Mentioning the increasing importance of Facebook and Twitter as marketing tools is a bit like pointing at the moon at this point.
Publicly traded companies are paying Facebook and Twitter top dollar to access their audiences — why would Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) spend millions on print ads when they can advertise to millions by starting up a corporate Twitter feed and Facebook profile?
However, investors must also realize how social networks’ are transforming traditional advertising by convincing a target audience to willingly participate in an ad campaign’s execution.
A perfect example is the upcoming television commercials Super Bowl commercials — already an anticipated entertainment event for the American public — which will be more than video vignettes fueling Monday morning’s office chat. They’re going to be social network-integrated machines looking to hook customers across a variety of platforms.
A recent USA Today report highlighted German car maker Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG buying TV ad time for their respective Mercedes-Benz and Audi divisions. While the companies have bought chunks of the 68 30-second commercial spots that will air on Feb. 6 via News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) Fox network, the campaigns have already started on Facebook and Twitter.
During its fourth Super Bowl commercial, Audi will host an “Inner Circle” event, which will reward the 10 “most active” fans from Facebook and Twitter. Audi Chief Marketing Officer Scott Keough told the newspaper, “We’re trying to use social media to glue everything together. The luxury automobile maker is enjoying a strong close to calendar 2010, with global sales up 5.2% year-on-year in November, and up 15% for the year overall compared to 2009. The company doesn’t necessarily need Facebook-related contests to build their brand, but the integration of social media in their advertising campaigns is essential if they want to appear relevant to consumers. As social media consultant Pam Moore says, ‘The ones who don’t do it will be left behind.'”
Mercedes-Benz also is jumping into the game with its Super Bowl ad campaign, something the company’s marketing vice president Stephen Cannon calls a “strategic leap of faith.” The car maker is launching “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race,” giving away two cars to two-person teams who garner the most Mercedes-Benz-related Tweets and Facebook “likes” between now and the Super Bowl.
While Mercedes isn’t really in the position of needing to raise its brand awareness — its sales grew 10% in November, putting the company on track to meet its goal of growing passenger car sales by 10% overall for the year — the auto maker also needs to show it understands the importance and leveraging the opportunies held by social media.
Still, the ubiquity of social networking-specific advertising campaigns could ultimately backfire. For now, they remain a low-cost, high-return way to augment the expensive TV spots, but they risk alienating the user populations on both services. News Corp.’s Myspace social network lost countless users to Facebook over the past few years in part because Myspace became seen by as more of an advertising tool more than a way to share information with friends.
Social network integration also is becoming so widespread that users will naturally just start tuning the campaigns out. Social-media consultant Jay Baer stressed to USA Today, “Most efforts won’t be able to stand out amidst the flood of ‘Let’s Do A Facebook Contest About the Super Bowl’ marketing lemmings.”
This year’s Super Bowl may represent the last year that social networks can help raise corporate brand awareness at a lower cost than usual. It may also mean businesses start to consider how far Facebook and Twitter can take them — which may not bode well for two companies said to be considering the IPO market.
As of this writing, Anthony Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
