Social media is taking the power away from money and giving it to “the good ideas” and those who posses them.
In the past, the only way to bring attention to your brand was to spend a shit-ton of money developing marketing and brand campaigns and then paying even more for ad-space and media-buys to get the word out. It helped if your idea was a good one, but that was never enough. This adversely weighted the “value” of a campaign on the media buy and the marketing budget rather than on the creative. Now, with social networks, the focus has shifted. (Thanks Twitter!) The “great idea” has taken the power away from “design-by-committees”, away from fear based, “me too” advertising, away from money.
Fewer and fewer people care to see a bad superbowl ad or a spot after the local news. They get their fix from conversation sharing. Typically, people don’t share stuff that sucks. (If they do, unfriend them. Unless, of course, it sucks so badly that it becomes awesome again – see “Chocolate Love” for an example.) Great creative and design now has a chance to have an impact by its very nature. If you can create a good idea, it will spread from person to person on its own, over the ‘net, with very little effort from the accounting department. It follows that we, as creatives, “should’ have more money for the creative, (cough). After-all, letting creative minds wander will reduce the need for expensive campaign support. If the idea is good, its impact will reflect and refract throughout society simply because it is compelling. It moves people. It moves the brand. And they tell two people and so on… and so on. And that folks, is free if the creative is good – and mind blowingly expensive if its mediocre. Truly good creative can save so much damn money because the idea is much less dependent on a media buy and marketing blitz to find success… and its impact can be measured with fancy charts and graphs in real time to keep the accounting folks happy. Just keep sharing good ideas and your friends will do the same.
