Brands must ignore fear-peddling hucksters and spend with confidence
King Kong founder Sabri Suby argues against doubt-peddling, recession-induced media narratives that are frightening brands out of their advertising spend.
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve faced an onslaught of attention-grabbing digital media headlines. Snap Inc’s shares fell nearly 40% following a profit warning from its developer. Facebook parent Meta Platforms faced a $53 billion drop in market value. Apple’s iOS 14.5 has thrown a spanner in the works for Meta when it comes to tracking. Google is facing a threat from Neeva… apparently.
Should we be worried? In short, no. I sleep soundly at night knowing that the highest paid engineers in the world at a $500 billion market cap company – and the 8th most valuable company on the planet – aren’t just going to let all their revenue dry up. They’ll find a work around for the tracking dilemma, and will weather the oncoming recession storms.
Money follows attention. And where’s the attention? It certainly isn’t on TV, or billboards, or radio. Social media is the number one dealer of dopamine in the world. It’s engineered to be highly addictive. The huge increase in screen time over the last two years might dip a little as people go out into the world a little bit, but like it or not, our screen addiction is here to stay. Once those neural pathways are formed in the brain for dopamine, it’s very difficult to break.
Another binary article about the demise of traditional media and the inexorable rise of social. Last time I looked, both were doing just fine. It’s so easy to play off one media type versus another, but it’s much more responsible to talk about the merits of both, especially working in concert.
But that wouldn’t be interesting and trendy would it?
“Social media is the number one dealer of dopamine in the world. It’s engineered to be highly addictive.” – the fact that this is presented as a positive in this article pretty much discredits it.