Social media and the brand building problem
As brands throw more money into social media advertising – and as Amazon prepares to up its marketing game – what impact is this having on longer-term brand building?
This was a question thrown at senior marketers by a Unilever boss last week during a debate hosted by Mediatel and 4C into social media advertising strategies.
“Are we forgetting to build brands?” Richard Brooke, the FMCG brand’s media operations and strategy director, wanted to know.
“Are we going too far down the performance route? Does brand building just not matter any more?”
With Amazon using its clout as a data-led business to muscle deeper into the advertising market, one marketer warned that we can expect, at least for now, to see more performance-based and short-term strategies.
“Amazon is quite anti-brand building with its current offering,” said Matt Whitehead, partner manager, ads API at Pinterest. So advertisers might expect things to tip further towards the performance and activation side.
“Brand building will remain, but the way we measure it will change,” Whitehead said, adding that with the rise of direct-to-consumer businesses – such as The Mattress Company, Bonobos and Everlane – businesses are treating brand as performance.
“The two are coming closer together,” he said.
Whitehead
Meanwhile, Carolina Boeri, VP, media and performance marketing, Beamly – Coty Inc, said her business structured its beauty brands around audience, which makes the split between the long and short-term much more flexible.
“Rimmel is aimed at young women, so we’re following them to whichever platforms they use, which happens to be online,” Boeri said.
“Max Factor, meanwhile, is aimed at 35-plus women and we know that audience is not likely to be on Snapchat.”
Boeri said that she was keen to commit to the classic 60/40 spend between brand building and short-term sales activation marketing, but that it was a rule that needed to change depending on each brand.
Storrar (left) and Boeri
The rise of social media as a major marketing channel has therefore led agencies such as GroupM’s Essence to look for a more nuanced and less binary approach as the market has matured.
“The concept of instant gratification making its way into advertising makes things incredibly difficult,” said Ryan Storrar, SVP head of media activation, EMEA, Essence.
“It works on a campaign by campaign basis, but in the long-run can appear very short-sighted. Having a strong brand position matters and makes a big difference. But right now there is a very big challenge to quantify that.”
Storrar said the current position for most of the industry was to take too much of a “binary” approach.
“However, where there is an opportunity for us, as an industry, is in the measurement space. We want to be quantifying performance value of a brand campaign and the brand value of a performance campaign.”
Storrar added that it is now important for the industry to understand the “total impact” of the media that it’s serving – factoring in the value of the brand – via econometric models – and also the instant revenue value.
“We need to be looking at the value in totality,” he said.