We Are Organized Chaos

Why I Hate Advertising (Part 1 of 1,000)

Adage recently ran an op-ed piece where traditional media was credited with helping Ashton Kutcher win his “Twitter race to 1 million followers” over CNN. The media in question was digital advertising billboards as pictured below:

What my beef with this whole op-ed piece centers around is that traditional media and ‘advertising’ had nothing to do with Ashton Kutcher winning this race. To the contrary, Ashton Kutcher is someone who gets ‘social media’ and used it to his benefit without the use of traditional media.. As I pointed out in the Adage comments:

1. Ashton has been very active in the social media world not only on Twitter but on Facebook as well. His Katalyst Media company has been working to bring original web content to the Facebook platform.

2. Ashton himself is an avid Twitter user and has been active on the service for awhile. Before this little ‘contest’ began, he already had over 842K followers.

3. Even as traditional media was picking up on this, Ashton was using the real-time online video service Ustream to appeal to his community going so far as to broadcast live the countdown to the final moments before his win.

Though I don’t dispute that integrated campaigns overall are very effective, this contest was all about social media and how someone used it effectively over traditional media methods. For what it’s worth, I think the digital billboard effort was commendable – though a tad late to the game and reeking of a strict PR play. IMO, what this effort shows is that anybody who gets social media, can design, develop and deploy a very effective social media campaign with little to no advertising. And that’s what has Madison Avenue scared shitless b/c if any Joe Shmoe can pull this off how are these large agency entities going to continue to justify retainers and 15-25% markups?

Tags: Digital Advertising Billboards, Facebook, Katalyst Media, Social Media, Twitter, ustream, youtube