Global digital marketing and communications leader
Social media is awash with quotes. Some accurate, some less so. Some deeply cherished by those who post them, others seemingly churned out of some quote sausage machine. Many love them, many loathe them. However, what is not in doubt is that they elicit engagement.
People are drawn to simple, clear messages. If those messages bring simplicity to complex issues, well then everything’s rosy. But there comes a point when something is made too simple. When so much context is removed that the message is meaningless.
There is an excellent documentary series on Netflix called Abstract. In the first episode, Christoph Niemann, who designs covers for the New Yorker, discusses abstract design. He uses the example of communicating love. Everyone uses a heart shape. From a design perspective, the heart shape is the most abstract a drawing of a heart can be before it becomes meaningless. It doesn’t have the complexity of ventricles and arteries, but it is definitely a heart. If you made it more abstract, by turning it into a square or a circle, it would go from simplified to meaningless.
Let’s apply the same thinking to language. A popular refrain in communications at the moment is that there is no longer B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business), there is only business to human. The idea being that in the age of social media and the blurring of work and personal lives, we need to communicate to people as people. It is superficially appealing, but it is meaningless.
B2B is a useful simplification. It tells us, at a very top level, that we’re communicating to people who are making decisions for businesses. Similarly, B2C tells us we’re communicating to an audience who are making decisions as consumers.
Business to human, tells us we’re communicating to people. What’s helpful about that? It is shorn of useful context. It is the equivalent of communicating love using a square.
This year, fake news has made serious inroads towards toppling house prices and Rupert’s Tesla as the dominant dinner party topic of conversation.
While chatting and chomping with Stephen Waddington in the more down to earth surroundings of Frank’s cafe on Southwark Street, we talked about the demise of the sub-editor, rediscovering the lighter side of Twitter and the joy of making and doing.
The conversation led to the idea of creating memes based on word plays of fake news. Over the following week, I peppered social media at odd hours with a range of these memes. The full collection is displayed below.
This isn’t a clever commentary on the news business. It’s not an analysis of the state of our civic debate. It’s certainly not content marketing designed to build trust, show leadership or sell consultancy. It’s a little bit of fun. Because it’s fun to have fun.
Twitter is a tricky medium for advertising but its user base is valuable.
On average, Twitter’s UK user base is better educated and higher earning than the population as a whole. That makes it a bit of a prize for some products, including some which are highly regulated like financial services.
Twitter users are also an opinionated bunch who often angrily coalesce around an issue and their regular flare ups become fodder for news outlets. So there’s a notable risk when advertising to them.
So how to advertise Twitter users? Let’s take a look at some ads by financial services firms to see the approaches different firms are taking.
Hargreaves Lansdown, which provides investment services to retail investors, has been running ads that link to information about the funds that are most popular with its ISA clients. They have a clear disclaimer that there is a, “risk of loss.”
Meanwhile, UBS bank’s digital wealth management offering, called SmartWealth, is running ads with a clear call to action telling investors to, “place your money into UBS SmartWealth.” They too run a disclaimer that informs us, “Capital @ risk.” The disclaimer is certainly less blunt Hargreaves Lansdown’s but is just a clear. Interestingly, UBS SmartWealth only uses Twitter to run ads. It has not tweeted in an effort to build an audience or a conversation.
Standard Life Invest, use no disclaimer in this Twitter ad. The account, which in its description says it’s only for investment professionals, instead takes an approach whereby you click through to a screen which requires you to confirm you are an investment professional before proceeding to take you through to the advertised content. This approach certainly frees up characters in tweets and also allows for longer and more complete disclaimers. A drawback to this approach is that the bounce rate is likely to be quite high.
BNY Mellon take the approach of using Twitter as a brand building tool. A simple ad, linking to a nicely designed (if a little too self-reverential) quiz that seeks to place BNY Mellon as an innovator.
What should we take from this array of approaches? Well, firstly, on Twitter there’s no standard way to deploy the disclaimers highly regulated industries need to use. That’s probably a good thing from a creative perspective. Certainly, in the examples cited, when sharing information that might be seen as financial advice, the disclaimers are delivered before you get to the content.
Another point to note is that targeting is poor. One of the ads is for investment professionals (and I’m a long way from being one) and two others promote wealth and investment management brands which provide services that, to put it politely, I’m probably not the target customer. That’s not to say those managing the accounts have chosen the wrong audience targeting. We all know that Twitter’s targeting can be a little off sometimes.
Finally, we should note that Twitter, in its thus far fruitless drive to turn a decent profit, is constantly developing new ad products. Financial services and other highly regulated industries tend to be cautious spenders but also big spenders. It’s likely Twitter will keep launching new ad products and tweaking its services to capture this lucrative market.
Asked a pointless hypothetical,
Deployed as a ruse,
To score the lead headline,
on the evening news.
The May-bot fluffed it,
A tweetstorm ensued,
Leave and Remain activists,
Need no excuse to feud.
While politicians strategise,
About which Brexit to pursue,
Their chess moves are pointless,
Talk radio’s playing Buckaroo.