Social media is more engaging than online advertising - how incisive!

I was moved by a couple of stories over the last week. The first was a clever piece of social media work by Pedigree for its Adoption Drive Campaign which is usually fronted by a TV ad campaign and an extensive on pack campaign. Not this year....The brand says that while traditional channels deliver reach they don’t encourage engagement or direct action....well no change here - they never have! 

Display advertising creates look and feel, it imbues personality to the brand but very few people have ever got up from their chairs to go buy things cos they've just seen them on the Telly and that's not a bad thing.

It allows people to form their opinions about the brand over time and adopt their favourites. The difference now is that people can interact with the brand online and tats great too but it’s unlikely that most of the Worlds biggest brands would have been built purely online - not yet anyway. Once they are built then they can afford to put themselves in the hands of social media.

Back to Pedigree where the results of the campaign appear to be over a million people 'liking' the brand which is great - I'm not sure that their tactic of releasing frankly quite average videos for every 25k views was particularly strong although the conation of 25k for every 25k views was certainly a good PR story....now perhaps that's the point?

www.facebook.com/pedigree

The second relates and I saw this morning with the trumpeted headline that online ads annoy rather than appeal - well of course they do! More interestingly is the fact that young web users will react positively to online ads as opposed to the over 55's who apparently were brought up on intrusive advertising so therefore are less likely to engage than those who are used to content online - Sounds like one great big cycle going round and round and round!