Speech to SMBMSP #16: The Impact of Social Media on Advertising and Marketing

Here’s the text of the speech I gave Friday, June 25, 2009 at Social Media Breakfast #16. It was a lot of fun speaking to such a receptive (huge!) crowd. And the bacon was tasty. MNHeadhunter wrote a nice recap here; and you can see more photos from PartnerUp here.

1. Intro.

Thanks to Rick Mahn, Social Media Breakfast, Deluxe Corporation and PartnerUp for hosting this morning’s event. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s been tweeting and promoting this morning's talk. It’s a thrill and honor to be here with all of you.

Before I begin, I want to take a moment to talk about our community.

I’ve been involved with the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association since moving back to the Twin Cities three years ago. I’ve attended AdFed events, UnSummit—and I’m proud to make this my very first Social Media Breakfast. 

Now, I’ve lived and worked in St. Louis, Boston, and New York. And in each city I’ve participated in local events—but none of these cities even begins to compare to the Twin Cities community.

Take a look around—look at the events calendars. By my estimate, there’s some kind of event for marketers, creatives, strategists, technologists—something for everyone—roughly every four days around here. Incredible!

And it’s not just the volume of events. The fact is, our community shows up. We represent. It’s impressive to see the community come together and support all of these events, to support Social Media Breakfast.

I think it’s also proof of the depth of talent working here in the Twin Cities. We’ve got world-class writers, designers, strategists, developers, producers—working here.

So thank you. It’s an honor to live and work in such a strong community

2. Some History

Okay. So this is where I grew up. I’m from Golden Valley. I graduated from Minnehaha Academy in 1985; went to school in Eau Claire, Wisconsin for a few years but ended up graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in Jazz Studies.

Then I got into advertising.

That’s how it works, apparently. Most advertising is brought to you by people who studied things like Jazz. (Imagine if engineering or medicine worked that way. Well, maybe not.)

So I started my ad career in late 1992 here in the Twin Cities—with many thanks to mentors like the great Bill Miller at Fallon McElligott. Bill’s the guy who told me, “The business of creativity is learning to survive rejection.” Sage advice. I did an internship at Martin/Williams; and then ended up moving to St. Louis for my first full-time gig as a Copywriter at TBWA.

I began doing retail ads for banks and products. Did a lot of radio. Got into doing TV commercials. It was a pretty typical advertising career—and I’m telling you this because I think it’s important to understand the history of advertising and the decades of culture that have evolved between clients and agencies, within creative departments, inside agencies themselves—before we talk about any potential impact social media might be having.

Truth is, advertising is very insular. We keep to ourselves. We’ve been very interested in being sole creators of brand ideas. That’s what you pay us for: The big idea (and the myriad executions of that idea). But there’s something in the air—mutation Is sprouting.

So around 1994-1995 Al Gore invented the Internet. Right? That’s about when it happened? And like a lot of curious people I started to code HTML. Built my first website in 1995. And continued to work in advertising.

A few years later I started working on Volkswagen’s “Drivers wanted” campaign at Arnold Worldwide. I worked on that campaign for nine years. And part of the responsibilities included helping figure out how this whole Interactive thing should be integrated with Design, Direct Mail, Events and—careful!—Brand Advertising. (At one point, I remember this art director asking me if I was a Writer or an Interactive Writer. This is the same fellow who recently asked to connect with me on LinkedIn.)

So one of the first true impacts of social media on advertising really happened before social media, and I’m talking about the Internet. I’m talking about interactive technologies.

In many ways, that’s really what we ought to be talking about this morning.

The Internet is the true transformational presence. Social media is merely the latest iteration, and in many ways the most useful—the easiest, thus far, to wrap your head around, if you’re in advertising.

So back in 1998, 99, early 2000 we saw a sudden and difficult transformation start to take place. A revolution of sorts. And it’s still brewing, still making advertising people uncomfortable, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Now, if you were working in an advertising agency, like I was—back in 98, 99—you witnessed a lot of fear and confusion about the role of advertising, the purpose of advertising and thus the role and purpose of the people working in advertising. In other words, you saw a lot of people suddenly facing career mortality, or at least that’s what they thought.

Fundamentally, one ofthe biggest impacts we’re seeing now—and social media is merely the current act, the current chapter—is a redefinition of Advertising itself. What is advertising?

I teach a course at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) called “The Future ofAdvertising,” and for the past two years I’ve had the pleasure of wrestling with this question—“what is advertising?”

I’ve also had the good fortune of running my own advertising agency, Hello Viking, which has provided other opportunities to try and figure this out.

What is advertising?

Good question. I’m not sure the definition of advertising will radically change—because business still needs to persuade us humans. Instead, I think the definition will get much richer and more detailed.

Advertising, which really is a subset of Marketing, is not dead. It’s not going away. TV commercials still make a lot of sense. Print, maybe less so. But the basic principles—of communicating with an audience about a brand—are still vital, still necessary.

3. Key Themes

I wrote a post about this morning’s speech on my blog, Useful Lunacy. If you Google those two words, Useful Lunacy, you’ll find it. We also recorded the preview podcast for this event. And in both locations I outlined a few key points which I thought made sense. But I’ve found time to explore, so here’s a revised overview of what I’d like to say about the impact of social media on marketing and advertising. Six key points:

a) Advertising is not dead. Social Media’s keeping it alive.

b) We’re MoreLikely To Seek The Truth.

c) The Individual Rules.

d) Everyone's An Expert. Even You.Especially your customers.

e) What Isn't Advertising Today?

f) The future’s about Creative Curation, not Creative Direction

Though I should admit my favorite piece of advice on this morning’s speech came via a Facebook comment from my former co-worker Paul Schauder, he said, “You shouldn't even show up. Just send in a constant stream of tweets.”

So to begin—I think social media's impact on marketing and advertising is a bit like the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from the movie Kill Bill. The blow has been struck. The industry's still walking around, still coherent—but for how much longer?

Well, maybe the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique isn’t the right metaphor. Maybe we should be talking about The Kiss Of Life.

4. Advertising is not dead. Social Media’s keeping it alive.

Advertising, especially direct response, is really about building relationships. It’s about generating conversation. People who advertise want the rest of us to talk about them, their products and services, to talk about the ads. You still need ads to spread the word. If fewer people know your brand exists—despite loving your brand, despite interacting with it—you'll gradually go out of business.

So interactive technology and social media have done a lot to improve relationships between brands and their customers, to help raise metrics scores like “I would recommend Brand X to a friend” and “Brand X is easy to do business with.” The evolution of User Experience, and Information Architecture have gone a long way towards improving advertising—because these improvements have insisted on the primacy of the consumer, over the primacy of the brand. Or at the very least, it’s about creating a level playing field where we can talk with each other, versus one at the other.

Social media strengthens relationships and enables understanding. Social media’s made it easier for advertising and marketing to accept the new responsibilities made possible by interactive technology.

Advertising lets you know there's a relationship worth pursuing—that you might enjoy a relationship with Brand X.

Social media can pick up the ball and build that relationship.

And the fact is, SocialMedia needs traditional advertising. Data I've seen clearly demonstrates that awareness of a brand through advertising significantly improves peoples' perceptions of that brand’s social media efforts. In other words, social media alone is nice—but advertising on top can really improve the perceived value of social media.

5. Because of SocialMedia: We’re More Likely To Seek The Truth.

Another keen impact of social media on the marketing and advertising industry is transparency of information. It started with the Internet—information wants to be free, right? Well, social media’s poured gas on that fire, and helped skake up rigid, bureaucratic, inefficient systems and practices. Even in advertising.

I can learn more, now, in a few minutes about how a brand’s doing just by asking my friends on Twitter, than I would have hoped to, using the available tools in 1999. Social media’s made it very acceptable to insist the data be made available—about everything: Budget levels, click-through-rates, KPIs, salaries, you name it.

It’s foolish now to imagine you or your brand can hide the facts or the data from the crowd. Advertising used to be addicted to pulling the wool, and the paragraphs of tiny legal type, over our eyes. It’s even more rapidly become a very unhealthy addiction.

Social media has, thank god, made it abundantly clear that consumers know as much if not more about the facts of the case. And they’re more than willing to share what they’ve uncovered.

On the other hand, social media’s made research that much faster and that much more available to the broader agency team. Copywriters and art directors don’t have to wait for months of planning to gain insights anymore.

And maybe this is more of a sidebar topic—but simultaneous to the cultural and philosophical impact of Social Media—we’re also seeing the impact of Data on the marketing and advertising industries.

So we’re having much more informed, less secret discussions now within ad agencies about the facts of the case. We’re more empowered to make better advertising, thanks to social media.

6. Because of Social Media: The Individual Rules.

What we’re really talking about here, of course, is the rise of the individual.

Social media’s opening the door, allowing one person to stick out as one person, to request greater personal relevancy. The Internet started the process. Now Social Media’s opening up avenues of expression, opening up opportunities to define yourself as a unique person to robots and software of all shapes and sizes.

In other words, you are no longer just a Demographic. If you want to market to me, to Tim Brunelle, successfully today, you best have done your homework via all of the data I’m willing to share within social circles.

So in that sense, social media's made it harder—demanding marketers market and advertise individual by individual. Don't craft one message for all people. Write to me, and only me.

This is significant.

Prior to this point, only direct mail offered anything close to this level of knowledgeable communication. But look now at Volkswagen's efforts on Facebook. It makes perfect sense—especially since I worked on Volkswagen for years and we would have killed for this volume of insight—but here we have consumers freely providing volumes more data about themselves than they’d ever dream of revealing to vw.com. Facebook makes it easier to be marketed to as an individual, and to market to individuals. I’m not saying Facebook is perfect. Certainly not. But the ecosystem is a vast improvement for those of us who prefer to receive more relevant advertising and theoretically less crap.

Here’s an insight on this topic of the individual from the good people at Zappos. I got this article from ZDNet. Anyway, the article says, “Therein lies the return on the social business that Zappos has become: Show the company is made up of individuals. Happy individuals. Be a company full of people you’d like to get to know, explains Tony Hsieh, their CEO. (Because) somewhere down the road, when you are ready tobuy something, hopefully you’ll call (Zappos) first.”

So on the one hand, social media’s ruptured the old “one too many” media model and insists marketers address each of us as distinct individuals. But on the other hand, social media’s empowered corporations. The piece I just read on Zappos also states,“The goal (at Zappos) is to create 1,400 spokespeople for the company, online–and off.”

Another way to look at this is in the area of expertise.

7. Because of SocialMedia: Everyone’s An Expert. Even You. Especially your customers.

Perhaps the greatest impact social medias (and really, inter-active technologies) are having on marketing and advertising are an unstoppable leveling of the playing field. In a word: empowerment.

I don’t mean “I get to be me!” This is more profound than the simple individualism I just spoke about.

This is about what the individuals talk about. This is about content.

Social media—through embedding and sharing technologies, mixed with inexpensive production tools and free data storage, have empowered a revolution in content creation.

We used to be divided into two camps. The bigger one was the audience—the inert and “captive”audience. The smaller camp, the brands and their agencies, spoke to the larger audience. One way. One message.

Social media’s changed all that.

Voices are now emerging inside brands with distinct, compelling stories that an ad, PR or design firm would never have imagined; and frankly, never would have imagined or would have captured authentically.

Outside corporate walls, the efforts of enthusiastic, knowledgable fans often eclipse the highly-compensated efforts of industry professionals—perhaps not in GRPs, but in respect.

Social media’s made it okay to speak up. Everyone's welcome. Everyone's creative—because the tools and the infrastructure exist to say so.

In essence, the impact here is to the collective ego.

Marketers and advertisers used to merely compete with themselves. Now the whole world has the opportunity to step up and share their ideas about budgeting, strategy, ideas, media—the whole ball of wax that used to be sacrosanct. This doesn’t guarantee that the great unwashed will, in-fact step up, or that what they produce is any good or effective.

But the simple fact that you can now, as an individual, be heard on your own terms on equal footing with a brand in a venue like YouTube is unprecedented.

We’re blurring the lines.

We’re rewriting the job descriptions on the fly.

Because Social Media’s empowered the expert in all of us.

Which leads me to my last point before I wrap this up.

If social media has empowered the individual on a practical level, and has made us all potential experts, it begs a question:

8. What Isn’t Advertising Today?

I think Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones has been carrying this flag forward better than anyone. In this new era of empowerment—of access and transparency, almost every aspect of a business can be construed as an aspect of marketing. Just look at Zappos to see how operations (e.g. Customer Service, Distribution, Product Development, HR) now act as forces of marketing and advertising. Every employee at Zappos is in marketing, in some fashion. The Internet in general, and social media specifically, has transformed formerly non-marketing, non-advertising aspects of business into vehicles and venues for communications—and not just outbound, but conversational interactions.

Social media means there are more cooks in the marketing kitchen. More talent. More to talk about, too. More opportunity for everyone. Yes, it’s a threat to the sanctity of creativeand the primacy of paid media. C’est la vie.

The challenge is to craft a compelling vision for all these new troops, to help keep the brand’s legions on message.

So here’s my final point. I think a future for social media in regards to marketing and advertising is nurturing the idea that …

9. The future’s about Creative Curation, not Creative Direction

We hosted Scott Thomas, aka SimpleScott, at a MIMA educational event last week. Scott was the Design Director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign—no small task.

It was a great presentation on so many levels. One of which was the role of social media within the broader mix of marketing done by the Obama campaign. As Scott put it, social media had a transformational effect on many aspects of Obama’s marketing—the new realities forced a lot of change to processes and long held beliefs about political advertising.

But they didn’t lose sight of the fact that they were advertising.

Phil Wilson from MinnPost wrote a great recap of SimpleScott’s presentation—I quote, “Great attention was paid (by the Obama marketing team) to delivering what Scott termed the ‘core of the brand; Deliver a clear and concise message focused on“We” rather than “Me.”’

Let me repeat that.“Great attention was paid to delivering the ‘core of the brand.’”

Sounds like typical advertising to me. What’s our singular, core message? What’s the big idea?

With social media in the mix, I’m seeing one aspect of creative leadership evolving—from strictly directing (meaning enforcing) brand messaging—to a more collaborative curation.

Less Creative Direction. More Creative Curation.

That’s what we saw come to life during the Obama campaign. We saw evidence of the role of the ad agency changing—to a position of providing tools, inspiration and guidance that unites the crowds wherever possible.

That, to me, ought to bethe result of social media’s impact on marketing and advertising. To inspire, enable, nurture and facilitate more relevant, more authentic and hopefully more effective communications.

Thank you very much.