Contract with the consumer.
For most of the last century, marketing was an underwriter of content. Brand marketing was predicated on a ‘contract with the consumer’. The contract essentially went like this:
The content you are consuming is underwritten by this ad.”
Newspapers, magazines, over the air TV and radio, it was all underwritten by ads. The bigger the crowd the content amassed; the more brands paid to pitch the assembled mass.
Media departments in agencies used to get pilots and try and predict hits. Some brands turn to live sports, with the pinnacle being the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl draws an audience, ads entertain and inform.
There’s still validity in this model. The obvious issue is that content creators are having a harder time amassing the mass market in one place. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, podcasts.
Newspapers struggle because they messed up their part of the contract. They gave people content for free in one place while charging for the same content in another place. And even though the fee was less than a dollar, free is significantly less than a dollar. News is free in many places on the Internet, and paywalled in other places. Leading to a weird world where news costs money and conspiracy theories are free.
Branded social platforms all lack that content contract.
Is that bad?
For an answer, consider direct marketing. It has always been a marketing tactic that skips the contract.
Direct marketing comes from seller to buyer via mail, phone calls or e-mail, skipping the content creators.
Postal mail is junk mail. E-mail is Spam. And telemarketing has do not call lists. People appear to hate things that skip content. We don’t call that show ad that follows us around the internet a Spam Ad, even though it feels sort of creepy. We are aware that the shoe ad makes Facebook free.
So this notion of skipping the content provider to go right to the consumer clearly agitates people. Maybe the simple answer is that consumers are aware they are getting nothing out of being pitched?
In the digital world, we continue to struggle to figure out ways to write a new contract.
Social platforms are exhibit A for the so-called new marketing. The organic Facebook Page doesn’t underwrite Facebook. The school YouTube channel doesn’t make YouTube free. The Twitter feed doesn’t underwrite Twitter.
Organic social doesn’t bring anything of value to the follower. Following a feed on your favorite social channel still might be an identity status cast: we follow our undergrad schools, well-known brands, politicians because the brand we follow say something about us.
However, like the website before it, which also had no contract with the consumer, social media needs to ask: what’s in it for the consumer in a way that wasn’t required of traditional advertising?
I don’t have the answers. I do have a lot of questions. Marketing on digital platforms isn’t exactly like direct marketing and it isn’t exactly like doing a 30-second spot. It is both and neither.
What do you think?
