How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Advertising: Week Three of Satellite Bootcamp
Well, kinda.
Today is a weird time for advertising. On one hand, advertising is at an all-time high. It’s on the radio, your TV, all your favorite websites, the billboards along the road and even the cars on that road, the beginning of every video you watch on Youtube, every movie you watch at the theater, and pretty much every square inch of Times Square. Some say the average American sees as many as 4,000 ads every day. This guy tried counting, and he gave up before breakfast.
On the other hand, there has perhaps never been a time where ads were despised as strongly as today. Everyone started using Adblock Plus years ago and the only reason they aren’t still using it is because they switched to uBlock Origin (currently at over 10 million users) once they found out Adblock Plus gets paid to let ads through. Spotify has, whether intentionally or not, taken advantage of the hate against ads by making their ads so infamously annoying and irritating that you need to pay for premium if you want to listen to your music in peace.
I hate ads as much as everybody else, but I also recognize that a lot of the creators, websites, and services I enjoy every day depend on ad revenue. It allows them to convert their share of the attention economy into real money, which makes it so that I don’t have to pay a cent. I use an adblocking extension, but I disable it for YouTube so that my favorite channels can still earn the fraction of a cent my view generates for them. Even then, I mute the ads automatically, and if it’s an “unskippable ad” I’ll play it at 4x speed to get through it faster.
As you can see, I’m not the biggest fan of ads. So when one of our instructors for Satellite Bootcamp said that this week was all about digital marketing, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. Having spent the majority of my life believing “Ads are bad and you should feel bad for making them,” trying to take on the role of a marketer felt deeply uncomfortable. And not only were we tasked with advertising, we were tasked with social media advertising.
Over the past three years, I’ve made five Instagram posts (none after the first three months), I’ve had two permanent profile pictures on Facebook, and at the moment I have a grand total of zero snapstreaks. The last time I made a tweet was for a classroom activity in 10th grade. I’d consider myself more of an antisocial media user than anything else. And it’s not hard to explain why; frankly you already know. Every day there’s some new article about how Facebook causes depression or how Instagram causes depression or how Snapchat is actually ok for you. Kidding, it also causes depression. I don’t think I’m being too controversial when I say that staying away from social media is generally a good idea.
That said, you can’t dismiss the massive reach and influence that social media has. With over 2 billion users, Facebook is bigger than every country in the world and most major religions. A bunch of people check a bunch of apps a bunch of times every single day, which means a lot of opportunities for marketers to get the word out and onto people’s phones. Whether I like it or not, if I wanna get a message noticed by a lot of people fast, I need to learn how to use social media effectively.
Our challenge was to build the largest, most engaged audience on three channels: Facebook, Instagram, and email. My team was advertising our own original app concept: FoodE. To put it simply, “It’s like Tinder but with food.” The idea is that you swipe right on pictures of food you like and swipe left on pictures of food you don’t like and the app will recommend you a place to eat at based on your swipes.
I set up a Facebook page, Instagram account, and MailChimp (email newsletter tool) account for us to use. On Facebook, we posted pictures of delicious-looking food (a proven recipe for success on many social media platforms) from various local restaurants at peak traffic hours, mostly around lunch and dinner time when people check their phones a lot. Our goal was to give people a taste of what FoodE had to offer by spotlighting different restaurants and, of course, providing a stream of delectable snapshots of food.
Our Instagram strategy involved a similar strategy, but with two additional caveats. First, we offered to “follow back” any accounts that followed our account. Secondly, we added a bunch of food-related hashtags to help our posts get found in searches. These strategies proved to be very effective, and our Instagram account ended up seeing the most success out of the three channels we used.
Finally, our email strategy involved the use of more longform content in order to provide additional information about FoodE and the goal/mission of our app. As email newsletters aren’t nearly as popular with younger audiences nowadays, we figured that those that subscribed were the customers that were most invested in FoodE and wanted something more than the surface-level content available on Facebook and Instagram. We promoted our newsletter through the Facebook and Instagram and managed to deliver two emails before the end of the week.
Now, I have to admit I still don’t like ads. If FoodE were a real company, I wouldn’t follow their Facebook or their Instagram, and I definitely wouldn’t sign up to get emails from them. But I’m starting to develop a slightly different mindset about them. The fact of the matter is good things don’t get popular just by being good. If you want people to know about a product or service you’re providing, no matter how amazing it is you’re going to have to put in some effort towards getting the word out to the people who should know about it. Advertising isn’t just an endless sea of spam; it’s about communicating with an audience and helping them find what they’re looking for.
Except Spotify. Spotify ads are just about torturing people.
