All's not well in Moment-Marketing-Ville!

It started right from the time social media started getting popular with brands. Even back in 2014, most of the briefs we’d receive from brands would say, “We want to be Amul of our category”. We’ve all loved Amul advertising for a long time, but before social media, brands could not really afford to make multiple ads on topical content with the kind of media monies involved. And here was social media, ready for brands to post content every hour. And no one wanted to miss the bandwagon.

Over the years, it kept getting worse. Moment Marketing was now divided into:

- Special Days: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day to Tell Your Plant a Poetry Day – there are as many as 5-6 Days every single day

- Topical News: Sports, Movies, and success of the National level, any popular platform going down, any news which is not political or religious

- The so-called “Trending Format”, a template that goes popular. If you do ______, you get _______ - which brands fill up with their category and brand name most of the time. Memes fall somewhere in this bucket too.

Now the issue is, that at first, it does look very convenient. Instead of thinking through a long-term strategy for a brand – what will its content strategy stand for, what will it drive, how will it impact the brand – here was a chance to create content for brands every single day. A&M media gave fans to the fire by featuring the best posts which made way to our month-end presentations as “Earned Media” –Impressive Stuff!

Here’s where the problem began:

- Soon enough, Topical News and Trending Formats became a critical part of the entire digital strategy. Which meant a huge lot of unplanned work. Lots of late evening, weekend stress often resulted in sub-par work because “timing” is far more important than “quality” in this case. You are the 8th brand to do this format? The media has already published the posts and you missed your opportunity.

- Most of the time, there is a huge brand-topic mismatch. The fit-in is usually done by quirky wordplay, or smart creatives and the audiences love it. Do they remember the brand when they have a product need? We don't know.

- It diluted the overall communication by the brand to quite an extent. A brand film where you see a serious issue being taken up, which people love. Followed by “Pawrrii Ho Rahi hai”, which also people love. But what is the audience perceiving of the brand? A brand that does great content. And? Maybe we need to think through.

- Some brands are fanatic about this. Way too much. They behave like ”Oh I didn’t make a post for Friendship Day - now why will people use my toothpaste?”. This obsession has got as viral as the trending posts.

I am not saying brands should not do moment marketing at all. I also admit that I have also been an active part of the madness myself. But we definitely need to get saner about it.

Here’s what I think:

- Brands & Agencies must define what role moment marketing will play for them in their overall content strategy and not the other way round.

- We all need to be far more aware of the IPRs when using logos and images. Right now, we pass it off as “Celebrations”, but deep down, we know it isn’t right to use someone’s pictures and logos just like that, for getting attention to our brand.

- Content & Creative people really need to step up the benchmarks for themselves before they share any topical posts.

Bonus Point: A lot of discussions on how Amul uses the topical trend without getting into legal issues? 1. They smartly play with illustrations, wordplays, without using actual imagery. Just giving enough hints to let us know what they are referring to. 2. Legend brand.

That’s my PoV. I hope I was able to make this Moment Marketing post on time :D