A lot of people tell me there is no point, that what I do is effectively take a dead medium for a walk every day in the hope that someone will follow despite all the signs suggesting they won’t. That’s the problem with a lot of the people I know studying and working in the advertising industry. They spend their days being creative, being free of constraints upon imagination and being allowed to do as they please to try and plug a product. In advertising you can, more or less, do that. The worst that can happen is that someone says “no” and then you just go back to the drawing board and start again, no harm done.
For years there have been three main ways to get your name out there: TV, press and outdoor. Nearly all advertising fell into those categories, and in reality most of it still does. TV is the overall winner because of how much money gets pumped into it by agencies eager to see their brand appear in the breaks between The X Factor and it is because of this money (and no doubt in part because of how often we are subjected to it) that people become so attracted to it. When I started my advertising degree that seemed like the perfect destination. It’s fancy, it’s rich, it’s a sign you have made it.
Then you come to the other end of the scale. The end that I work in, the end that I help produce and the end that so often gets criticism from people who see it: online marketing.
Online marketing, or social marketing as it is often called to make it sound friendlier, is seen as the joke in advertising. It’s seen as the cheap, nasty, easy way out of trying to publicise a brand and as such creatives tend to frown upon it. For the most part their preconceptions are spot on. Online marketing is 90% absolute rubbish. Banner ads and pop-ups were the first incarnation of the beast and they were ignored in as quick a time as they had taken to be created. They were, and still are, an irritant. They stop you from doing what you want to do and therefore you don’t like them, you want them to go away. Because you don’t like the ads you think less favourably about the company being advertised, going completely against the idea in the first place. You will very rarely see a big brand doing something like a pop-up ad anymore for that exact reason. They know they are unlikely to work.
So then companies had a problem. The internet was this huge, largely untapped resource that millions upon millions of people used every single day of their lives. They used the internet more then they read a paper. They used the internet more than they watched TV. Even while watching TV they would likely have the internet on in some form in tandem, or the show would direct them to a website to visit after to continue the experience. How, then, to access customers while they are away from traditional means? After all, advertising is effectively badgering someone to do what you want them to do and if people aren’t seeing any advertising for a large part of their day there is an opportunity being missed.
Then social media was created and companies had an idea.
In the past decade the idea of life without social media has become near unimaginable to today’s generation. Find me one person of about ten years old or above in civilised society who isn’t on either Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or Bebo and I will return with a million who are. Everything we do now is somehow linked to our online presence. When we go out we tell people where we are, what we are doing and who we are with. When we come back we tag pictures of friends and have a conversation via comments about how much fun it was. We find most of our news online, with the newspaper industry suffering drastically as a consequence of information being so more readily available. When key figures in the past few years have died people knew about it from the likes of Twitter long before any official source confirmed it. Even the official sources themselves often use social media as a way of getting the news they wish to broadcast, with it being referenced in BBC news stories or tabloids the following day. When Bin Laden died, for example, Twitter was flooded with news of this hours before it was mentioned anywhere else. Social media has become a trusted, reliable source of information for some of the most serious issues today and is no longer just seen as a way of laughing with acquaintances. Business uses it to hire people, with the emergence of LinkedIn having such an effect that now an estimated 70% of perspective employees will look at a candidates profile (on LinkedIn and other sites) before making a final decision. You can now Google search for someone’s name and all the information you could ever need to know will appear right before your eyes. For example, if I Google myself my Facebook, Twitter, blog, portfolio, LinkedIn and Myspace sites will all appear on the first page such is the way that Google now operate their ranking system.
So if news and business can accept social media as part of the every day essentials, why does advertising still look well and truly down its nose at it?
Just the other day I was talking to a friend who, upon discovering what I do, as much as said that I was wasting my degree. The words “No-one wants what you are doing,” were also dished out, leading to me writing this. It’s never nice to be told that your work isn’t needed, especially when you know it is.
The problem with social marketing is that, as I mentioned earlier, most of it is rubbish. Businesses flog the dead horse that is their Twitter account in the hope that the masses of potential consumers also using the service will jump on board and part with their cash, but that simply won’t happen. Why would I ever want to follow the events of an insurance company or a car dealership online? Why would I want to know about their latest deals or offers when all I really want is to read some jokes and be entertained? I won’t. I never will. It’s these sorts of things that bring the perception down and that is the right reaction. Just like pop-ups of old, the majority of social media adverts are things no-one wants and that just get in the way of the thing we actually want to be doing. The knee jerk reaction, then, is that online ads are all bad. They are dismissed as the lowest form of advertising life. They are mocked. Though don’t TV ads also stop us from doing what we’d rather be doing? Aren’t we just more used to them, more accepting?
So what is the difference between online advertising and the sort you see on TV that is lauded and praised by those in the industry? What stands them apart from those that every budding creative wants to create?
Nothing. That’s what.
They are the exact same thing. It is not the quality that differs, it’s the quantity and that is what makes them undesirable. During the average three minute break between a TV show the majority of those adverts will be forgotten almost instantly. If you’re lucky you might see one in the hour that stays with you, but even that will likely have slipped from your conscious by the next day. Come the end of the year the chances are you’ll only be able to remember a handful of TV advertisements that have had a genuine impact, and even then I bet none of you have actually been out and brought that product on the basis of the thirty seconds of film that was put before you. How many of you can honestly say you have brought car insurance because of a meerkat or a flat screen television because of some bouncing balls? You haven’t. I haven’t. The majority of people who have seen those ads and said, “Yeah, they’re good,” have not then gone out and purchased those products.
Yet still, ask most people in the advertising industry if they prefer those ads over a brand’s fan page of Facebook and they will say yes. Of course they will. Those ads were clever and funny and smart. They made people smile and laugh and they won awards. They also made you click online and join in a social media campaign, but oh wait, you weren’t really aware of that at the time, so that doesn’t count, right? When you went on to Tweet about how good they were and when your Facebook status about it got liked by your friends, that effectively did their social media campaign for them. Welcome to the dark side.
The fact is that the only difference between advertising that is acclaimed and appreciated and the sort of advertising done through social media networks is that online there is a lot more of it to be criticised. While a television campaign can cost hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of pounds to produce, a company can set up a social media campaign for next to nothing. It only makes sense, then, that more and more companies will do this and ultimately the online market will be flooded with an awful lot of drivel. It becomes harder to see the good amongst the crap and no-one likes having to work hard so it all gets tarnished with the same brush.
That is not fair. It is also a bit naïve. I will be the first to admit that most brands are lazy when it comes to their online presence but there are an awful lot that are not. For companies that simply do not have a marketing budget, social media is the only real option. What would you naysayers advise, just stop advertising all together? There are some very clever online campaigns out there (I bet you all loved the Old Spice ads and the very fact you’re reading this suggest that my personal social marketing effort has had the desired impact on you) and to just dismiss them all as dead wood is ridiculous.
It is incredibly easy to criticise and a lot harder to actually put the work in and try and change the situation. Don’t judge an entire crop based on one bad apple, as the saying goes. Give the rest of the orchard a chance to prove you wrong and I guarantee you you’ll be surprised.
For years there have been three main ways to get your name out there: TV, press and outdoor. Nearly all advertising fell into those categories, and in reality most of it still does. TV is the overall winner because of how much money gets pumped into it by agencies eager to see their brand appear in the breaks between The X Factor and it is because of this money (and no doubt in part because of how often we are subjected to it) that people become so attracted to it. When I started my advertising degree that seemed like the perfect destination. It’s fancy, it’s rich, it’s a sign you have made it.
Then you come to the other end of the scale. The end that I work in, the end that I help produce and the end that so often gets criticism from people who see it: online marketing.
Online marketing, or social marketing as it is often called to make it sound friendlier, is seen as the joke in advertising. It’s seen as the cheap, nasty, easy way out of trying to publicise a brand and as such creatives tend to frown upon it. For the most part their preconceptions are spot on. Online marketing is 90% absolute rubbish. Banner ads and pop-ups were the first incarnation of the beast and they were ignored in as quick a time as they had taken to be created. They were, and still are, an irritant. They stop you from doing what you want to do and therefore you don’t like them, you want them to go away. Because you don’t like the ads you think less favourably about the company being advertised, going completely against the idea in the first place. You will very rarely see a big brand doing something like a pop-up ad anymore for that exact reason. They know they are unlikely to work.
So then companies had a problem. The internet was this huge, largely untapped resource that millions upon millions of people used every single day of their lives. They used the internet more then they read a paper. They used the internet more than they watched TV. Even while watching TV they would likely have the internet on in some form in tandem, or the show would direct them to a website to visit after to continue the experience. How, then, to access customers while they are away from traditional means? After all, advertising is effectively badgering someone to do what you want them to do and if people aren’t seeing any advertising for a large part of their day there is an opportunity being missed.
Then social media was created and companies had an idea.
In the past decade the idea of life without social media has become near unimaginable to today’s generation. Find me one person of about ten years old or above in civilised society who isn’t on either Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or Bebo and I will return with a million who are. Everything we do now is somehow linked to our online presence. When we go out we tell people where we are, what we are doing and who we are with. When we come back we tag pictures of friends and have a conversation via comments about how much fun it was. We find most of our news online, with the newspaper industry suffering drastically as a consequence of information being so more readily available. When key figures in the past few years have died people knew about it from the likes of Twitter long before any official source confirmed it. Even the official sources themselves often use social media as a way of getting the news they wish to broadcast, with it being referenced in BBC news stories or tabloids the following day. When Bin Laden died, for example, Twitter was flooded with news of this hours before it was mentioned anywhere else. Social media has become a trusted, reliable source of information for some of the most serious issues today and is no longer just seen as a way of laughing with acquaintances. Business uses it to hire people, with the emergence of LinkedIn having such an effect that now an estimated 70% of perspective employees will look at a candidates profile (on LinkedIn and other sites) before making a final decision. You can now Google search for someone’s name and all the information you could ever need to know will appear right before your eyes. For example, if I Google myself my Facebook, Twitter, blog, portfolio, LinkedIn and Myspace sites will all appear on the first page such is the way that Google now operate their ranking system.
So if news and business can accept social media as part of the every day essentials, why does advertising still look well and truly down its nose at it?
Just the other day I was talking to a friend who, upon discovering what I do, as much as said that I was wasting my degree. The words “No-one wants what you are doing,” were also dished out, leading to me writing this. It’s never nice to be told that your work isn’t needed, especially when you know it is.
The problem with social marketing is that, as I mentioned earlier, most of it is rubbish. Businesses flog the dead horse that is their Twitter account in the hope that the masses of potential consumers also using the service will jump on board and part with their cash, but that simply won’t happen. Why would I ever want to follow the events of an insurance company or a car dealership online? Why would I want to know about their latest deals or offers when all I really want is to read some jokes and be entertained? I won’t. I never will. It’s these sorts of things that bring the perception down and that is the right reaction. Just like pop-ups of old, the majority of social media adverts are things no-one wants and that just get in the way of the thing we actually want to be doing. The knee jerk reaction, then, is that online ads are all bad. They are dismissed as the lowest form of advertising life. They are mocked. Though don’t TV ads also stop us from doing what we’d rather be doing? Aren’t we just more used to them, more accepting?
So what is the difference between online advertising and the sort you see on TV that is lauded and praised by those in the industry? What stands them apart from those that every budding creative wants to create?
Nothing. That’s what.
They are the exact same thing. It is not the quality that differs, it’s the quantity and that is what makes them undesirable. During the average three minute break between a TV show the majority of those adverts will be forgotten almost instantly. If you’re lucky you might see one in the hour that stays with you, but even that will likely have slipped from your conscious by the next day. Come the end of the year the chances are you’ll only be able to remember a handful of TV advertisements that have had a genuine impact, and even then I bet none of you have actually been out and brought that product on the basis of the thirty seconds of film that was put before you. How many of you can honestly say you have brought car insurance because of a meerkat or a flat screen television because of some bouncing balls? You haven’t. I haven’t. The majority of people who have seen those ads and said, “Yeah, they’re good,” have not then gone out and purchased those products.
Yet still, ask most people in the advertising industry if they prefer those ads over a brand’s fan page of Facebook and they will say yes. Of course they will. Those ads were clever and funny and smart. They made people smile and laugh and they won awards. They also made you click online and join in a social media campaign, but oh wait, you weren’t really aware of that at the time, so that doesn’t count, right? When you went on to Tweet about how good they were and when your Facebook status about it got liked by your friends, that effectively did their social media campaign for them. Welcome to the dark side.
The fact is that the only difference between advertising that is acclaimed and appreciated and the sort of advertising done through social media networks is that online there is a lot more of it to be criticised. While a television campaign can cost hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of pounds to produce, a company can set up a social media campaign for next to nothing. It only makes sense, then, that more and more companies will do this and ultimately the online market will be flooded with an awful lot of drivel. It becomes harder to see the good amongst the crap and no-one likes having to work hard so it all gets tarnished with the same brush.
That is not fair. It is also a bit naïve. I will be the first to admit that most brands are lazy when it comes to their online presence but there are an awful lot that are not. For companies that simply do not have a marketing budget, social media is the only real option. What would you naysayers advise, just stop advertising all together? There are some very clever online campaigns out there (I bet you all loved the Old Spice ads and the very fact you’re reading this suggest that my personal social marketing effort has had the desired impact on you) and to just dismiss them all as dead wood is ridiculous.
It is incredibly easy to criticise and a lot harder to actually put the work in and try and change the situation. Don’t judge an entire crop based on one bad apple, as the saying goes. Give the rest of the orchard a chance to prove you wrong and I guarantee you you’ll be surprised.