The End of the Affair
Musings on why we might be entering a ‘post social’ age
As I sat at my desk at home this weekend mulling over a response for Gareth Kay’s latest Account Planning School of the Web assignment, it occurred to me that the communications industry may be at, or at least approaching, a decisive turning point.
The assignment focusses on Kiehl’s, and a hypothetical challenge to re-energise sales that are slowing. The imaginary brief asks you, as an account planner, to put forward a recommendation for how the CMO should allocate a marketing budget to address this problem – and crucially, whether they should abandon their previous approach focussing on sampling and below the line communication, in favour of an above the line media and communications approach.
Whilst now is not the time to get into it, my response was yes, of course they should. They should probably spend a load of money on telly.
At the risk of attempting to appear an iconoclast, or perhaps more worryingly, at the risk of coining an utterly meaningless phrase or buzzword – I wondered if we’re entering a sort of ‘post social age’, an age characterised by a decidedly different attitude toward social than we’ve had to date. The significant disclaimer being that this is a working title – something to pin an idea or thought to in the short term, no more, so from you I beg forgiveness, temporarily at least.
To lend context, it would probably be helpful for me to say that when I started in the industry, in 2006, communications industry was undergoing a period of significant change – with the landscape changing quickly - this ‘thing’ called social was just starting to gain traction. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, published at the turn of the millennium, had been read and digested by everyone from agency CEOs to the cleaning lady. Not a meeting would pass without mention of ‘influencers’, mavens and ‘peer to peer recommendation’. In an unprecedented move, agency Holler and UK broadcaster Channel4 (disclosure – my employer), would successfully launch youth drama Skins on social network Myspace rather than a traditional TV channel.
Slightly later, in 2008, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody would offer a world view of a mobilised population, prepared to use the economics of web 2.0 to organise themselves and circumvent normal market dynamics. Groundswell; by Forrester Research execs Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff and published in the same year; would offer perhaps a slightly less radical view that was more palatable to business, but its argument was essentially the same. On the one hand, it was a warning. Start listening to your customer (there is something inherently odd about having to remind a marketing department of this), for now they are better equipped and better connected and more vocal than ever before, and if you piss them off it’ll cost you dearly.
On the other, this represented an opportunity to businesses and their marketing departments. The opportunity to not just listen to your customers, but to actually start working and collaborating with them. An opportunity to welcome customers and potential customers into the organisation, as you would a colleague perhaps. An opportunity to devolve power to them – make advocates of them, and in some ways, outsource the work of the marketing department to them. Cluetrain’s 74th thesis declared this new generation “immune to advertising”. Its opening thesis assured the reader that “Markets are conversations”.
Encouraged by soaring using numbers and the doom-mongering of leading members of the digerati and the words of Cluetrain and Levine et al ringing in their ears, some companies began to undertake a whole sale shift of their marketing and channel strategy, moving money out of traditional ‘ineffective’ marketing and communication channels in favour of these new, shiny, social channels. Simultaneously, the lexicon of marketing began changing too; it began to include words such as engagement, community, fans, influence, share, seed, love, and conversation. An eco-system of specialist consultancies and technology providers sprang up to offer services and advice to advertisers, whilst so called “traditional agencies” resourced this new area more slowly.
By the end of the decade, we’d seen the rise of Myspace as a brave new media frontier and it’s subsequent fall as News International colony. Wikipedia had put the printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business and we’d witnessed the digital world where everyone was connected and seemingly participating in a ‘conversation’ – brands included – grow from a dream to a fully formed reality. We entered a golden age of socially driven this and socially driven that, a utopian state where almost any problem could be solved by a blogger outreach program or a getting just a few more likes.
In the same time frame, roughly 10 years or so, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from being an anonymous and nerdy computer science student coding in his bedroom to a billionaire impresario attempting to use his wealth to shape US national policy. Whilst his fortune may show just how much advertisers and brands now trust Facebook and how much they are willing spend their advertising dollars on the platform, it also highlights the social network’s, and indeed social medias, biggest problem.
Post stock market flotation, Facebook tinkering with Edgerank, the formula that governs how content is served to users, has become not only more frequent, but also more public. Like many modern software companies, this iterative approach is sold to the outside world as being done with the user in mind. Ensuring the user gets what they want and the content that is most relevant to them.
After several substantial changes were made to the algorithm the level of reach for organic activity by brands on Facebook plummeted. Outrage ensued. Was Facebook trying to squeeze more money out of its advertisers to satisfy it’s new shareholders desire for constant returns? Probably. The launch of ‘sponsored stories’ and ‘page posts’ did little to calm people. These formats were ‘native’ ads, the tech industries latest obsession; advertising masquerading as content in the context of regular Facebook user experience. They essentially allowed advertisers to replace the organic reach they would have received for free before the changes to the algorithm with paid for impressions and reach.
More worryingly, for those willing to question it, the data offers a slightly different story. Read another way, the data suggests people don’t want to engage with brands on Facebook. The Algorithm works perfectly. It acts as a filter for stuff the user doesn't care about. The Social Media utopia wasn't perhaps as Utopian as we had been led to believe.
The need to satisfy shareholders first, rather than people taking part in the ‘conversation’ on it’s platforms (brands included) has changed the service that was the archetypal digital social network into something else, something altogether more familiar and less inspiring, a traditional display-advertising network. Shirky’s new economic model of a hyper connected population was accurate – people would use these tools to connect and communicate with each other, but somehow brands are slightly at odds with it. Brands being the equivalent of the fat kid who was last to be picked at football or the acne-ridden teenager left sipping coca cola on the sidelines of the school disco.
Facebook’s changing algorithm is not the first piece of evidence that the social, interactive and communal model of brand building may be flawed, though it may be amongst the most compelling.
Over the last year or so there has been a cascade of information and writing which may undermine this approach to communications. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for instance. In this work we meet the two sections of the human brain, the fast, intuitive System1 and the slower, lazier more deliberate System 2. We also see how they divide up the work, process wise. Whilst the algorithm may show that people don’t care about brands like they care about someone like their best friend for instance, brands have traditionally been great at helping us simplify choice. Brands therefore, as a heuristic or mental shortcut, are the province of the automatic, instinctive System 1. Therefore, it could be argued, the best brands may be the ones we think about the least, not the ones we have the most conscious relationship with.
Then there is Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, a provocative piece of work, written by an equally provocative author. Amongst other things, Sharp uses empirical data to show that the key to brand growth is the recruitment of light or non-buyers of your products, not an increase in frequency amongst existing users. This demonstrates two things, firstly the enduring importance of broadcast media such as Television, but it also further seeks to undermine the community driven approach to brand stewardship that we see so much of on platforms such as Facebook. Approaches that favour strengthening relationships with existing customers over the recruitment of new ones may do little in the long run to drive long-term growth.
It would appear then that the tide is turning away from the view of social media as brand saviour and morphing into something else; a ‘post social’ standpoint. The poster boy for this movement is undoubtedly Wieden and Kennedy’s Martin Wiegel. His recent ‘The Liberation of Magic’ post synthesises much of this thinking along with the reams of scientific work undertaken by people such as Robert Heath, Giep Franzen, Les Binet, Peter Field and Paul Feldwick.
The ever reliable AdContrarian came up with this gem earlier in the week, suggesting that when you’re committed to a big idea, or ideology, things often end in a train wreck. The digitally driven worldview of Shirky, Jarvis and Schmidt which perpetuates the importance of socially driven advertising and business is an ideology. As a result it only allows for one way of doing things, one school of thought, one approach to any problem.
This attitude is a classic example of what Russel Davies highlights as the advertising industry’s “tendency to argue that the arrival of X will cause the total eradication of Y. The Internet will destroy television. Phones will destroy MP3 players…. and forget that the likely scenario will be that everything will be a blurry munge like it was before, with this new element added in”
I am hoping, that this slight sea change signifies that we’re starting to remember that we should be using all the tools at our disposal to deliver effectiveness rather than constantly proclaiming the death of this, and the ascendancy of that. That maybe it’s the quality of our work, not the quality of our tools we should be examining. That social can power TV and Posters, and vice versa - not that it has to replace it.
Social is undoubtedly an amazing development in the media landscape, and our customers and potential customers use these channels as a way of organising and living their lives. The power of our old tools should not be forgotten though, nor should the classic pillars of our trade. We’re clever people after all, we should, as F Scott Fitzgerald said of clever people, be ‘able to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still function’.
