Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: What Marketers Get Wrong About Social Media

• Inspiration: Salesforce’s “Ask More of AI” Campaign

• Timeless Wisdom: Freud on Freedom and Responsibility

Column: What Marketers Get Wrong About Social Media

Outside of the “big brand world” marketers often look at social media as their silver-bullet medium of choice.

It’s safe and intuitive, even because as marketers we significantly over-index in social media usage relative to regular folks.

We see how we utilize the platforms and how much time we spend on them as a proxy for how our customers use them. And that breaks marketing’s cardinal rule #1: We Are Not The Customer.

But it doesn’t end there. Business pressures push marketers to make decisions that they can measure in real-time. Hence the endless, overwhelming KPI dashboards that so many marketers waste hours every week updating to prove that what they’re doing is working, or to quickly “pivot” and “optimize” initiatives that may have slightly dipped in performance.

Complete nonsense and we are not candidly talking about it.

Vanity Metrics

I’ve seen small business founders and CEOs quite literally request for weekly social media metrics on CTRs, Impressions, Leads, and so on in order to make “informed” decisions about what to continue, improve, and stop the following week.

This sort of hyper-reactive behaviour is quite common in small and medium sized business, who are under the pressure to keep the lights on each month. But this false sense of security by keeping a pulse on every movement in performance goes counter to every evidence-based marketing strategy taught in schools and across the top marketing excellence organizations around the world.

If you’re a brand manager for a top CPG brand, you might be surprised to show up to work on your first day and never once hear about your social channels for the entirety of an year (unless you’re leveraging them as a channel in an integrated campaign).

I’m not saying that engagement metrics are useless — they can give you interesting, albeit unrepresentative, signals about consumer sentiment, product feedback, and emerging communities around your brand.

But these metrics were never meant to direct marketing decisions.

Contrary to what marketers think, people spend quite a lot of (higher attention-quality) time on traditional channels when compared with social media channels.

This obviously has major implications about what it means for how marketers might be currently allocating their brand resources.

Years ago, Nielsen conducted a meta-analysis of over 450 campaigns for which they showed detailed ROI and business results to go along with it.

They found that there was NO CORRELATION between engagement/CTR for campaigns and ROI.

The reason being is actually quite simple but something that we, marketers, don't talk enough about: social platforms are in the business of keeping people's eyeballs on their feeds, meaning whatever silly interaction-forcing “games”, incentivized competitions, and open question polls that do little to build brand perceptions or sell products, typically get prioritized.

However, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever showing that "engaged audiences" actually drive sales or even brand health metrics.

As a matter of fact, when you buy paid social and optimize your campaigns for some sort of "engagement" (such as web traffic, conversion, profile visits, etc.) all the algorithm does is it delivers your content to those "most likely to engage".

And as proven before, there's nothing that says users who engage are the most valuable types of customers. So, chasing them is a bit of an arbitrary strategy. If anything, you're peddling to people whom in all likelihood already appreciate and buy your product/service, instead of appealing to that valuable "long tail" of light buyers who actually drive growth (refer to "How Brands Grow" to understand why).

The reality is that most people never like, comment or share anything on social media, what gives us a skewed perspective about our customers who engage with us on our channels.

Pay-To-Play Reality

One of the great promises of social has been its low-cost to execute.

But when you run the numbers, they don’t quite add up.

Sadly, too many marketers have been lured by the possibilities of their content going “viral” at absolute zero cost. Bonkers.

Every single day the average user has over 10,000 possible posts/news/stories that they could be shown upon login in. The thought that your organic post, even if your handle has a massive amount of followers, will actually cut through and drive any sort of meaningful reach relative to your total market is insanity.

The reality is that most posts that achieve virality status (a definition that will vary by brand size and length of measured time) do so in conjunction with some sort of traditional media push (such as TV, radio, OOH, etc.).

Take the example of the Cheetos’ Statue that went up in Alberta a few years back which garnered an estimated billion+ impressions in a matter of weeks. It only did so because it made it into Jimmy Kimmel Live, which then was picked up by a bunch of other media outlets that kept pushing the story forward.

This was a masterful PR play planned by one of the great marketing organizations in the world (PepsiCo). This isn’t easy, and the size of the brand also played a major role in it being a relevant story to be told by the news channels. If Cheetos was not a well-known brand, this wouldn’t have been newsworthy.

Another key factor in driving organic reach is how engaging the post is — meaning how many people like it, click on it, share it, comment on it, and so on.

As already covered above, since engagement isn’t the best objective for marketers to chase due to its non-existent correlation with business results, such a strategy is made entirely redundant by the disproportional effect that even a tiny amount of paid media can have on a brand’s reach.

And since organic reach typically only involves your existing followers, whom need no convincing to buy from you, not putting dollars behind your social media ends up missing the bulk of light category buyers whom you actually need to appeal to in order to grow.

In other words, if you’re not using paid social and only relying on organic reach you’re not accomplishing much.

Deceptive Numbers, Scale Explained

Some years ago, Oreo cookies garnered a ton of earned media due to its “masterstroke of genius” during the 2013 Super Bowl mid-game blackout.

The Ravens were playing the 49ers in Super Bowl XLVII when suddenly the Superdome lost half of its lights for about 34 minutes.

At this time, Oreo posted a tweet that went “viral”.

This was lauded as one of the great marketing strokes of genius of the decade, with many claiming that Oreo “won the Super Bowl” at no cost.

But when we run the actual numbers, the story isn’t as rosy as it appears on the surface:

• At the time, Oreo Cookie had around 65,000 followers on Twitter;

• Taking the generous CTR average at the time of around 2%, meant that only around 1,300 followers clicked on the link and actually saw the picture (at the time, Twitter didn’t support embedded images, so the tweet was all text with a link);

• But the tweet was also retweeted around 15,000 times, meaning that if the average US user had around 208 followers on Twitter, the tweet ended up reaching around 3M people, out of which only 2% of them clicked on the link and saw the picture (=around 63,000 users);

• When you add it all up, around 64,300 people saw the post.

Not bad, huh?

Well, when you take into account that around 40,000,000 Americans buy Oreos every year, these numbers starts to look REALLY small. Like, 0.2% of the total-target-market-small.

Again, organic reach, even for massive brands, nearly always end up being a rounding error.

How To Approach Social

By now you’re probably left wondering — heck, how the hell do I use social then?

In APG’s book “Eat Your Greens” published back in 2020, Jerry Daykin wrote an entire chapter about the issues I described above. In it, he outlines some great ways to approach this social beast:

1. Brief social media marketing the same way you’d brief traditional approaches: with clear insights, business objectives and a solid understanding of your positioning.

2. Pick your channels based on how they’d best align with your brand positioning and where your customers are likely to be at.

3. Great social media marketing isn’t about deep interactive experiences — it’s about being worthy of attention as opposed to being worthy of a click.

4. Stop creating any content you can’t afford to promote. Put dollars behind what you share in order to achieve meaningful reach.

5. Ignore the temptations of real-time engagement data and focus on what really matters: the business objectives you’ve set out to achieve. Jerry suggests these should typically include Reach (how many of the right people did we reach?), Resonance (did it make them think the right things?), and Reaction (did they ultimately take action and buy from us?).

And there you have it. I highly recommend you to read “Eat Your Greens” as well as Les Binet’s and Sarah Carter’s book titled “How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw it Up”. In these timeless books, a lot of myths are unpacked and broken down with evidence to go along with it.

The harsh reality is that social media platforms work far more like traditional media channels than we're willing to admit as an industry.

Inspiration: Salesforce’s “Ask More of AI” Campaign

For years now Salesforce has been pumping out some of the best B2B advertising in the game.

In a conversation with Fergus O'Carroll on his podcast “On Strategy Showcase”, Kim Baffi (VP, Executive Creative Director at Salesforce) and Darren Brady-Harris (Sr. Director, Global Brand at Salesforce) talk about how their company has taken an approach of “poking fun” at things to stand out among the crowded, hyper-serious B2B world.

Sounds risky and bold for a B2B company, right?

Well, it’s been some of the most effective B2B creative work out there, and in their latest campaign they leveraged Salesforce’s Brand Advisor, Matthew McConaughey (whom is also an advertising professor at the University of Texas, Austin) to poke fun at the “AI Tech Bros” in the “AI Wild West”.

This series of spots are entertaining, get a clear message across (that Salesforce’s AI tools keep your data secure), in a creative and iconic way, filled with Easter Eggs throughout (hint: pay attention at the cheetah pattern “AI Tech Bro” on the last spot - can you recognize who he is?).

Timeless Wisdom: Freud on Freedom and Responsibility

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” — Sigmund Freud

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • An Introduction To Brand Architecture

  • Fostering A Culture Of Creativity In Efficient Times

  • Strategic Thinkers Are Playing A Different Game

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.