As many of us look ahead—to the end of the year or the next campaign on our editorial calendar—social creative agency That Lot found more success this year by looking back.
At Adweek’s Social Media Week: London, That Lot co-founders and co-executive creative directors David Levin and David Schneider described their social strategy as “rolling back the years.” Glossy brand imaging and refined copy have been traded for what earlier years on the internet looked like.
The crux of good work
“It’s been about going back to the things that are important,” said Levin, noting that this second year of existing through a pandemic called on people to connect more meaningfully with those around them.
Brands that succeeded during this time followed that lead, by authentically connecting with the community and valuing their contributions to the new shared spaces they’d created.
Brands successfully got people through the pandemic’s heaviest weeks by “not just broadcasting, but creating as much of a dialogue loop as you can—and not just in community management,” Schneider said.
He spotlighted brands like Spotify and Amazon that engaged their audiences with “conversation starters”—questions that followers could not only answer easily, but would also be curious about how others answered. This generated the type of organic reach and interaction that, as an industry, many thought was behind us.
A return to organic communication
“So many of the biggest wins on social media were organic ones,” Levin noted, citing examples like Wendy’s recent “name change” to Meat, as well as Tesco’s bad pun in honor of the U.K.’s appearance in the Euro 2020 semifinal.
Whether these attempts at cheeky communication went over well (as Wendy’s did) or poorly (as Tesco’s knowingly did), it got conversation started in ways that, again, hearkened back to an earlier time on these platforms.
Elsewhere, the shine wore off the kind of elaborate brand presence that had dominated social media—at first by necessity, but later by design. “Fancy visuals got stripped back,” Schneider noted, citing a Chicagoland area #gotmilk campaign sourced from user generated content, “[and we found that the more] lightly curated, lightly editorialized, the more authentic it felt for the times that we’re in now.”
Socialize your digital approach
This communal, meme-ified and even deliberately antiquated form of communication is bleeding into other areas of marketing. Simple-yet-snappy language and sparse imagery is influencing how we speak and design for print and outdoor work.
SOURCE : Adweek
