Roughly a decade ago, while in business school, I became enthralled by behavioral economics. Behavioral economics holds that rational economic models seldom prevail. Most people who lose a $10 bill on the way to the movies will still buy a movie ticket, whereas most people who lose their ticket (also of $10 in value) will not buy a new one. Reality gets in the way of models.
The key to social advertising is creative that people find engaging and want to share, just as a key component of any good economic theory is reality. If advertising before Ogilvy and Wunderman was all art, and advertising since has mostly been engineering, I think we’re entering an era of true “imagineering” in digital that finally combines art and science.
The current obsession in the industry is with audience-based targeting platforms. Programmatic and exchange-based ad buying are the equivalent of econometrics, or classical economics. Getting the best prices and optimizing effectively are important. They’re critical to making this industry work at scale. But great trading doesn’t matter unless the creative moves real humans with their subjective and unpredictable emotions to react, and in social advertising to share. It’s not worth debating which part is more important; the answer is both.
At BuzzFeed we spend a ton of time measuring and engineering for sharing. We don’t believe sharing just happens, that it’s like catching lightening in a bottle. We spend equal time thinking about what is great creative that people will relate to, experience novelty in, and want to share. We tracked 2 billion events across 225 million uniques of partner traffic in our Mongo databases in June, but we also applied the best of our creativity to hundreds of organic posts and branded content posts in conjunction with our agency and brand partners.
For social advertising to reach its true potential, it must be guided by math and moved by art. We need to trade like econometricians and do creative like behavioral economists.
More in Media
YouTube is under fire again, this time over child protection
Adalytics Research asks, ‘Are YouTube advertisers inadvertently harvesting data from millions of children?’
Media Briefing: Publishers pump up per-subscriber revenue amid ad revenue declines
Publishers’ Q2 earnings reveal digital advertising is still in a tight spot, but digital subscriptions are picking up steam.
Lessons for AI from the ad-tech era: ‘We’re living in a memory-less world’
Experts reflect how the failures of social media and online advertising can help the industry improve the next era of innovation.
Ad position: web_bfu