Everything's viral, everything's multi-platform, everything's connected, everything's social. The advertising world isn't happy these days, unless it's combining some social network with some digital device to produce something everybody can stand back and applaud.
Which is great, of course. It would be very surprising if something which used to be called 'new media' wasn't a favourite territory of the worlds's advertising and marketing agencies.
But how are those dazzling campaign concepts shaping up? For example, Land Rover recently invested in a piece of work which used Instagram to take the viewer on an 'adventure' as they jumped from one uploaded picture of a vehicle to another. Once live, the work attracted all manner of admiring comment from the media and creative businesses.
Featured in all the usual places, it was viewed as groundbreaking and not a little clever. And so it may be. Unfortunately, when the numbers are run, something less impressive is revealed. No more than 5000 'adventures' were actually undertaken on the platform. By any measure that's a massively disappointing audience.
"It's only by experimenting that we hit on the big ideas that really work well.."
Not only that, but when one considers how much fuss adland was making about the venture at the time, one has to wonder how many of those players were fellow creatives trying out this new marvel. I have no idea how much Land Rover spent on this campaign, and they may have been delighted by all the attention it received in creative circles.
However, if they were hoping to reach a few million car buyers, I'd have thought they'd have been sorely disappointed. So, what does this tell us about this brave, not so new, world of digital media and its use in advertising? To be fair, we shouldn't be too quick to mock the agency (whom I won't name) for trying something different. It's only by experimenting that we hit on the big ideas that really work well.
Nevertheless, we need to be careful we're not entering into an 'Emporer's New Clothes' scenario, whereby everything with a social, digital or mobile basis is lauded as the most wonderfully effective campaign for years. It's perfectly possible to produce a tremendous ad which appears nowhere more revolutionary than a magazine, radio station or TV channel.
Ultimately, this game is all about delivering audience for the client, then persuading the crowd to act. Everything else, Instagram or not, is just window dressing.
Magnus Shaw - copywriter and blogger
