Always relevant: social’s untapped commercial stream
if “always on” is dead then “always relevant” should be the new norm for brands, writes Red Engine’s Paul Isbell.
‘Always on’ was once considered best practice for all social engagement while today – unless you’re Gary Vee – it is considered a dirty word, well, dirty phrase. The mantra from Facebook was fly the flag of “fewer, bigger, better” that is, fewer assets, bigger creative and better reach.
Because why should you create multiple assets that aren’t reaching a tenth of the optimal audience you should be reaching – that’s about 70% by the way – with your brand and affinity tailored social assets?
For marketers this meant throwing the content calendars (with a fixed number of assets) out of the window and either creating less assets or (for the more savvy) integrating social into big brand bursts or campaigns throughout the year to deliver increased ad recall and frequency of message.
Well said!
Great read! On the money!
This is a good piece, although a lot of the digital ad ecosystem places too much emphasis on co-incidental actions. This is a technical issue at the moment more than a principled one.
E.g loads of people have ‘liked’ pages or watched 3 seconds of video and are targeted on that basis, even though it had no long term impact on their behaviour.
Worth thinking about.
Spot on Henry.
There are a lot of emperors out there, and not enough clothes.
Neither of you are wrong, but I find it interesting how much of a different standard digital advertising is held to.
Blast an irrelevant message to 000’s via ATL and nobody blinks an eye. Target the same message to someone who’s at least shown the modicum of interest in your brand to watch 3 seconds of a previous spot and the emperor’s out for a stroll.
I don’t disagree with you Dave.
But digital media formats are generally less effective than OOH / TV in particular.
Plus a lot of OOH / TV tends to be more contextual (OOH to location and TV ads tend to try and align to shows that have some context to their audiences).
I agree it’s not perfect, but compare the formats and looking at the research tends to show that… so your trade-off is to improve efficacy through data. Challenge is a lot of that data doesn’t make for effective marketing.
No perfect answers, unfortunately!