Advertising

Facebook is a Tough Place for Brands to Call Home

There’s no denying that Facebook is becoming a major channel for brands on the planet. I spend quite a bit of time there and likely you do as well. Brands are investing significant amounts of thought, human capital and money in hopes of garnering customer engagement and eventually revenue. But Facebook doesn’t make it easy.

We create content around the Facebook page design and try to understand how their technology works. We sift through the countless companies who claim to know how things work on Facebook, and just when you think things are getting there, Facebook makes a major change to the design, or code, or interface and suddenly much of what you have made is now broken, or will no longer be useful to you. It’s frustrating, and should cause all brands to take a step back and re-evaluate the role external social networks should play in their company strategy.

Facebook is great at helping us understand their ad platforms and targeting, but don’t seem to be as focused on trying to understand where pain points are for brands who place their intellectual property on Faceboook. Or, in providing ample notice when major changes are about to occur. It would be wonderful to have a technology roadmap, or at the very least an outline of what might be coming. This would help brands plan their investments. It’s hard to argue that with Facebook’s size and large head start that they need to keep everything close to the vest.

Research done by Forrester, indicates that consumers trust the information they find at a company web site (30%) at higher rates than email, TV ads and direct mail. Company blogs (12%), online banner ads (9%) and mobile ads (6%) are at the bottom of the trust list. This means that your earned media, in particular your web site, is where most of your resources should be placed. Brands control the content, design and the technology of their own internet properties, making planning and tracking much easier than in the paid and earned media spaces.

Facebook offers significant access to consumers as well as a platform that is truly social, and this means you can’t leave them out of your social framework. How much you include them and in what way depends somewhat on your brand and how valuable consumers find your web site. The more your customers visit your site, the lighter your integration efforts in the social networks should be. If you have trouble getting people to your site, then Facebook might be a richer platform for you.

Other considerations are who owns the data and how much can you track or attribute back to the networks you work in. By all means I think Facebook is valuable for brands, but like anything, the value will evolve over time. The majority of your investment should be on your own web site.

Rapid Fire Marketing Techniques are Required for Social Sites

The New York Times recently ran a story by Randall Stross assessing how big brands are doing with advertising campaigns on social networking sites like Facebook. The results have not been encouraging for advertisers. Top line: big brands can get consumers interested (term used loosely) using old school tactics like sweepstakes or spend gobs of money on slick interactive campaigns. Neither keeps them engaged for long. In meetings at my own company as well as monitoring conversations across the Internet I hear the same basic question posed over and over. “How do you advertise on these sites to get results that move the business?” In my humble opinion it seems there needs to be an entirely different question, or set of questions asked.

Advertisers/marketers are thinking about things the way they’ve always thought about them (for the most part). Create a knockout, break-through-the-clutter, campaign/commercial and people will flock to your product or service. It has definitely gotten more integrated over the last few years, as advertisers have moved from the :30 spot as king, to stacking several mediums to reach a more attention-fractured public. But anytime a new audience-set or demographic is discovered, the same stale old playbook is put on the field. That’s followed by a lot of money being poured into agencies and media. That in turn is followed by head scratching, research and then in many cases a pause in all activity until it can be “nailed.”

Social media sites are about humans connecting with other humans and sharing common thoughts, information and experiences. The hooks get deeper when people began allowing others a view into the window of their emotional world as well. A health challenge, work success, family milestones, etc. People used to go online for two things, to learn or to do. Now you can add to connect as the third pillar of that stool. Ads are tolerable, and perhaps even occasionally welcome under the first two scenarios, but way off limits in the third. “Don’t pollute my pristine landscape with billboards and neon, I’m tryin’ to take a picture here.”

Two decades ago the media world revolved around the :30 second TV spot. Advertising started there and then radiated out. Today the heart of that solar system has been replaced with the Web. Not a web site, the entire web. There is a difference. A television was a television was a television. Fully compatible, everyone had the same experience, one form factor. You sat on the sofa and watched. Today, with the web at the center, complexity sets in. There are browsers on computers, televisions, mobile handsets; a consumer could be anywhere. The technology is all over the map and advancing weekly. Ads are now embedded in YouTube user-generated content videos for heaven’s sake.

No one single campaign will be able to make a big enough impact any more. Hitting that big home run is tougher and more expensive, which raises the risk. In today’s economic climate brands are looking to cut back, not spend on experiments. As I’ve said over and over in this space, don’t gold plate your efforts. Instead, create dozens of small, mini-campaigns, spend as little as possible and get them out there in rapid fire fashion.

Ideate, execute, learn, repeat. Senior managers will require you to justify a $500,000 campaign, and if it doesn’t pay back, it’s curtains. But no one will really pay much attention to something that costs $10,000. Just think you could do 50 smaller campaigns for the price of one big one and avoid all that scrutiny. And, you will get more data back in small bites that can be incorporated into the next small effort. It’s iterative advertising (a term just coined by me).

We’re a long way from cracking the code here, and arguably we may never fully crack it, because it’s a moving target. TV held still for a generation. The web will always keep transforming. One thing I’m sure of. Banners won’t work in places where people go to connect.

Neuro-Typicals Still Struggle to Understand, But Keep Trying

New York Universities’ Child Study Center had a great idea. They were looking for a way to raise awareness of children’s neurological conditions. Certainly a noble idea. The ad agency BBDO worked pro-bono to create a campaign to interrupt consumers and get them to read the ads. Their creative execution was to put the message content in the form of a ransom note. Of course breaking through the clutter is always the challenge for any ad campaign, and as it turned out their goal was met. The ads ran for only two weeks, and they were indeed interruptive. So much so that calls and e-mails poured into the Child Study Center. Here is one of the ads that actually ran.

I am a parent of an Asperger’s Syndrome adult (see previous blog here). When I first saw the ad I was alarmed (the creative was doing it’s job), my immediate next reaction was that this would help raise awareness (the campaign was doing its job). But it did feel negative to me and that is something my son and I are trying to leave behind.

It is very difficult for neuro-typicals to put themselves inside the complex minds of these children and adults. Frequently their days are filled with anxiety, confusion and fear. In a way this ad transforms a neuro-typical reader into someone on the autism spectrum. You read it and you can’t quite figure it out… It doesn’t fit into the familiar buckets… You are searching for meaning… Based on that I find it difficult to be overly critical about the campaign, but there has to be a better way.

So what to do next? I wonder if the well-meaning people responsible for this campaign consulted with the parents and individuals who live in this world everyday. A simple focus group would have told them that they want to move beyond the negatives and into the positive attributes that our children have. These are wonderful people and can contribute to society in meaningful ways, and in some cases in superior ways. The human spirit, regardless of what mental or physical differences shape it’s vessel, is essentially universal. People want to make a difference, to live fulfilling lives, communicate with others, and be happy.

The attitude and approach of all of us must evolve and advance, just as the attitude toward regular medical conditions have evolved (diabetes, cancer, etc…). The key to this, as with so many things, is awareness followed by education. Once those building blocks are in place, people will get it and go to work.

I was happy to read at the end of The New York Times article on this topic (you can link to it here) that they were going back to try again. I’m grateful for their efforts and will look forward to what they come up with next.