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.
Or does this just prove that if you want to sell sh1t, use TV, because on social it gets found out?
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…?”.
Why is having “targeted marketing” in a brand’s communications arsenal a bad thing?
How does this say anything about social? It says more about Bob’s lack of understanding.
Shifting your advertising to social media doesn’t always work. In fact, few companies use social media to sell shedloads of products or services.
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.)
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…
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
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…
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.
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…
“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.
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”
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.
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.
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.