The Role of Advertising in the Age of Social Media

Pete Davis, managing director of innovative marketing ideas search engine Getmemedia.com urges brand managers not to overlook the role of more traditional advertising in the age of social media.

Simon Carter, the marketing director of Fujitsu’s government arm, was recently quoted in the marketing press as warning that some junior marketers were in danger of becoming lazy and over-using social media – essentially because it was seen as free. (1) Whilst I agree with this in essence, I would also argue that there are other factors at play here.

While few would question that social media is a powerful way of getting your message out to a wide audience at very little cost, and it has an important role to play in the future of the marketing mix, it’s all too easy to get sucked into the numbers and forget some of the basics we’re taught as professional marketers.

Brands can often place an over reliance on “cheap” social media as they get enthralled by the volume of friends and followers they can gather relatively easily through sites like Facebook and Twitter. This can lead them to gloss over other paid-for media channels, which can deliver equally powerful results.

While around half the population of the UK may have Facebook pages, brand managers still cannot be sure how many of these they are engaging with. Social media may, on the face of it, look like a great way of broadcasting personalised and targeted messaging, but this does not necessarily translate to a better quality of message or more engagement than if the same brand were placing an ad in Coronation Street.

Not everybody sees social media as an acceptable channel for advertising, so some of the traditional channels could prove more effective. Coronation Street, for example, can still pull in audiences of nine or 10 million viewers, and the reality is that this is an accepted area for people to engage with advertising. Just because brands see the word friend or follower attached to their consumers it doesn’t make them any more likely to be engaged with what they are doing or saying, and just because people use social media and follow you, it doesn’t mean they read what you’re saying, or are acting upon it.

This can be another key problem area with social media: brands not investing in creating interesting and engaging content for their audience. It may be free to set up, but running it takes time and energy, and if it’s not done well – as any number of recent examples highlight – it can backfire. The power of this channel is that it gives brands the ability to create a dialogue with their consumers that other media doesn’t, but this dialogue needs to be managed and nurtured. And any brand managers that are becoming lazy in their use of social media, are in serious danger of upsetting or alienating their customers.

Social media should make brand managers more vigilant, and the things that we are taught in the classroom about, targeting, tone and creative, about getting the right proposition and the right message are as relevant now as they ever were. A by-product of the rise of social media is that we are now communicating more then ever with our customers, and we need to maintain the quality of that communication if the brands we represent are to thrive and not simple be cast aside. There is no room in marketing for laziness.

(1)  "Cheap social media makes marketers lazy"
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/digital/cheap-social-media-makes-marketers-lazy/3025413.article

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