Griffiths / Why advertising trumps bad social media ideas

LET’S get this out of the way: I work for a company that pays the bills by selling advertising. This article is going to be about why your organisation should pay for advertising.

Having said that, it’s an article I decided to write in the absence of any suggestion or direction from anyone else. Because this is what I genuinely think.

In a newsroom we are bombarded daily by highly paid PR people trying to get us to write about their bad ideas: “Pay for Brad’s holiday to Vietnam and he’ll try and raise some money for a charity you’ve never heard of”, “Local mother is starting ferret meat business”, “School children are flashmobbing for cetacean inclusion”… I’m only sort of making this up.

The money going to pay for these PR people’s cocaine habits could have bought advertising, and advertising money pays newsroom wages.

All media has a limited amount of space to run stories (even in online media you can’t overload the audience with fluff or they’ll spend their browsing time elsewhere) and is generally disinclined to expend it on snake oil merchants who are eating our lunch.

Even worse than the PR firm that doesn’t understand the importance of buying some ads for relationship-management purposes, is the paid social media expert.

Hoovering up hours of billable time, they lure the client into social-media engagement strategies generally less effective than standing on City Walk handing out fliers.

Let’s look for a moment at what the world’s most successful companies do.

Apple are generally thought of as the world’s most successful company.

Apple does not tweet. Yes, Tim Cook tweets, and specific parts of the company tweet, but @Apple does not.

Apple does spend more money on advertising than they do on research and development.

Apple generally spends in the order of 100 times what their competitors do promoting iTunes. In 2013 that colossal spend earned them an even more gargantuan $10 billion.

Movie studios are the serious pros of brand development. Each film is an individual brand that has to be reaching an absolute crescendo of public interest on opening weekend.

Like Apple, their brands are much debated on social media, movie trailers in particular are a huge part of online discussion, but equally they spend enormously on buying advertising.

But, by all means, go to that seminar and get sucked in by stories about lucky people, presented in slick power points by salesmen who would not be giving the presentation if they really had the answer for how to make lots of money.

I’m not saying to ignore social media. I am saying social media communications have to be one part of a broader marketing strategy.

And even if you go viral for a day, it’s rarely going to match the persistence in delivery of a regular advertising spend.

I’ve been involved in businesses that did well, and others that did not. For the failures, I can generally always look back and wish we’d included a bigger ad budget in the business plan.

 

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