Safe Social Brings Safe Results

Have you noticed how bland social media has become? How predictable?

Like the Disneyfication of Times Square, or the tourist lines up Mt. Everest, the rough pioneering days of social media are long since over. Things are prettier, now, and a lot easier to navigate. There's much more consistency across platforms, and marketers can pretty safely assume that a campaign that performs well on Facebook will continue to do well on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and every other network down the line.

But has the pursuit of opening every channel to every user made things, well, boring? Are today's Everest climbers as satisfied as those that preceded them half a century ago?

Today, nearly any audience a brand wants to reach can be found on every social media platform. With rare exceptions, social channels are all looking at close to 80% saturation in the United States. Iowan farmers are gathering on Twitter to learn how to hack their John Deere tractors, and preteen gymnasts are hiring agents to manage their growing Instagram audience as they spring past 100,000 followers. Given enough time and energy, anyone can become an influencer, on any network.

Is your brand trying to sell jewelry made with human hair and can't find an audience that wants to buy? You're not looking hard enough.

All of this has a side effect: homogenization. For savvy users (and brands), Facebook is Instagram is Snapchat is Twitter. The big platforms are all copying each other, riffing on each others' ideas, and building easily-stolen "unique" content forms that inevitably pop up on their competitor's press releases within weeks. Snapchat was an innovative concept (despite Twitter beating them to the punch by a few years) up until their top competitors mimicked their functionality perfectly - Hell, Instagram may actually be doing Stories better than Snapchat did.

This vanilla social landscape is killing off the weird, wild, and punk rock experimentation that drove many of the best social media campaigns over the past eight or nine years. Burger King's 2009 Whopper Sacrifice campaign would probably never happen today. It relied on a unique Facebook feature, making it too limiting and unscalable to be appealing in a corporate environment. There are still amazing social campaigns happening today, but nothing about them is inherently "social." It's brilliant creative, great timing, and smart marketers at work. They could just as easily appear on any platform.

Let's look at a counter-argument.

Lowe's, with New York agency BBDO, is doing awesome stuff on Snapchat. Slideshow-style stories that users tap through to decorate a room, clean snow off a driveway, or play with a simple crafts project.

I love this campaign. But is it really all that inventive? What about this is a truly unique experience? It's not live, it's not personalized, it's just a Snapchat story, like a dozen other big brands are creating. This campaign could live anywhere and be just as successful. The reason it's on Snapchat is simply because Snapchat was super trendy when the campaign was thought up. You enjoy the story while you're actively watching it, and then its over. Maybe you text your husband and tell him to watch it so you can see what you had planned for that kitchen renovation you want to start this weekend.

Burger King's effort was so much more. So much weirder. It's this oddball experience that users talked about a lot, because it was something you could miss out on. If you weren't on Facebook, you didn't get a chance to see it. Period. Like 1950s TV product placement, it was ephemeral, temporary. Something that could only live in the medium it was created for. I can watch videos of that Lowe's campaign any time I want, but I can't ever sacrifice a friend for a free burger again.

There is a long-running concept among creatives that the best ideas come out of the most restricted challenges. Brilliant Facebook campaigns came from agencies that had to make that thing work on Facebook because there was no other choice. Whopper Sacrifice came from a room of people saying "We're stuck with Facebook, and there's not a whole lot this platform can do. What in the hell is here for us to work with?"

Today, every channel does everything. Facebook can replace a major publisher's primary website, including articles, videos, live coverage, Snapchat-style stories, private messaging, automated replies, interactive ad experiences, store fronts, and network-wide analytics. Instagram does 90% of those things. Twitter does 70% of them. LinkedIn does... God only knows what LinkedIn does at this point. There is less reason to innovate, because it is cheaper and more profitable to iterate.

Iteration leads to lazy marketing. Iteration can get you safe, predictable results, but it is never going to break through into unpredictable wins. Unpredictable wins only come from unpredictable campaigns - from brands and marketers that are willing to come up with something completely bonkers and to go sprinting down one of those uncharted Mt. Everest cliffs in search of a view no one has photographed.

The social media landscape has gotten a lot safer for all of us, but let's not use that as an excuse to stop being pioneers.

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These comments reflect the opinions of Tim Howell alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of his employers, partners, peers, or family members. Opinions or advice in this blog should not be taken as direct recommendations or suggestions. Any statistics, information, or metrics provided are linked to referenced source material, and are not sourced from any current or past clients, customers, or related brands.