Featuring:
Kelsey Chickering, Principal Analyst
Show Notes:
There’s been some pretty serious disruption in the social media landscape lately. The ongoing upheaval at Twitter has everyone questioning that platform’s future. TikTok has more than a billion users but is being banned on government devices in several countries due to security concerns. And Facebook’s parent, Meta, seems to be losing itself in the metaverse while consumers lose trust in the platform. What’s the impact of all this swirl and volatility?
In this episode, Principal Analyst Kelsey Chickering provides her view on the current state and future outlook of digital advertising (don’t call it social medial advertising, please). She says advertisers are taking a big step back and reevaluating where and how they spend their budgets in 2023. “The disruption that’s happening is actually probably a good thing because it’s forcing everybody to rethink their plans and rethink where they might want to test and change,” she says.
Of course, advertising is always changing. Chickering points out that in the early days of social media marketing, brands created social-specific campaigns and assets that leveraged the uniqueness of the platforms. But then they got lazy and defaulted to just repurposing existing campaign assets on social platforms (posting 30-second TV spots on Facebook, for example). More recently, creator-driven platforms like TikTok have reignited the idea of creating platform-specific campaigns, and Chickering highlights a few examples of brands that are putting new creator strategies and models into market.
But “digital advertising” isn’t synonymous with “social media advertising” today. Chickering points out that there’s now a lot more competition for digital ad dollars and provides her thoughts on which emerging digital channels brands may consider adding to their stable, including CTV (think Amazon Fire, Roku, Apple TV), Reddit, and podcasts.
How should marketers budget for all these new channels? Rather than simply splitting up ad budgets by media channel as they have traditionally, Chickering advises marketers to put a budget against a desired outcome or job and then decide which digital marketing channel will get that job done.
Be sure to catch the episode’s close, when Chickering provides her most pointed advice for digital advertisers and marketers who are still unsure how to manage their way through the ongoing volatility. And if you liked this episode, be sure to check out the agenda for the upcoming CX North America event in June in Nashville. Chickering will be presenting at the event along with a host of other Forrester analysts and thought leaders.
