Cerebra

Here’s an idea: “take this product and send this to some online influencers and get them to tweet about it.” Yes, that is a common brief to an agency, and no, you should not simply go ahead and get that done. Unless you’re the Reserve Bank and your product is money, simply sending stuff to an influencer is unlikely to achieve the campaign success you had hoped for.

Media strategists are slowly starting to understand digital as both the client and the agency demand a more holistic approach, but what about social media?

For many, the environment is daunting as it goes against what most media strategists are trained to investigate (such as reach, frequency and Gross Rating Points). Social media means consumers have the voice to talk back, but for many, it doesn’t even feature as a blip on the radar as a channel because it’s foreign to traditional media strategy which is all about broadcast.

To me, social media fits in the media mix just as much as TV, radio or print. However, the current agency briefing model doesn’t lend itself to this type of thinking. A few different approaches I’ve seen are:

Infographics have been floating on the scene for some time now, and although they are on the brink of over-kill I thought I would enlighten those of you who have yet to experience the “Infographic-magic”.

I remember discovering my first one. I was hooked from the very first picture. Amidst the jargon of text and pop up ads that bombard my daily browsing was this brilliant infographic on the American electoral debate, of all things! To put it simply, an infographic is a visual representation of an idea, statistic, report or data. Topics can vary from politics and science to pop music and baking. Infographics are eye-catching and make lengthy reports and analysis easy to read and digest.

Preamble:
No doubt that you’ve heard of Myspace, even if it was something like, “Hey, remember that thing before Facebook? What was it called? Oh yeah, Myspace!”

I actually still have a Myspace account. Admittedly, I haven’t logged in, in about four years, but it’s still there, with my rubbish photos and ridiculous wall posts. The nice thing about Myspace, at least in the days of yore, was that your profile was completely customisable, from background, to the fonts, the box shapes and sizes, their placement, content and other plugins. I hosted videos and games on my profile, come for the laughs, stay for the games.

I'm writing this post as most of my colleagues are too young to even know what is, and why the is a potentially important digital development. One of my first small jobs back in the 00s was to create a MySpace profile for a client, back then, Facebook and Twitter were non-existent in SA. MySpace was all we had, yes it was ugly, and the user experience was clunky, but you could upload videos, photos, text and audio files on one page.

Fast forward a couple of years and MySpace is the old shoe from several seasons back that gets lost in the back of your cupboard. Until today.