The State of Social Media Strategies, What On Earth Is Going On?
A chat with strategy leader Mark Pollard and debating what should be considered a marketing genius.
This is first half of my interview with Mark Pollard, strategy leader and founder of Sweathead community. Plus, my insights on state of social media.
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Jaskaran: Most social media marketers work in small businesses and they rarely use strategy frameworks or think about long-term strategy.
How do you make them focus on strategy first and tactics second?
Mark Pollard: Well, there are different kinds of strategy. It helps to have a brand strategy in place, but you could have a brand strategy, campaign strategy, and then a social media strategy. It isn’t about one strategy but starting with a brand strategy will help people focus.
Then, as far as tactics, with social media strategy, it can be okay to explore different tactics to back into a strategy and then lock that in for a bit of time.
I have general sense of my strategy but I also experiment with different formats and topics to see what will stick. For example, slow-motion zoom-ins while I’m making a funny face, or talking about hair transplants.
Small businesses can have an advantage - if the owner has a strong point of view, then that strong point of view can become the heart of the strategy.
If a small business is soulless and just about generating cashflow and they don't have a strong point of view, it can be harder to generate a brand strategy for them. And, if you do, they often don’t know what to do with it.
I'm not rigid with these things. I just think it helps to have a strategy to stand on so that everything you do has a center, and you're not worrying every single time you're doing something about where to start.
Jaskaran: But a platform change can prompt a tactical change. All of these platforms are constantly launching new social media updates. It can distract you from the brand strategy. Sometimes businesses chase trends and become trend-driven instead of brand-driven.
Mark Pollard: I guess I’ve seen this over the years - social media managers copying the same social media calendars and chasing memes and hashtags. Brands can do well by chasing some trends but it’s more powerful when they do a little bit of this while having a sturdy brand strategy.
Duolingo is good at this. Their brand is so strong on social media - Duo, the owl, is fully unhinged in his attempt to nag you to learn languages and they dip their toe into topical events and trends.
Jaskaran: You talked about three-second attention threshold research in your masterclass. Social media marketers talk about something similar - catching people’s attention in the first three seconds of a video.
And, generally, what happens is they go too hard on the hooks. You see all the creators sharing and using the same 10 hooks. Do you think at some point a brand should move away from the hooks, because it's not always about attention?
If I’m following a brand and it constantly shows up on my feed, a repeating hook can be annoying.
Mark Pollard: Yeah. I get that but most people are probably not seeing the same hook from the same brand all the time.
It's a difficult question to answer, because even if you think about the top Netflix shows and the top movies - for example, we talked about James Bond a little bit yesterday - their opening scenes, the opening of a good TED talk, they have hooks.
So you can't be against hooks. Literally the point is to get attention and set up what some people would call a curiosity gap, like, “What's going to happen?”
And while repetition might annoy followers who are chronically online, a lot of creators would love to just find that one format that works for them. You know, instead of having to make all this different kind of content, a lot of people just want to find that one format. Then obviously some feel they become hostage to it.
So I don't think brands can move away from what works. The flip side of that is there are other approaches to content such as the New Wave on YouTube. They're not using these kinds of techniques
Jaskaran: Yeah, I have seen the growth of the New Wave trend and video essays. What they usually do is they focus on a topic that is already getting a lot of awareness, and they stretch it until the point it reaches their own message.
Mark Pollard: But isn’t it different because people think they have some kind of relationship with a creator in a way that they're probably not thinking about a brand having, unless a brand has a character or two?
There's this concept called the messenger effect. It's pretty simple. It just means that the power of the message depends on who's saying it.
So, striking equivalency between a brand and a creator, especially with that New Wave style, doesn’t work.
Jaskaran: What do you think about @thebestmarketingstrategyever?
An Intern grew the brand to 500k followers with simple comedic content. Very rough strategy (in the beginning) leading to huge growth.
I imagine when senior strategists and bosses look at these businesses, they might get second thoughts about their strategy.
Mark Pollard: I have a point of view on this. I encourage companies to have a sense of their long-term strategy but to spend 60 days publishing a lot of content to see what sticks.
I challenge them to publish 3 to 5 things per day that don’t take hours to make to see if they can end the 60-day period with a small library of successful content - for example, 20 videos that do well for them.
Then they can tighten their strategy, they can repost the content that worked, they can use that content in paid advertising, and they can try to develop more similar content. Volume can change a brand’s trajectory if the business can get out of their own way.
Jaskaran: Yeah, this is social performance. Marketers are doing brand formats - branding plus performance. Okay, it's kind of similar to how we don't just have paid; we have organic too.
But this is really about social formats because at the start, you're doing it all for performance, and then you go back to branding at some point to rediscover your brand and stick to the things that work.
Part-2 soon.
Building a Curiosity Gap: Music tells a different message, not the same.
Your favourite movie directors like Martin Scorsese aren’t always using the soundtracks that fits the vibe. They use radio music or soundtracks that uplift the message or give audience a new context.
That builds curiosity and keeps the viewer connected. But the opposite is happening on IG reels and TikTok, the creators either use trending music or sounds that make feel like something important is being said, even if it isn’t. Both tactics are done to death.
About time you use music as a strategy in your content. Using Jazz and classical music to give people new context about the topic. This will help you to keep viewers attentive and maintains their curiosity every time they watch it.
Another strategy is making a certain style of music or a single track your permanent background music for reels and TikTok. Nara Smith uses same 3-4 tracks for every video, Nice and Easy - Louis Adrien is the most used song across her recent videos on TikTok. Music is part of your brand content strategy.
Should you treat social media, specifically TikTok as TV?
A year ago, The answer was ‘Yes’. Today, No.
Comments dictate how people should feel about a piece of content more than the content itself. TVs don’t have comments sections and people do feel other ways if comments are turned off on a video.
Elon Musk, Reaction creators, TikTok Reposts, AI and Editing culture has changed the trajectory of social media in last 12 months. Media content plays an important role in producing the discussions but the shift in power between reactors and creators is huge.
To be a powerful brand or creator in 2024, you need more than good content. The ability to clap back in comments, win the fake social justice arguments and possibly do the best PR/apologies if you F**k up. What you post matters less than What you do after the post.
Creating for TV is much simpler and the media content matters the most. On social media, the behaviour of viewers is different and changed. To be honest, we can’t even classify our core audiences as ‘viewers’. To win on social media, brands need their own Nielsen to define, who is a lurker, true fan or hate-watcher? After that comes, interacting and engaging with users outside the media loop.
What is defining social media?
Hate-watching is thriving,
Elon Musk and friends have changed the idea of social justice. If it wasn’t broken enough with people fighting for nonsense, now people are doing it more. The Idea of ratioing someone is now forever embedded in minds of many users, everyone is on the run for that most liked comment.
Reaction creators are the voice of moment. But most brands aren’t using their voices to be part of the moment, it could surely benefit them.
TikTok Reposts and Instagram stories are the formats used by Gen-Z and Alpha to define their personality. If Brands want to get into Teen circles, they need to create content that defines their personality.
Celeb/Media/Culture Video Edits is the medium defining interests/thoughts of Gen-Zers, specifically Gen-Z men. The Text on video content defines the interests and cultural moments among Gen-Z women. Unless they are influencers, Gen-Z Men and Women are mostly using CapCut Edits and TikTok Text overlays to distribute their messages or stories.
AI is impacting perspective of consumers on creativity and the topic of AI has built its strong presence on social media platforms to overlap with other mainstream interests of viewers.
Influencers aren’t having the best time, they have their core audience in chokehold but they are not being the representatives they ought to be.
In the food space, Keith Lee is still trusted and loved but his city tours do get him in trouble. Simply because he can’t be the saviour everyone wants him to be.
Alix Earle wrote the ‘how to get paid’ blueprint for influencers but she also got exposed for using racial slurs. She’s part of many other creators that got exposed for using either racial or homophobic slurs.
Hate-watching is one of the many reasons behind influencers getting exposed, a lot of people like the drama and do the online searching to find dirt on the big influencers.
The worst part of too many influencers getting exposed as racists or homophobic is some people saying, “Everyone was like that back then or teenage years.” That’s BS.
The Trends are getting stale in less than 48 hours, performative approach is making people tune out. (more)
This might have something to do with the fact that Gen Z only needs to scroll through social media for 38 minutes to experience negative emotions.
The shift from traditional news sources to Online creators is not 100% cool. People continue to talk about “Gen Z is getting news on TikTok”. What they don’t talk about is amount of people leaning toward creators that fit their worldview, creators and news publishers with facts and sources are getting silenced.
Second, The pushback against news content from Meta has only benefitted the dark side of media.
Marketing as a product, Charli XCX’s most successful product wasn’t her album. It was her marketing becoming a cultural product that everyone held to, similarly we had Barbie last year.
The need for Human Curation, rebirth of Instagram pages, Outlander Magazine and Highest Nobiety are the best examples of how curation can help brands succeed.
Storytelling,What are we in 2000s or 90s? Every year, we hear storytelling is the future. Stories will always define human consumption.
**To be continued**
One trend that continues to define social media: People aren’t exploring new solutions.
How often do you download new apps? Specifically apps focused on socialising or activities. It’s likely your answer is not so often. Nielsen’s data shares, 70% of total US smartphone app usage is accounted for by the top 200 apps in the marketplace. If often, you could be part of this group, 25% of apps downloaded by mobile app users worldwide were used only once after installation.
Every year, we sit and bash social media and dating apps for negativity, lack of moderation and XYZ but only a set of people make the step toward new apps and social networks. There exists an opportunity for brands to support these new solutions and build strategies around smaller platforms/apps. It’s not easy and surely not profitable in short-term.
The state of social media tells us, a new platform will soon arrive to change our behaviours for good. Until then, brands should try to experiment and try to join different apps with small but engaged communities. Don’t just steal attention, give platforms attention. Every app and brand is trying to earn the same thing: attention. Like the YouTube New Wave Trend, brands can start their own wave and build communities with new platforms.
When Dominos joined Tinder with ‘Date with Dominos’ Valentine’s Day promo, the platform wasn’t that big and they also benefitted from the attention generated by the campaign. Similarly, a lot of brands can help the platform and build their own audiences. Brand-Platform collabs > Brand-Brand collabs
Best Brands either address the noise and problems to stand out or they bring their audience to silent places, a library where everyone can read silently.
The Smart ones are building libraries on Discord but the risk-takers might do the unexpected.
That’s not a marketing genius. Stop glamorising minimal/performative creativity!
Disclaimer: Creativity is subjective and you do type of marketing that your job requires, this post is meant to debate performative creative marketing culture and shares a few insights on how to do better. Let’s begin:
The discourse against Modern Art, People comparing AI and Human Art, Internet culture, and other factors have changed the definition of what is creative or what is genius. Most importantly we consume so much crappy content that we don’t ask brands that do well to do better. We have normalised being ok with what we get. Meanwhile marketing is always about being ahead and creativity is about breaking the norm.
How people define good marketing or creativity has never been vaguer, everyone is throwing around ‘This is marketing/creative genius’ in comments of brands and creator. But are they really geniuses? No.
What’s happening:
Most brands are engaging in Performative creativity, not human creativity. Some confuse these two, human creativity that drives performance is a different thing than performative creativity that is meant to be performative, by using the trends and context around a topic.
Brands are retelling the cultural stories, not uplifting them with their own ideas and geniuses.
Many brands don’t realise when their idea/style of creativity becomes the norm.
What’s the problem: Audiences slowly but steadily catch up with brands engaging in these practices. How?
1: Marketing Genius because of the brand context, not creativity.
When brands are small, culturally relevant or young, people have a different context and bias towards them. How people praise Skims and Marc Jacobs for being early to trends is different from how people praise Nike and Adidas for being early to a sports moment or winning story. Both brands are engaging in performative creativity on social media as their ‘creative work’ is relying more on the idea of being early and the creative drive is not coming from the human desire or passion. They are acting out of need to act and context of the moment. (More on the performative creativity in the next section)
It all exists in the context, it’s creative to audiences because of the the context. Meanwhile what could have been is burdened by what has been.
As this study shares, a creative idea’s worth diminishes the newer it is, highlighting one reason creative ideas may fail to gain traction in the social world. The best ideas are burdened by the context people have, so they need time to break through.
This shouldn’t discourage people/brands from experimenting with new creative ideas. Only doing what already appeals to people or exists in the context can make your brand disappear or it might exist like Supreme.
2: When the context changes and your brand/style of creativity is the new norm.
The supreme story, It’s classic tale of brands not being aware of becoming a cultural or creative norm. More than supreme hurt themselves through their internal creative ventures, the streetwear scene and the copycat culture hurt them. Because their brand became the norm, new clothing brands became Supreme copycats.
Usually brands move fast and change to become creatively relevant again, Supreme didn’t. When brands don’t, they become the culprits of ruining a trend. Like many do believe supreme’s logo slap culture is behind why we have $100-200 hoodies/t-shirts with no real quality.
You need to know when your creativity is no longer deemed as creative work before the audience tunes out.Most good creatives know this and they have the drive to change, so they easily move forward. But sometimes the corporate culture and shareholder mentality holds you back.
Supreme’s approach to creativity didn’t change much, but the audience’s perspective on the brand changed. When this happens, Nostalgia is born, audiences glamorise a brand history that was never creative or different than now.
Many generic brands became cultural classics through romanticism nostalgia. Why? Because people can attach their own stories and struggles to these no-message brands. That’s how you get annoying fanboys.
Every brand has the task to be early and change before what they do creatively on or off social media becomes the norm or annoying.
For many brands, what they could be is burdened by what has been, sticking to formula that worked. The Idea behind criticising the brands like Supreme is always “Everything can be better because creativity has no boundaries”.
Above Mark Pollard shared that brands should try different things and stick to what works. That task should take place every once in a while, so brands can discover a better solution/ creative strategy.
Creativity doesn’t need a shareholder mentality. Most Brands are not performers, they are prisoners. You can preach AI or Data, But you can’t get any further away before you start coming back to Human Creativity.
3: The Case against performative creativity
The Truman show is embodiment of what performative creativity does. First thing to note is “It works”. The show was successful and Truman didn’t feel like he was being exploited for years.
The consumers never cared enough about Truman’s life, even though they loved who he was. That shows you reality of consumer world. But the day arrived and Truman broke lose and the studio tried to manipulate, stop and then negotiate to keep Truman in the loop.
“You never had a camera in my head”.
Performative creativity thrives on everything around us. It exists in the context and is tied heavily to Materialistic works. Relying on external factors is already a bad brand strategy, never rely on things that you can’t influence or change.
The important argument against it is “We’re f**king humans.” The most unpredictable animal on the planet. The creativity in you is unique to your minds, it has less to do with the society.
The Truman Show is fiction, our reality moves faster. Performative creativity in marketing is constantly trying to take new shapes using the context. But our minds work differently than the societal systems or trends. Brands can’t predict the next step of a consumers, that’s why they need….
Brands need creative people or agencies with guts to experiment.
But marketers or creative people don’t rule the world or manage financial budgets. Those who do are obsessed with idea of tracking the way people buy and try to do repeatable things. Even though ton of researches from Kantar and other firms share creative ads have a higher ROI than non-creative ads. And short-termism isn’t healthy for marketers.
Nike did that by hiring a consultant as a CEO and they are suffering. It has become a thing for companies to use broken systems or hire McKinsey, only to come back and say, we will focus on our community and being creative.
Human Creativity thrives because we are unpredictable. We are not bound to shareholder mentality. Creativity and Art is about expressing yourself, not suppressing.
What makes human creativity different is simply “Your will”. When you are in a creative state, you fear losing the idea. So, You write it as immediately as possible, turn off the shower and open the notes app. The Idea is you express, not suppress.
Performative creativity asks you to create something for sake of creation, performance or your boss sharing “my niece finds this creativity”. The creative will behind it isn’t strong enough and is clouded with false intentions.
4: Why Skims and Marc Jacobs aren’t marketing geniuses?
Creative behaviour of a genius is heavily informed by both the culture and the zeitgeist. The Cultural influences and Zeitgeist should define your brand’s creative behaviour because that is what defines the geniuses.
I shared this write-up on Instagram, the sentiment against what was mentioned came down to:
That’s what brands do, they don’t have to engage in human creativity.
They are doing well, the product and marketing resonates.
The Answer: It’s more profitable, they would make more money using the mix of performative and human creativity. Skims and Marc Jacobs are great brands doing well on social media. We are not arguing against them, we are arguing for them.
Whenever we discuss the merits of what brands should do or don’t. It’s about undoing the damage of marketing and making world a better place. Because..
It is rude to ignore the damage we have done to society and internet. SEOs did ruin the internet with pop-ups and listicles that now haunt every google search, giving rarely a clear answer.
Social Media Marketers like Gary Vee and Gurus like Neil Patel are creative geniuses to many but they did ruin the internet by promoting approaches that created a flux of garbage content. Before AI, we had these people prompting people to create for sake for creations. Or how marketers played a crucial role in rise of subscription economy, everything is subscription now.
What marketers were saying or doing was deemed as creative at that time. Sponsoring blogs was modern, it gave us annoying ads. That’s traditional now.
Influencers are also becoming traditional, there is nothing creative about sponsoring an influencer in 2024. Back in 2017, it was considered a creative thought. You had to beg to get an influencer partnership improved.
How did this happen? Unconsciousness. Every marketing channel turned into an industry. Very few people looked back at what was vs what has been to get a hold of themselves, we moved away from marketing practices that cared about people. Just this week, someone made a video on “death of traditional marketing”. Last time I checked, TV was still more profitable for brands.
Marketers aren’t evil, but our practices consciously or non-consciously did the work to make internet experiences worse in many ways. So, we ought to re-evaluate what we treat as creative or non-creative and have higher standard of creativity.
5: The Imperfect End
A post discussing what creativity is or isn’t will always confuse or make people angry. Or feel like a conversation that started before you came in.
My write-up was heavily influenced by Hegel’s views on Philosophy, Art and Zeitgeist. Understanding Hegel is not easy, I try my best. Addressing the Zeitgeist can be too bold for brands and some big/neutral creators. It is about depicting the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.
The Cultural Climate in 2024 is not that chill, so it is up to brands if they want to address the vibes and concerns of zeitgeist or not. You can tell by factors defining the social media, the need for brands being vocal and them having a good social value proposition is more important than ever.
Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
TL;DR:
Value human creativity over performative work as it burns out the creative and audience can feel the heat if everyone is doing the same stuff.
The marketing genius goes beyond trend-following or minimal creativity.
A brand's context heavily influences the perception of its creativity.
Successful brands must evolve creatively before their style becomes the norm, or risk losing relevance (e.g., Supreme).
Short-term performance often overshadow long-term creative strategies, potentially harming brand growth and innovation.
Marketers should track impact of their practices, especially tactics once deemed as creative.
Addressing the current zeitgeist and cultural climate is important for brands, but you need to have strong cultural insights to do it safely.
Romanticism doesn’t lead to innovation or better work. It keeps us in the past.
Sources & Reading material used in this post:
1. Lectures and research papers on Hegel’s philosophy of art and Zeitgeist, recommended source: Michael Surge on YouTube.
2. Kantar and WARC’s Study on Creative and Effective ads generate more than four times as much Profit.
3. Thinkbox study sharing all advertising turns a profit.
4. Diagram is from study titled: “Culture’s influence on creativity: The case of Indian spirituality” Author: Dharm Bhawuk, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
5. The Artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity by Julia Cameron
6. The Verge: The People who ruined the internet
7. The Founding story of bold agencies and brands like Mischief No Fixed Address, Liquid Death and GUT agency. All share how they started because brands didn’t had guts and weren’t focused on being boldly creative and focused too much on performance.
8. Scott Galloway on “Brand is Dead” statements made in The CMO podcast and Uncensored CMO podcast.
9. NASA study sharing we are more creative as kids than adults. Many other studies sharing the same answer.
10. Rick Rubin - The Creative Act (Book)
P.S. I’m not trying to be the authority on what you should do or what you shouldn’t in terms of creativity or marketing. In real world, we would be having daily discussions and researches to define our creative strategy. So, treat this post as an health debate/discussion on what type of creativity should we promote.
It debates current dynamics of marketing to help brands do better, you can debate or criticise to make this post better. See you on Sunday with marketing news recap!