Whatever is the point
The endless cycle of ad-led platforms promising the world, but delivering a culture of Whatever
A few years ago, I was invited to participate in a Campaign roundtable that had a very Campaign/adland premise - turning customers into “brand ambassadors” (it was also a sponsored feature for Uber Eats, which probably explains why someone working at Teneo was invited to participate).
We had a wide-ranging discussion around the nature of customer journeys in the 2020s, the multitude of touchpoints and the changing nature of loyalty.
The most surprising aspect of the chat was that at least one agency in adland still advocated (and apparently still does) the importance of organic social for brands. Here’s the quote from the published article from the roundtable:
“So many people misunderstand or completely forget about the power of social organic and the importance of that… that is literally the face of your brand every single day.”
Well, yeah, we forget about it because the power of reaching only 2-5% (at best) of your fans is not much power at all. The examples cited by the agency also focused on Heinz, tapping into another of my bugbears with the marketing press.
If you are Xbox, Doritos, McDonald’s, or EA Sports FC, of course, you’re going to get more cut through than the average brand on social. People love those brands! But brands that people love represent only a tiny fraction of the business community.
Most people don’t care about your brand or business, and aren’t bothered either way about your posts being in their feeds.
Big tech platforms know this; that’s why they charge brands and businesses to appear there, dangling the carrot of organic reach just enough to keep everyone interested. But anyone who works with any relatively unknown business knows that the carrot is almost always just out of reach.
So you might reasonably wonder why the myth persists. Well, firstly, of course, plenty of brands, businesses, and creators don’t have the financial muscle to invest meaningfully in paid social. So the tantalising promise of free promotion, of using the right hashtags and following the latest trends, presents a lucrative, lottery-like opportunity.
As this piece by writer Caroline Crampton highlights, there’s enough activity on the big platforms, particularly around the creative arts, for the promise of impact to feel real. BookTok has been a thing for a while. Writers and their work can gain momentum and virality that converts into sales.
The trouble is, Caroline outlines in her piece, that steam is the exception, not the rule. Crampton also asserts, in line with our earlier “brands people love” discussion, that books discussed on TikTok and Instagram have already generated some talkability in literary circles or come with a pre-baked level of fame courtesy of the author. As Crampton outlines:
“Everyone in this space seemed to publicly agree that "social media was really important for book promotion" and pointed to the viral success of various books on BookTok, but nobody was able to go into more detail about how this was achieved, or if it was even applicable to a non-fiction book by a non-celebrity author.”
And yet this is still the expectation of authors and purveyors of the creative arts. Your personal brand is vital to driving your commercial impact.
It is true that you can build stronger relationships with people who enjoy your work or products, thanks to online communication. It’s just that, as Caroline Crampton outlines in her piece, algorithm-driven content-sharing platforms aren’t always the best way to do that. Having the ability to curate what your audience sees and build up direct connections is arguably more impactful.
But growing communities in that fashion takes time and effort. It’s an approach that lacks the scale and velocity promised by an all-singing, all-video organic social “content” campaign. But what it lacks in velocity, it makes up for in impact. According to Caroline Crampton’s case (admittedly one example), she saw zero drop-off in impact on her book from quitting social media. Her curated, genuinely owned channels were much more effective in generating interest and connections with her fans.
The other challenge, of course, is that the big tech platforms flatten all forms of posting into “content”. Meaning that you might be a writer or a musician who has put years into perfecting your craft, but you end up competing with an individual or company that is only interested in producing content for the sake of generating financial reward. There are no additional layers and very little substance. It’s work that can be produced with the least effort, designed to generate the maximum reward attention bestows.
In a piece on her blog, writer Eevee calls this kind of posting strategy “the rise of Whatever”. Eevee’s theory is that when the point of making anything online is to make money, whether that’s via ads on a website, some kind of crypto-scheme, or via social platforms, the work is “…ancillary. It’s only important insofar as it keeps people around, to look at the ads. It’s jingling keys. It’s… Whatever.”
“This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, behind suggestion algorithms, behind recipe blogs that all look the same and have a mile of filler fluff.”
It’s the men selling you the secrets to unlocking algorithms, so you can create AI-generated videos that will secure payouts from the big tech platforms. It’s about making Whatever might achieve the remote possibility of gaining some viral fame on a platform and generating a significant cash return.
The organic reach carrot, because it’s now intrinsically linked to financial reward, has created the incentive structure where posting Whatever is more often rewarded than posting about anything you truly care about or believe in.
And plenty of people think that the rise of Whatever filling our biggest platforms may lead to something of an exodus in favour of something new and less flat. “May” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence - it’s been six years since the rise of TikTok shifted the social landscape decisively. The likes of BeReal and Clubhouse only flickered around the margins.
The challenge is that our history of predictions as a species is poor - we tend to imagine the future based on our previous experiences. Hence a yearning among certain sections of the internet for a return to more late noughties vibes - blogs, forums, small communities, The Enemy and Rihanna dominating the charts (OK, maybe not that last bit - The Enemy were rubbish).
If we are to break the advertising-led cycle that has dominated the past 20 years, the “next big thing” will have to be significantly different from what came before. Otherwise, it’ll be the same old playbook - platform launches, its initial growth provides a group of early adopters with the opportunity to build influence, which they subsequently turn into cash via advertising.
As more people flock to the platform in search of influence and cash, the likelihood of achieving both diminishes, until you reach the point where we are now - the dominance of Whatever to try and eke out as much cash as possible. Those early adopters drift away in search of something new. Rinse and repeat.
For brands and businesses, it will certainly be easier if it’s the cycle of excitement to entropy that continues. The basic principles will remain the same - identify the platforms and channels where you can have the greatest impact, then utilise the available targeting options to attempt to influence that audience.
And the principle of ignoring anyone who suggests an “organic” approach is the most important part of the mix. Even if you can secure “free” impact in the early days, it’s only ever going to be fleeting - the exception that proves the eternal rule that nothing comes for free.