New Media, Old Ideas.

In the world of today you can’t exist without the help of social media. I don’t care who the fuck you are or what you think about twitter, if I ask you if you have Facebook and you say “no! I don’t have time for stuff like that” I don’t buy it for one second. How the FUCK can you not have time for Facebook? It’s obviously not because you are too busy being social, because if you were social, you’d have a fuckin Facebook. What am I getting at here? Facebook and other social media channels raise big opportunities for advertisers, and they are being hailed as the newest, greatest and best thing for advertising.

The problem is, like your bullshit busy schedule, I don’t buy it.

In my time in agencies I have seen nothing to support the support for the use of new social media in advertising campaigns. In fact! One creative director told Adam and I to not bother with our pretty fuckin awesome and slick campaign on Facebook because “no one actually bothers to click the link” Sorry bro but who the fuck are you? A creative director? Oh. Better question, are you father fucking time?!

I’m just going out on a limb here and will assume that 90% of you are like me and will click the crap out of any link our friends post because 400% of the time you are on Facebook you are bored shitless, procrastinating, and looking for something, anything, to do. Social media is by far the most awesomely powerful tool. How did they get the message out about the sweet new cobbler on the corner of the street back in the day? I believe a classic something called ‘word of mouth’. Take word of mouth, lock it in a basement with the alternative between cutting its dick off or doing a ton of crack, wait till it chooses crack, then unleash it on the world and you have Social media.

Andy Blood, Creative Director of TBWA in Auckland gave a seminar in which he talked about the importance of social media, blogging etc, in the proliferation of advertising messages. It is easy. For example, I have 203 friends on Facebook. I send out my message to all of them. Say to be really rough on my message only 10 of my friends pass the message on to their friends. Then again, only 10 of their friends pass it on. All of a sudden in my first three tiers of broadcast I have reached 10 > 100 > 1000 people…. Exponential growth. Morale of the story, with social media, only a handful of people need to care in order for you to hit big numbers in terms of exposure.

The most upsetting thing for us in New Zealand is that as far as stuff like this goes, the guys who are running the show right now still want to play around with TVCs, Radio, Billboards, Print etc… while we are saying, fuck! Lets do all of that but online, or with an online component, its way more badass. But they won’t have a word of it, to be fair some of the bigger agencies are getting involved but for the most part it looks like we’ll have to wait till we are wearing the big boy pants in the agency before you see some real e-innovative shit going down.

In the mean time, who wants to see a picture that makes me look pretty 1337?

Everyone? Gangs.

It's my lvl 80 Mage and The Lich King, how cool is that.