The digital marketing and social media sectors continue to change the way consumers engage with each other and brands, and the way brands approach their digital marketing.
And some of these recent changes have been confronting to brands: in July, a number of global brands took the decision to withdraw their advertising spend on Facebook and Instagram, as part of the Stop Hate for Profit campaign.
But the reality was that for many businesses, especially those with large consumer customer bases, this wasn’t a long-term strategy because demand and necessity were always going to remain on Facebook and Instagram, and because any continued absence would likely raise huge opportunities for challenger brands.
What’s more, this decision by global brands masked a number of other inconvenient truths – around the role all of us have in stopping hate on social media, in the way we chose to use social media, and the way we engage with brands that chose to take these positions.
I think the answer has to be to push for sustained, meaningful, long-term change across all channels, and it starts with education. Read my perspective in more detail in my latest article on Mi-3.
And elsewhere, I commented on Snapchat’s first global B2B marketing campaign in CMO magazine. Snapchat is doing what all businesses are doing (including the other social and search platforms) – to advertise that brands should spend their marketing dollars with them. Any brand can be successful if they create content that is right for its audience and that maps best to the platforms being considered, by testing and measuring impact, and by refining content based on where the best results are found.