Choose Social Networks, Choose Life

By Walmsley, Andrew

All human life is there. The words, which once ran over the masthead of the News of the World, could now be used to describe social-networking sites such as MySpace, Facebookand Bebo. Over the past few weeks, many newspaper column inches have been devoted to the pitfalls of advertising on these sites. Most have focused on whether such activity is safe for advertisers, who might end up next to distasteful content, but a much bigger question is whether it is worth it in the first place.

When a brand was spotted next to a British National Party group on Facebook, a small journalistic feeding frenzy ensued, with commentators competing for the holier-than-thou spot.

But most of the sites were already addressing the issue. MySpace already had a PG rating for profiles on its site in place so that advertisers could choose to avoid appearing next to inappropriate content. Bebo doesn’t run advertising on users’ profile pages, so it is unlikely to be an issue, and Facebook quickly rushed out a fix, allowing advertisers to exclude ads from running on group pages – the source of the problem on the site – rather than those of individuals.

So it all looks like job done. Social networks can continue to rake in the money and advertisers can sleep at night knowing they are not appearing next to material that The Guardian and the BBC would get upset about. Except it doesn’t work like this.

A huge chunk of the advertising running on these sites is bought through ad networks – sales houses that aggregate together billions of impressions from thousands of sites and sell them on cheap to agencies.

Much of this inventory is ‘blind’ – the agency doesn’t know where the ads are goingtoappear-anditis commonly used as a way of bringing down the average cost of a media schedule and making it lookless daunting.

But it is much harder to apply controls over content when buying media this way, and the low price reflects the fact that environment is not a primary consideration. Because whether you buy ads on social networks directly or indirectly, the chances are, it is cheap. And it’s cheap for two reasons.

First, there is absolutely boatloads of it. Social networking is one of the most popular online activities in the UK, and it generates enormous audiences. Second, it generally doesn’t work very well.

People who use these sites are highly engaged with the content, and are not in a consumer mindset. Forrester’s latest report ‘Marketing on social networking sites’ is spot-on when it says advertisers should ‘ditch the marketing tactics – this is about building trusted relationships’.

Advertisers have already spotted this, and offset poor response rates with low cost-per-thousands for the media. While few have moved on and created the imaginative and engaging marketing programmes that Forrester called for, they are filling their boots with cheap banner ads.

The argument about appearing next to distasteful content is an old one, and rests partly on whether audiences consider there to be an implied endorsement by the advertiser on that content. Marketers have fallen into three camps: ‘get me out of here’, ‘consumers are smart enough to make the distinction’ and ‘don’t care, just make it cheap’. There is no right answer – each of these positions reflects the needs of different brands.

What we have to remember here, though, is that we are in a different sort of media environment. Here, all the content is made by real people, not journalists or publishers. So it is their media not ours, and it should be us that treads carefully when we place our wares there. But more than this, it reflects real life – warts and all. Social networking isn’t to be criticised for this, it is to be celebrated for it.

All human life really is there, and it’s up to marketers to figure out how comfortable they are with that.

All the content is made by real people, so it is their media and it should be us that treads carefully

30 seconds on… News of the World

* The News of the World is published by News Group Newspapers of News International, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

* It was first published in 1843, and established itself as a purveyor of titillation, shock and criminal news

* The newspaper’s focus today is on celebrity-based scoops and populist news and is Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, with average weekly sales of 3,445,459 copies as of October 2006.

* It has broken scandals including David Beckham’s relationship with Rebecca Loos in 2004, Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten dalliance with a rent boy last January and Prince Harry’s drinking and drug use in 2002.

* Former editor Andy Coulson resigned on 26 January over a royal phone-tapping scandal. He has been replaced by Cohn Myher, former editor of the Sunday Mirror. Previous editors include Piers Morgan and Rebekah Wade.

Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level

Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. Aug 29, 2007

(c) 2007 Marketing. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.