Paid media; earned media; content; DIY; overshare; overwork, Kardashian, Jenner.

  By Gonzalo López Martí  –  LMMIAMI.COM

• If you don’t like bawdy analogies & explicit turns of phrase or if you have a distaste for all things Kardashian-ralated , you might want to stop reading here.
• Unfortunately, I could not find a sanitized way to describe some of the thinking below.
• Let’s see.
• Foreseeing the social media scenario coming our way a few years ago, Jon Bond, founder & partner of legendary 90s agency Kirshenbaum & Bond coined this phrase: “In the future, marketing will be like sex: only losers will have to pay for it.”
• Brilliant.
• Of course, he is talking about so-called “earned media”.
• My respects too to whoever coined the “earned media” neologism as the antonym of “paid media”.
• It hits the nail right on the spot.
• Marketing should be based entirely on “earned media”.
• In a perfect world, marketers would develop products so good that spontaneous word of mouth would suffice to get people to buy them.
• Marketing should create products that intrinsically attract attention and purchase intent sans the invasion of our sensory space entailed by “paid media”.
• Marketing was not meant to be an intrusion.
• Getting people to buy products and services should be a mere afterthought.
• However, this logic is lost on us.
• Marketing slowly and inadvertently retrofitted its original mission.
• We created the monster -intrusive advertising in the form of “paid media”- and now we believe it is just normal.
• So you are a marketing exec?
• Great, here’s your product.
• You can’t touch it or change anything about it.
• Here’s a marketing budget you can use to try and fool people into buying it.
• Just shut up and sell whatever the assembly line spits out.
• And sell it fast, inventory is piling up.
• Big marketing budgets and “paid media” made many a marketer complacent.
• Or frustrated, in the sense that they are only allowed to do half of their job: don’t question the product, just sell it as is.
• This scenario also pushed many people to feel extremely mistrustful of -and jaded about- marketing.
• Don’t despair.
• There’s a silver lining.
• In the future, hyper customization (e.g; 3D printing) will shift the role of marketers from intruders to attractors.
• Now back to the present and back to reality.
• We don’t live in a perfect world or in the future.
• Yet.
• We still need to deal with the cards we’re dealt.
• Here’s the product.
• You cannot touch it.
• Just sell it.
• Using paid media, of course.
• Let’s see a small example.
• An acquaintance of mine, a guy in his mid 50s, a quite successful developer and realtor, called me recently in need of marketing advice.
• Let’s call him Clint.
• Clint is fully aware about the fact that his name is a brand.
• That much he knows.
• As such, he badly needs to raise his profile.
• He needs to market himself.
• Clint being a human being, one would expect for him to be fairly malleable, right?
• Meaning that my job as marketer would allow me to, to a certain extent, change the product –Clint- and adapt him to the new reality.
• This is what happened.
• Clint: Gonzalo, you gotta help me. I want to buy an ‘engine’ to raise my profile on the interwebs.
• Me: You mean you want to improve your presence on search engines and social media?
• Clint: Yes. I want to buy an engine…
• Me: Well, you could buy the usual adwords on Google, sponsored tweets and sponsored posts on Facebook. Maybe some display. But it will be an artificial leverage with a pretty short shelf life, it will deflate instantly the moment you stop pumping money in. If you want to obtain good rankings on search and good visibility on social you will need to create good, relevant & copious content to attract attention organically.
• Clint: (blank stare)
• Me: What kind of content do you generate? Videos? Press coverage? Virtual tours of your listings? Imagery? Reviews by clients?
• Clint: (blank stare)
• Me: You cannot just buy exposure off the rack or hire someone to do it for you, if that’s what you mean by buying en ‘engine’. You must generate content and, in your line of work, you pretty much have to generate it yourself.
• Clint, stuttering: I’m too busy to do that.
• Me: It is time consuming, yes, but you have no other choice. Google’s been playing cat & mouse with search engine tricksters for years now: attempting “black hat” tactics and those good ol’ artificial shortcuts will only hurt you and get you penalized with more anonymity (you don’t know what ‘black hat’ means? Google it).
• As I said, Clint, increasing your search engine and social media visibility these days can only be achieved “organically”.
• That is, with genuine, authentic content generated by human beings.
• The more the merrier.
• Put that fancy smartphone of yours to work for you.
• Clint: Then I need to buy an eng… I mean, hire someone to do it for me.
• (Here comes another off-color analogy. You ready? Sure you wanna keep reading? OK.)
• Me: Clint, let’s put it this way… you cannot hire someone to fuck your wife. You have to do it yourself. The same applies to social media.
• Can you learn and become better at it?
• Yes.
• Can you pay someone to help you, teach you & train you?
• Certainly.
• However, I can’t stress it enough, if you want to build a social media network of solid relationships:
• You.
• Must.
• Do.
• It.
• Yourself.
• It’s your persona.
• It’s your voice.
• It’s gotta be spontaneous, authentic, genuine.
• And abundant.
• That’s the reason why Kim Kardashian exists.
• Because she is bizarrely, even grotesquely authentic.
• Sex tapes, warts & all.
• She lets it all hang out.
• Literally.
• In a word: overshare.
• Shamelessly.
• I know, what I’m saying sounds outrageous and preposterous to a lot of people.
• Particularly to people over 35 years of age.
• When I explained this to Clint, he’s first reaction was “I don’t have time”.
• Plus, he expressed disgust at the prospect of oversharing his life on social media like a pathetic, desperate teenager.
• Clint’s brief was clear: you cannot touch the product (him).
• Just use “paid media” of some sort.
• And cross your fingers.
• At this point in our conversation, Clint came full circle and fessed up the reason of his woes: one of his most successful colleagues slash competitors, a lady who’s twenty years younger than he is, is not particularly attractive and boasts an unfinished high school education, briskly moves luxury inventory due to the fact that she essentially turned herself into a real estate celeb with Kardashianesque social stunts.
• Clint is depressed because what he considers a lightweight, vulgar exhibitionist is giving him a run for his money.
• When I told him he needs to imitate her and become an attention whore himself I made him more miserable than he already was.
• He looked at me as if I had asked him to sacrifice his manliness and pull a Bruce Jenner makeover.
• I’m sorry Clint.
• I know you have an MBA from a prestigious higher ed institution and she moves her lips when she reads.
• Still, I can’t sugarcoat it.
• There’s no way around it.
• Your carefully curated resumé is not worth the paper it is never printed on.
• Your social media footprint is what matters now.
• Once again: overshare.
• Don’t airbrush it.
• Be yourself.
• Kardashianize your life.
• Authenticity is everything on social media.
• The opposite of which is the reason why so many Match.com initiated relationships go nowhere.
• The difference between the romanticized, carefully curated, photoshopped avatar and the real person is too wide.
• The story doesn’t match.
• The meet face2face and flesh2flesh rarely meets expectations.
• Hence the vicious circle of disappointment.
• Terrible to a Milennial’s self-esteem.
• The digital era is about processing large amounts of data in a short period of time?
• Yes.
• The digital era is about mobility & cutting cords?
• Sure.
• But none of these definitions fully captures the essence of the era we are living in.
• The digital era is, simply put, DIY taken to 11.
• On steroids.
• It is true, for instance, that most books by politicians or big shot personalities were and are written by ghostwriters (no living politician ever read a book, let alone write one).
• Well, the book format still provides a certain level of distance that allows faux writers to get away with the whole scam.
• Social media don’t grant this luxury.
• We thought technology was going to simplify our lives, right?
• The proverbial dream of the 10-hour work week.
• The utopia of happily toiling remotely, at our own pace.
• From home or from a beach somewhere.
• Well, exactly the opposite happened.
• We are busier than ever.
• We are working remotely, yes: overworking from home, at airports, hotels, restaurants, waiting in line at the grocer store, in traffic, doing 90 mph on the HOV lane.
• 24/7.
• At this pace we will need to hire someone to have sexual intercourse with our significant others.
• In the DIY era what might the solution be for corporations, aka brands.
• Corporations are not an individual human being.
• The logic described abover doesn’t apply, does it?
• Methinks it does too.
• Corporations cannot hide behind a logo anymore.
• PR & legal departments need to back off or find a way to streamline, systematize and accelerate their meddling (easier said than done, yup).
• If corporations want to have credibility and traction, they need to put a human face on it.
• Can the face be a hired gun, a so-called influencer?
• If you consider Tim Cook, Jony Ive or Elon Musk hired guns, yes.
• Brands will need to become movements.
• Like political parties.
• With armies of boots on the social media ground advocating for it.
• I said boots, not bots.
• Employees and customers operating as social media brand ambassadors & advocates.
• The practice of hiring a celeb and getting him or her to follow a script and wax poetic about your product or service on his/her SocMed feeds might be ending its life cycle.
• Target audiences will call your bluff sooner rather than later.