Since the start of social media promotions, topical advertising has been the way to go. Everyone has taken this route, some can sustain it over a long period while other decide to abandon it abruptly. Topical themes are funny, entertaining, impactful and relevant but it dampens the big picture because literally everyone seems to be doing the same thing.
The law of diminishing marginal utility kicks in here are you're not impressed with the visuals you see, albeit each brand has worked equally hard on conceptualizing and creating their work.
What happened to outright crazy advertising?
Brands today have the freedom to bring to life any campaign they can dream. From the plethora of available resources, man power, creative inspirations and ability to amplify, the impact can be unimaginable. Yet, brands choose to follow a routine of bland ideas that create nothing more than lukewarm appeal and minimum recall.
Mercedes SLS ad vs Mercedes Cucumber Ad:
Remember when Mercedes Benz made an absolutely outrageous ad with the SLS gulwing doing a running 360 inside a tunnel. Almost every car enthusiast will remember this ad. Then you look at this image with slice of a cucumber which was connected to a spa and the 'S' in the S-class. This ad has to have a copy and multiple online articles to support the idea and justify what is really going on.
Netflix India:
Netflix launched in India with massive budgets and a wild plan to take over the daily entertainment market. The brand enters the Indian market with an massive content library and extensive data and insights from being early movers in the space. But after launching in Indian and have a standard of their own abroad, the Netflix promotion themes were reduced to bottom of the barrel ideas paired with top class productions. Netflix is also teaming up with Bloggers to constantly talk about the platform on their blogs and in everyday conversations (Literally any conversation you have with them will be responded to with a Netflix related sentence).
To promote the highly acclaimed series Narcos, Netflix India created what is basically a college festival level script packaged with moderately popular cast of web celebs and a superior post production result. The audience that watched this found it 'relateable' because they have gone through similar situations in life and so they raved about it in the comments with comments like Netflix is greatest at promoting its platform.
The problem with social media:
Frequency is king in digital, as brands try to outdo each other on the social space, everyone starts to create campaigns more frequently and post on a daily basis. This fear of becoming irrelevant or being forgotten by your fans due to reduction in engagement has plagued the industry to the core. As social platforms twist the arm of brands to encourage regular posting and push for paid campaigns. The truth is that no matter how good your campaign idea may be, if you don't have a big budget to support it, you won't be visible to your audience.
The YouTube comment section:
Thanks to the internet boom in India, every other person is has something to say in the comments section. Sadly the thinking majority does not always take the time to leave a comment and so the comment section of today is filled with template responses praising mediocre jokes.
Numbers are everything:
Big budgets demand big results and in the age of measurable ROI agencies are hell bent on increasing the reach of their story however poor their script may be. The term 'viral' has lost its meaning because today everything we see is primarily because a brand is paying to push that post out to everyone. Numbers will show brilliant figures of impressions, reach and engagement, and the marketing departments will be happy looking at these results.
But can we say that the content will be remembered or cherished by the consumer? How long will it be spoken about? And what will you do differently next time to regain the attention of your audience?
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