20 Jul Country Mouse in the City – My Move From Traditional Advertising
In my short year of experience working at a Social Media Agency I’m learning every day why social media is just as, if not more, important than traditional advertising – the “world” where I worked for over 25 years.
Coming from the traditional advertising industry and moving to the social media scene I felt like a country mouse in the city. I was under the impression that I was doing everything possible to “get the word out” about and spread the message about what our clients had to say to their prospective or existing customers. Day in and day out I’d look at marketing and creative strategies and objectives and plan how to best convey these brands’ messages to a targeted audience. We, in the creative department of Brogan & Partners, the ad agency I worked at, would have to take a marketing budget and figure what could give us our best bang for the buck. Every time we’d start a campaign we’d ask ourselves what medium would reach our target audience the best. Would it be TV and print ads? Would it be billboards and radio spots? How about a combination of all of them? That would be nice – we just rarely had the budgets for all mediums. For years, that would be our arsenal of tools in which to reach our audiences. Now that I’ve been exposed to the tools available in social media I’ve expanded my position on the best way to reach consumers. I’ve learned that it is important to engage the consumer, not only in traditional mediums like television commercials, print ads and billboards but there are many different benefits to engaging these consumers more where they live – on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
People don’t ask for advertising.
There’s no such thing as the commercial-only TV station or the ad-only magazine where people can just sit and peruse product advertisements all day – helping them to ultimately decide to buy one product over another. Advertising pays for the rights to insert itself into a place where you are going to notice it — at least that’s what the ad media planner is hoping for. I think traditional advertising is very important when it’s placed in the right venue or medium, however, traditional advertising isn’t requested by the viewer — it’s pushed on the him – so to speak. Inversely, social media marketing isn’t pushed at viewers it’s pulled in by the viewer. In our president – Jim Tobin’s book, “Social Media is a Cocktail Party”, he explains this in detail.
Traditional marketing + social media = potential success
Every day big companies spend a lot of money on traditional ads then just walked away from the opportunity to follow up on how people reacted to that ad. Perhaps Company A will wait to see if they sell more gizmos after their TV commercial runs versus Company B who runs a social media campaign in conjunction with their advertisement that tells Company B whether or not their messaging has made an impact on anyone.
A great example of advertising that has a this “follow up” or social media component is in this Brisk drink commercial where claymation characters of celebrities hop around on the screen in a high-energy, very entertaining TV spot.
Brisk could have just let the campaign end when the TV commercial ended and hoped that the message inspired people to try their product but instead they extended a social aspect to the campaign by asking people at the end of the commercial to participate in some personal “brisk” storytelling on Brisk’s Facebook page…something that over a half-million people were excited to engage in.
You can even create and share your own self portrait that they call “brisk yourself” which is a bunch of fun.
When people are actively engaged in your product’s message they are more likely to purchase your product and even potentially share how they like your product with a friend. Social gives this happy customer the method in which to do this. This is a dream come true for an advertiser – to have people saying positive things about them on social networks because #1, it’s not coming from the company (people will tend to listen to their friend’s opinions over ads) and #2, its free publicity!
Timing is everything
Another way to think of the difference in traditional advertising and social media marketing is that advertising is banking on the idea that its message will meet you at a place in time when you need that particular product or service. That’s quite a heavy burden to put on that messaging. Social media marketing is different in that it serves up information when the searcher (the consumer) looks for it – and can usually be very focused on messaging because of the narrowed search that consumer just did to find that information online. Traditional advertising, most of the time, is a rehearsed, scripted and pre-planned out message from the company selling the product or service. Some consumers listen and act upon that form of selling. The explosion of companies getting into social media proves that they realize a lot of their costumers are seeking different types of information, via social networks, that is filled with information based on opinions of critics, enthusiasts and other consumers.
Measurement
One last mentionable difference I’ve noticed over the past year is that social media allows a company to monitor up to the minute opinions, thoughts and actions by it’s consumers by watching its social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Traditional advertisers, to find out if people “like them or not” would generally have to wait until the end of a fiscal quarter to discover that people aren’t responding to their messaging and that would be illustrated by lack of sales. Social media allows a company to monitor how people feel about them in real time. In the ad world, when we produced a particular billboard we were always in the dark as to how many people actually reacted to that medium. When we created print ads we hoped that people would take away a memorable message or benefit from that ink on paper then remember that message in the future when they needed a product like that. These mediums can’t give the advertiser the immediate feedback and emotional sentiment data that social media delivers. Social can give the real marketing pulse of a company which is information worth gold.
I hope that I haven’t deterred you from producing a print ad or a television commercial or printing a brochure or sales flyer. If you do need those things you need to call who’s best at that – Brogan & Partners. Those tactics are very important in conveying branded messages and benefits to desired target audiences. They are, however, alone – not the only way to collectively reach your customers. What social media has taught me over the past year is that the best way to reach out to and find customers is to give them a platform in which to FIND YOU.
Let me know of any experiences that you have with advertising or social media where one strategy worked better than the other. I’d love to hear from you.
