Social is the default advertising strategy for those who know nothing about advertising
A trip to a baseball game taught Bob Hoffman something important about shifting your advertising strategy to social: it doesn't always work.
As a resident of Oakland, CA and a baseball fan, I have more than a passing interest in the health and welfare of the Oakland A’s baseball team.
Like all sports franchises, the A’s have had their ups and downs. But in recent years they have become one of the most hapless franchises in all of American sports.
For years the ownership of the A’s have turned off fans by trading excellent players for “prospects,” hinting that they were going to leave town, constantly whining about their predicament, and making one false start after another trying to build a new stadium. They have also had lousy teams.
But the end of last season was hopeful. Although they finished in last place in their division, they had some good young players and showed promise for an exciting 2018.
With that as background I went to an A’s game last week. It was very depressing. It was a night game in which parking was free (saving fans $30) and still the park was empty. There was one other person in my row. The A’s announced attendance of about 7,000, which means there were probably fewer than 5,000 people really there. The stadium holds over 50,000. And this was the first week of the season, when fans are at their most hopeful and interest is high. Something, I thought, is terribly wrong.
And then I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle…
“For many years, the A’s had the best television ads in the game… This season, the A’s have moved their advertising in-house, and the TV spots are no more… The A’s have decided to focus on targeted marketing this season rather than mass advertising, and they’re segmenting their advertising campaigns to customized audiences…”
“advertising in-house…targeted marketing… customized audiences…?” This ol’ boy doesn’t need an interpreter to know what that bullshit means – social media crap to millennials. It’s the default advertising strategy for everyone who knows nothing about advertising.
So far in this early season the A’s have missed every advertising and marketing opportunity they’ve had. In the first week they had potentially the most exciting player in a generation – Shohei Ohtani – come to town. Did they tell the market about it? No, they were too busy doing “targeted marketing to customized audiences.”
They have a player, Khris Davis, who has more home runs than everyone in baseball except the much ballyhooed Giancarlo Stanton the past two years. Have the A’s told the five million or so people in their market about him? No, they’ve been too busy doing “targeted marketing to customized audiences.”
So I did a little research to see how well their new strategy is working.
All of last year the A’s averaged 18,446 people per game. The first eight games of this year they averaged 15,212. A drop of almost 20%. And it’s really a lot worse. Last year’s attendance figures include the dog days of August. And this year’s small sample include both opening day and opening night, often the biggest crowds of the season.
Which leads us to tonight. The A’s are staging a generous, but potentially misguided marketing stunt. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first game in Oakland they have distributed 200,000 free tickets for tonight’s game – 200,000 tickets and fewer than 60,000 seats. What could go wrong?
And what for? So they can have a meaningless PR claim – “the biggest crowd ever to watch an A’s baseball game.” Which proves what? That if you give something away for nothing people will take it? This stunt has a marketing value of zero. In the best case scenario it will be forgotten in 48 hours.
The Oakland A’s problems go way deeper than marketing incompetence. But when you’re in the toilet, the last thing you need is amateurs screwing around with the plumbing.
Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and is the author of the Ad Contrarian blog.
Or does this just prove that if you want to sell sh1t, use TV, because on social it gets found out?
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Good on Bob Hoffman for calling out social media crap. Like Dave Trott, Bob’s one of the few people who see through “advertising in-house…targeted marketing… customized audiences…?”.
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How does this say anything about social? It says more about Bob’s lack of understanding.
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Agree with huh. To me it just means the team sucks and no one wants to see them play live. As a result, assuming they can’t afford to splash money on big TV spots which clearly were not providing a return in the previous years anyway…
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Shifting your advertising to social media doesn’t always work. In fact, few companies use social media to sell shedloads of products or services.
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Why is having “targeted marketing” in a brand’s communications arsenal a bad thing?
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As Bob said these averages are skewed because counting the whole 2017 season with August etc.
If you take the first 8 games from the 2017 season the average was more like ~28,000 so like a 45% drop which IS significant
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Perhaps the issue is that they went from a good creative agency to shoddy in-house creative, or that they went from R&F focus to micro-targeting.
If only social media gave advertisers the opportunity to reach big audiences with good creative! Wait…
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Hmmmm… Big Budget Bob is surely a shill for the TV companies.
He’s picked a campaign that failed and applied the theory to the whole industry.
TRUE STORY TIME: I spent $100 last week to help a mate with a Monday night gig. A decent targeted audience yielded 40k views and 3k interactions. The gig was almost capacity. Not bad for a Monday night cover band.
That $100 wouldn’t have even got me a cab to the TV studio.
Bob might be right to have a go at the creative and the team behind it, but to argue the platform is crap shows a deliberate ignorance.
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Sometimes if a product, a service or a baseball team are crap and the experience at the stadium is crap; people won’t buy the product, use the service or go and watch the baseball.
Koala mattresses – watch these guys soar. Their foundation, if managed by Hoffman, would probably never have been built and they would already be on the scrap heap. Great product – great service – built on social. (Eventually TV might be part of the strat, but if at the beginning, they would have gone under.)
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Classic Bob.
The A’s have gone from first in their division in 2013 to last in 2017. Their product stinks. But, sure, let’s blame the fact they don’t advertise on TV anymore…
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“This ol’ boy doesn’t need an interpreter to know what that bullshit means – social media crap to millennials. It’s the default advertising strategy for everyone who knows nothing about advertising.”
Sounds like the ol’ boy has no idea about modern advertising at all. Yet another jaded, industry-dinosaur struggling to face up to reality, instead choosing to blame millennials for his own inabilities.
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What’s even better than Bob’s misunderstanding of how to use the old socials, is Mumbrella’s mix up between Basketball and Basebal – “A trip to a basketball game taught Bob Hoffman”
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Thanks Chris, I mentioned to the team when this piece came in how Aussies and Brits don’t understand baseball. I guess you proved the point. We’ve fixed that now.
Cheers,
Paul — Mumbrella
Complaining about social advertising is the default strategy for those who know nothing about social.
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I could not agree with you more. Social is only another channel, it’s not the be all and end all of distributing marketing information. Unfortunately, because the channels have atomised (we have more places to have our ads than we can reasonably afford to utilize) all advertising is less effective nowadays. Some social is needed. But unless there was quantitative proof the old campaign was ineffective you wouldn’t terminate it. Perhaps they are experiencing a budget crisis and turned to social because that’s all they could afford? Good commentary Bob.
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No better way to advertise your incompetence than to say
‘HAH YOU KNOW NOTHING THIS IS THE BEST PLATFORM TO USE FOR EVERYTHING’
or
‘HAH YOU KNOW NOTHING THAT PLATFORM IS ENTIRELY USELESS’
Seems to be the purview of grumpy old white dudes whining about social media and aggravating morons who jump on whatever the latest bandwagon is in order to make up for their lack of talent.
It’s not hard folks. If it works it’s a good thing. If it doesn’t, then that means it didn’t work here but it might still work elsewhere.
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