The Ultimate Brand Promise
Lessons from Ello’s Retro Take on Modern Communication
As New York Fashion Week flittered across my social media feeds last month, I kept seeing one particular trend resurface: flared pants. Designers creating modern updates to decades-old fashion have made flared pants the latest trend for this fall and next spring.
Fashion constantly reflects on the past to reinvent its future. Technology, on the other hand, rarely incorporates retro elements into new products or services. Technology doesn’t look back. It looks forward. The newness. The latest and greatest. The most features. Denser number of pixels. More processing power. Longer battery life.
But recently, an ad-free social network called Ello has received so much buzz and traffic (reportedly, 31,000+ signups per hour) that it’s publicity bears closer examination.
Here’s a snippet from Ello’s “About” page:
Ad Free
Ello doesn’t sell ads. Nor do we sell data about you to third parties.
Virtually every other social network is run by advertisers. Behind the scenes they employ armies of ad salesmen and data miners to record every move you make. Data about you is then auctioned off to advertisers and data brokers. You’re the product that’s being bought and sold.
Collecting and selling your personal data, reading your posts to your friends, and mapping your social connections for profit is both creepy and unethical. Under the guise of offering a “free” service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy.
We also think ads are tacky, that they insult our intelligence and that we’re better without them.
So, is there anything digital marketers can learn from Ello’s buzz worthiness?
Remember When?
For starters, Ello looked back to a time before social networking became monetized. Before user data got auctioned off to the highest bidder. A retro social network of sorts. Back in the day when Facebook was exclusively available to only college email addresses. Or go back further and reminisce on AOL and Prodigy. No ads. No undercurrent of nefarious data mining taking place. Just strangers talking to strangers in private chat rooms. It was all so innocent (a/s/l anyone?).
Ello embraced elements of the retro Internet. It’s the “flared pant” of social media. A throwback to a retro digital age with a modern twist. No ads. No data mining. No ulterior motives. One-hundred percent pure, uncut social media.
I’m not here to add my opinion to the debate about whether Ello will actually work or not. But I do think they tapped into a sentiment shared by many, including myself, about the modern Internet, social networks, and digital marketing. People are clamoring for a less cluttered, less invasive online user experience. Too many ads. Too many pop-ups. Too many cookies. Too many logins. There’s a harkening back to a simpler time. Retro Internet 1.0. Where content wasn’t bedraggled by advertisements and users could browse without fear of being retargeted by Nasty Gal because they visited the site once (And I swear it was just once! An honest browsing mistake because a colleague sent me there!)
Ello struck a chord bemoaning the modern Internet and the social networking experience. They went retro with their approach. And the public, whether with or against its motives, couldn’t help but take notice.
So what are the lessons to take from Ello’s buzz?
Acknowledge and Address the Sentiment Ello Stirred Up
The pain is real. People don’t want their online experience to look like the digital equivalent of Times Square. People want a break from the visual noise that paid ads, sponsored posts, listicles, promoted tweets, and adwords create.
The quaintness and simplicity of the early Internet is, in fact, what people are feeling nostalgic for.
Are Corporate Sites the Last Bastion of Trust with Visitors?
If social networks are getting noisier, the opportunity to create your own Ello has never been greater. Yes, the corporate website is one of the last places where a tacit agreement still exists between visitor and host. Visitor comes for information about a company, knowing full well that the company’s site exists to sell a product. Company provides visitor information (ideally useful, interesting information — more on this later). Expectations couldn’t be clearer. And with clear expectations, there’s an opportunity for companies to build trust with their visitors.
As Facebook, Twitter and Google continue to tweak their algorithms, introduce more ads, and track user behavior, their motivations become confusing. Are we really here to network socially or have we just been corralled into a convenient location for advertisers to let fly? This unsettling leaves a gap for informative, authentic online relationships with visitors. And who stands to benefit? Companies who can step up and fill that gap. Unlike with Facebook, where its denizens increasingly feel like the site is a Trojan Horse for advertisers, a corporate site’s visitors come willingly, to learn, and to get something of value out of their visit. No ads despite the overarching corporate site itself, but again, the expectations are clear.
We’re Not Witnessing the End of Online Advertising
Ello makes the mistake of presuming that all ads are bad. People like branded content. They just don’t like bad branded content. Brands aren’t forcing anyone to follow them on social media. People follow brands because they get something of value and interest from the relationship. There are brands creating incredible content. If done well and tactfully, people are willing to forgive that this [insert spectacle du jour] has been sponsored by RedBull.
If brands continue giving people a reason to tune in, they won’t see it as advertising. People won’t see it as being sold to. And that’s great marketing.
It’s Still About Fundamentals
We’ll never run out of “how to” and best practice articles on content marketing, blogging, and social media engagement. You could melt down all those articles into a few hard and fast rules: be interesting, be relevant, and give people something that makes them want to keep coming back. All the other advice is just a convenient outlet to procrastinate instead of creating something of worth for your audience.
One of the most retro-y tactics of digital marketing remains the blog. It’s the Michael Myers of digital marketing. You simply cannot kill it off! It remains the backbone of content marketing, SEO, and social media. And companies with a robust content marketing strategy keep building brand authority, thought leadership, and growing awareness. That’s not a shameless endorsement because we’re a blogging company. It’s the reality. Go ahead. Do a search. I assure you there are smarter people then us saying the same thing.
The Ultimate Brand Promise
Reading between the lines, Ello is presaging a movement where transparency is the most resonant brand promise a product or service can make to its customers. Users clearly aren’t getting that transparency from their social networks. Somewhere along the way, that trust was broken by Facebook and its ilk. Ello’s attempting to fill that need for social networks. And the same rules apply to the rest of the marketplace. People want mutually respectful relationships online. They just need someone to show them.
