How To Train Your Dragon
Critiquing a presentation by James Whatley for Ogilvy at #SMWLDN.
Today I was drawn into a conversation about why I had openly mocked a particular presentation during Social Media Week. If you’ve seen some of my tweets already you’ll know this was nothing new, nor an isolated incident. So why did I think it worthy of mild ridicule? This I’ll go on to explain. Either way, the presenter was not happy. The presenter was James Whatley who I’m sure many people in the industry will know. He’s been there from the beginning so in my opinion should know better. He’s like one of those soldiers who comes out of the Congo and thinks the war is still going on. Yet, the world has moved on. Usually I don’t pick out individuals, and in this instance I hadn’t, until James queried me as to why I’d tweeted about his presentation without including him personally in the tweet. Thus, we ended up here and I am doing as asked — the critique.
The presentation is entitled ‘A series of provocative statements (and all the dragons that await therein)’. So, with this one you really feel that we’re not going to need a BA in Bullshitting to understand. We’re going to go behind the smoke and mirrors. However, the title is fairly cliché — it’s pretty common to try to stand out at these sorts of events by promising something is shocking… or dead! Even if the content is valid, the title has to be catchy and promise more. Lets jump in to see how provocative these statements really are…
So out of context this doesn’t even make sense. It’s nonsense. Worse, it comes across like an affirmation. This is the danger of sharing a background slide without adding any information on what you actually said (or when a picture is tweeted). Always consider context — that’s a good lesson not just for marketing as a whole.
Worse still, I would say it is impossible to say anything with any meaning using the “____ is the new ____” formula. It’s lazy, overused and ultimately devalues any point you were trying to make.
However, the point trying to be made is simply, ‘please do not call content shared in social media, “Social content”’. Why is that shocking? We’re not learning anything — we’re just being told to stop using one term and then asked to make up a new bit of lingo to replace the word ‘content’. Isn’t that what we were trying to escape in the first place?
I love a bit of marketing speak so I vote for renaming it ‘thought quarks’. Whatley then encourages the crowd to agree to a pact never to use the term. There is mainly silence and nervous shuffling but the notion is sworn in without protest.
This point is frankly void. It’s really saying, “aren’t clients stupid asking for a buzzword!”. Okay, well in that case just educate them better and don’t scoff when the industry itself is guilty of pumping out nonsense phrases. I’ve seen plenty at Social Media Week so it’s no wonder where they get these ideas from?
I would recommend you try to hunt down Steve Sponder’s diagram on ‘Social Currency’ and show that to clients. It’s years old but still an undervalued tool.
It’s true. This one is completely spot on. Couldn’t agree more. So why do I have a problem with it? In the presentation a lot of time is spent going over as to why they are not important. Beckie finally alludes to something with more value… “We need to poke them around a little bit more” because so many campaigns that the industry celebrate actually do not deliver a decent ROI. Woah…
The industry is celebrating campaigns that do not deliver ROI.
Now that is a provocative statement! I wish they had explored this further as there are many questions that pop out of it:
- Have agencies fundamentally made social media worse by selling campaigns that delivered little ROI ?
- Are agencies fundamentally interested in perpetuating this sort of behaviour — not fixing it?
- How can we better monitor campaigns?
These are valuable questions in my opinion. The question of the validity of hashtag usage is relatively quick to answer and dismiss. Again, this statement is more about client management than anything to do with Social Media.
PS Who ever came up with ESPIRIT’S #ImPerfect campaign hashtag is my hero.
I’m still not offended, wowed or stunned. Owning the moment is impossible. Yeah, okay. I’ve actually never come across any client or agency that has demanded they ‘own the moment’. But I get the point — agencies like to create long winded calendars of non-related events and then try to ‘jack’ them with content which loosely links back to their client.
Stop doing that.
At least, stop trying to own moments that aren’t yours to own. It’s actually okay to own a moment if it’s one you helped make.
Here Whatley is questioned about the agency he works for trying to own the moment for clients. Here he says, “yes we are charged with owning the moment” (I think he’s unsure who’s charging who). He then goes on to say he complains about having to do this for his clients before going in to work and doing the thing he complains about. Next he describes how he got his team to make some ‘May The 4th’ content which he describes as ‘not shit’. How about, don’t do it! It’s lazy and pointless — you’re just helping to make Social Media a worse place by clogging it up with instantly forgettable content. Every agency makes their employees do this for their clients. You know it’s wrong — you said it yourself.
Luckily there was some maths thrown in to help me figure out how to do it right…
I don’t think anyone got it but then most people don’t understand E=MC² so I can only presume it’s genius.
I wanted to like this point — I thought there would be some resolution to this self-loathing. However at the end the point is made that actually it’s just the term that is the problem. Please stop using ‘own the moment’ to describe ‘reactive planning’. Reactive planning is in itself oxymoronic.
Again, there was a better statement that could have been made and explored with:
Don’t try to make every unrelated event appear relevant to your business
In essence it devalues what your brand should stand for. If you stand for everything then you stand for nothing. Find what you stand for and try to own that one thing and that one thing only. This should have been the point but it wasn’t.
I’m still not provoked. It’s pretty common knowledge that the portrayal of oneself online is different to real life. I worked at MySpace so I know for example that people look different when their mobile is held aloft over their brightly lit face (I was one of them too eek). It’s not exactly new or unique to social media. People bumped up their CV before they bumped up their LinkedIn. Analogue was no different to Digital. In fact it was probably much easier to lie before Digital come to think of it.
The point is made: “Brands are trying to be humans and humans are trying to be brands”. Yes, this is certainly true. The worst thing is is that people in the industry are telling their clients that their brand has to act like a lad and have “bants” with other brands and users. If every brand acts like this then every brand becomes the same — obvious and annoying. I wish this point had been unpacked a little more.
But if we’re going to pick out ‘terms’ that we shouldn’t be using then ‘audience’ is one of them. It’s again another term I feel is lazy. In modern social platforms a minority of people who once clicked ‘follow’ or ‘like’ will see your content. An even smaller number will engage. When you have an audience — they’re all listening, watching and interested. ‘Audience’ is a bullshit term.
Beckie says at the end ‘You need to know the lies your audience tells you’. Okay, in this there’s something good. Essentially that ‘you need to try to second guess the people you believe to be your consumers’. It’s a wordier but better way of describing her point. This is the essence of what strategy entails — calculated assumptions.
A better statement would have simply been:
You have no audience.
(PS. Stop trying to be my friend).
This is the final statement and the one I said was actually right. Having watched several presentations and numerous comments I have to agree. Every year SMW is the same — nonsense statistics, pointless jargon and regurgitated ideas. This isn’t the worst presentation by a long shot but it can’t be celebrated either.
We are later informed that even though everything is awful it’s okay because everyone in the room is at the ‘bleeding edge’. By bleeding edge I can only presume that members watching the presentation were at the point of self-harm.
The dictionary defines bleeding edge as “the most advanced stage of a technology, art, etc., usually experimental and risky”. I don’t think I need say how far a SMWLDN audience is from the edge — bloody or not. Whatley goes on to say:
“We are laying the foundation and subsequently making it better for the people that come after us. We’re making the world a better place.”
I think I need to start a ‘Humanitarians of Social Media’. The truth is, the foundations were laid long ago. They stand there like the many crumbling structures in Rome. The truth is that Social is a much worse place than it used to be and it’s also a much more difficult medium to market in. I believe we’ve helped make it a worse place and events like SMW help to continue its decline — not elevate it. If we’re not all too jaded by what has happened to the thing we once all believed in so deeply, then we’ll need some sort of reformation.
Thus concludes my critique. Whether you agree or not I honestly don’t mind. Maybe I missed some points or overlooked something. Cool, call me out on it. My goal is not to make anyone feel bad but to help us all actually do a better job. If we’re all honest though:
- Celebrities and the culture that surrounds them ruined Social Media
- Brands don’t have to but often ruin Social Media
- Agencies are invested in the decline of Social Media
- Capitalism always kills Socialism (eventually)
I could write extensively for days about my thoughts on how Social has changed and what I think the future holds. I’ve done this before but it’s hard to get people who have conflicting interests to listen. It’s even harder to tear them away from their screens to think about something deeply for a long time. So we are where we are — when things are ‘awful’ sometimes the only thing left to do is laugh at them.
