With the recent flotation of Facebook one thing is clear, social media is big business and it is here to stay (at least for the foreseeable future). At last count Facebook boasted in excess of 750m users which, in theory, is over 10% of the world’s population. I say in theory as, despite their strict “one user, one account” policy, in reality we find that many users have at least one fake account to participate in app development, competitions and so forth. In one of our latest competitions one entrant had no less than six fake accounts to boost their chances of winning, whilst a cat attempted to claim a bottle of shower gel.
Imaginary folk aside, it is clear there is an enormous captive audience for your brand to engage with on Facebook, making it an obvious choice when planning your next marketing project. However, with so many brands utilising Facebook as a marketing platform, there is a flaw in the logic because a) you lose a competitive edge with so many others attempting to attract users’ attention and, possibly more troublesomely, b) users have become more and more wary of this invasion of space and as a consequence are less likely to engage with you (at least not openly, hence another function of fake Facebook accounts).
So where should you be advertising in the digital realm if not where the users all “hang out”? In my opinion, the best campaigns are ones that understand and work with the online tools and websites that their audience go to and trust the most. Two excellent examples of which just surfaced in the last few months. The first was a reactive banner ad produced by Nissan, in which the search terms entered by a user on a popular house-hunting website would affect the terrain and vehicle model displayed in the Nissan ad banner.
Simple but unusual and extremely well executed. The second example takes the concept one step further. In this campaign, an agency was searching for digital art directors to join their team, but instead of attempting to go through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, they engaged with one of the tools that they knew their target audience would go to almost instinctively for every new web-based project: Lorem Ipsum.
This idea is brilliant in its simplicity; take one of the core features that the target audience would desire most and, quite literally, tag their advert onto the back of it. It is exploiting a space that none of their competitors are in, and in doing so surprises the users into engaging.
