadow the ability to totally control a space online and make it perfectly reflect the values of a brand. And, unlike a company website, that space exists as part of the larger fabric of people’s daily Internet usage, not separate from it. Still, brands have to be clever about how they use these spaces. A shotgun blast of diffuse messaging across every social space that seems hot at the moment is not the way to go. Rather than being blinded by the newness of digital marketing, let’s remember that the same lessons marketers have been learning for decades about building a brand are just as applicable now as they were in the past.
First, we have to stop thinking about digital as a monolithic thing, but rather break it down into its component parts. Each one of the platforms a brand uses to reach people should be treated as a different entity. Not every brand is right for every advertising channel. Some brands are better suited for print, radio, outdoor, TV, etc., and can simply ignore the rest because they don’t match the brand’s optimal communications strategy. If we treated Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook the same way we treated Print, Television, and Outdoor then we could free ourselves from the idea that every brand has to be everywhere, allowing for a more intelligent approach to selecting which platforms are right for a brand.
The idea that you shouldn’t rush to adopt a new platform after it’s first upswing in popularity is an important one, but it is a difficult one for many to stomach. I think people look at the Internet and how disruptive it was to business as we knew it, and they look at all of the companies that were effectively caught with their pants down, and say: “That will never be me.” But early adoption isn’t the right lesson. Sure, Amazon won their piece of the online retail business by being the first to get it right, but Facebook replaced MySpace and Google replaced AltaVista. It isn’t enough to be first. In fact, in the book Good to Great, Jim Collins demonstrated that the most successful brands during the beginning of the Internet were the ones who didn’t rush in, but were patient and strategic about how they brought their business into the new space, with a focus on maintaining brand values. This is just as true during the beginning of the Internet of Things.
Being careful and calculated about how you enter each new space, and manage each new platform, ensures you won’t dilute your brand promise. If you know what you stand for, and are consistent about standing for that, it is just as powerful online as it is in any other space. It can even help you take on the challenges of social media outrage. Take, for example, the case of Protein World. They received a great deal of criticism for body shaming women with their ads about working on one’s beach body. Protein World knew what they stood for, and stuck to their guns. As a protein powder company whose consumer base was predominantly fitness-oriented women, they knew they could push back without threatening their existing consumer base. Love their ads or hate them, it’s impossible to deny that, by doubling down on their brand values, they saw a surge in sales as consumers who agreed with them were drawn in by the conversation around the controversy and decided to try their products.
Of course, the conversation is the ultimate goal of brands participating in any of these platforms. Word of mouth has always been a primary motivator for purchasing decisions, and for as long as that’s been true, marketers attempts to control word of mouth have been laughably unsuccessful. Instead of trying to control what people are saying, brands should try to encourage positive conversations and create more opportunities for those conversations to exist. Right now, brands often seek to inject themselves into the cultural discourse just to be part of the zeitgeist. Oreo’s super bowl blackout tweet. Clorox’s ill-timed emoji snafu. The power of a platform, however, is that the brand can make and publish content that encourages the right kinds of conversations, instead of just being reactive. Let’s look at that principle through the context of a world event. People don’t mind when cool stuff is posted on social media related to a brand’s involvement in something like the World Cup. People are less keen about a random brand’s quip on the same. Just like with other forms of advertising, when it’s too invasive it is disliked. Why? Because people don’t really care that much about brands.
As Martin Weigel of Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam points out in his presentation on consumer indifference, the degree to which real people buy into social media marketing’s ideas of engagement and loyalty are vastly overstated. People will buy products from both Coke and Pepsi, without thinking twice about it. People aren’t likely to follow brands on social media without being motivated by a promotion of some kind. The biggest challenge for brands is indifference. So even though there is great power in creating content that sparks conversations online, it is important to remember just how much apathy there is to overcome. Paid media is a useful tool to overcome this, as it is interruptive in nature, but it is not the only way. This is the whole idea behind the recent rise in content marketing. The right piece of content can find its audience, overcome that apathy, take off, and generate the sharing and discussing on social media that are the digital equivalent of word of mouth, without costing an arm and leg: Dollar Shave Club, Ice Bucket Challenge, Starbucks Happy Hour.
Beyond all of the specifics I’ve discussed so far, the most important thing to realize is that digital strategy is just strategy in the digital space. There was a wonderful piece published recently by Jack Morton that calls for brand managers to say no to digital strategy. They make the excellent point that too often digital strategy seems to be focused around the idea of what and where, but not of why. They argue that the first question a brand should ask is what kind of experience they are trying to create, and then figure out how that can best be serviced by the technology afterward. In effect, they are not actually arguing for the end of digital strategy, but rather for the rejection of the kind of thinking that demands a branded app for the sake of a branded app. Technology can be seductive, and the siren call of every new social platform is often hard to resist, but we must keep reminding ourselves that step one is always to have a strategy based on the brand, its consumers, and the organic ways in which both can grow.
It is also worth remembering that surges of interest in various platforms don’t mean those platforms actually have legs. Consider QR codes, Klout scores, or Facebook apps. They may still have some relevance, but do they have the importance that they did right after they launched? That many experts thought they would have going forward? Remember that the same could be true for social apps like Snapchat or Yik Yak, anything augmented reality, or the explosive growth of wearables. Is it worth jumping in as soon as possible? Or is it smarter to wait, see how viable they actually are as a marketing channel, and then get involved once the right criteria are met: it’s here to stay, it succeeds as a platform for communicating ideas, and it fits the brand and its values. Multi-channel approaches to digital advertising aren’t going away, and they shouldn’t. They are probably the most effective way to reach consumers online in this day and age. It’s just that being clever, calculated, patient, and focused with what platforms a brand is on, and what it says once it is there, will lead to better results.
Despite what brand managers, and some of their advertisers, think, people don’t care about what brands are doing on the web. Marketers and advertisers spent much of their time talking about concepts like developing relationships, fostering engagement, and building loyalty, but the truth is that these ideas grossly overstate the amount the average consumer cares about brands. Yes, there are rare cases in which the fans of a product will be so enthusiastic they will not only buy it for themselves, but preach its greatness to all of their friends. But that isn’t the norm. At the same time, it is absolutely true that the vast majority of sales are still driven by word of mouth, and that includes chatter online. This is the challenge of digital strategy. How do you make people care enough to spread the good word of your products to their friends, when they don’t fundamentally have any interest in your brand? Step one is to build a great product. Step two is more complicated. It involves getting online, taking advantage of brand-friendly, socially driven sites for user generated content (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), selecting only the channels that are right for your brand (and being skeptical of every new channel’s ability to be the same), and cultivating conversations amongst users in unobtrusive ways that highlight the best aspects of your brand. Certainly not the easiest task in the world, but then again, that’s why they pay us the big bucks.