“And,” not “or”
On our industry-wide obsession with death.
I think death is overrated in the advertising and technology industries.
Recently I was talking with a friend about Ello and found myself going back a few years, when Google+ came along and it was going to be the Facebook killer, the wannabe who could never win, the great new world, the ghost town, an example of a great new model of how you can do marketing and everything else in-between. Everyone had an opinion.
History has spoken since.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the future of Ello. I don’t know if it’s the beginning of the end for Facebook. I just know and abide by the facts. I’m no futurist. I think futurists are often full of shit (even though some have a striking record of good guesses). But I know this conversation keeps happening over and over again.
As an industry, we’re obsessed with things dying, especially when it fulfills an agenda. The funny thing is: stick around long enough and you begin to see patterns. Advertising is a flat circle. So are social networks.
We live in an “and”, not “or” world. It’s no wonder that when you think about a brand’s presence on social media, you can see variations of a core message, but the core message stays untouched (if properly done of course). New things don’t trump the old things as much as they complement them.
“Or” is often the result of conflicting agendas from “passionate innovators” and “chief disruptive officers” or whatever they call it these days. He who proclaims the death of a platform often has an interest in the other side of the equation. At the very least, an interest in all the money that goes to that platform.
That’s why the “experts” say TV is dead, regardless of all the data pointing otherwise. And why traditional ad men (the bad ones) don’t get Twitter. Well guess what: you have many examples of companies doing terrific TV ads, and many examples of companies doing terrific Twitter campaigns and community management.
Quite often it’s even the same brand bossing it on both those ends (and many more)! Not a paradox of course, because a brand is the combination of thousands of consistent interactions over time. In brand talk, “or” plays no role if it’s arbitrary, hence the importance of strategy: making choices based on available resources and goals. Not based on shady agendas.
