How Contagious Can Social Media Really Be?
The new Contagious Index helps but contagiousness should not be the top priority when crafting your ad campaign
By Antonio Nunez*
THE SOCIAL MEDIA advertising industry has been built on the idea of Contagiousness. Social Media’s promised paradise was that of effortlessly making fans promote branded content until it went viral through word of mouth –ideally, on a global scale and for a very reasonable price. More than a decade later, has this promise been fulfilled? Is Contagiousness still the marketing god to worship?
How Contagiousness became contagious
After the demise of interruptive marketing, marketers collectively embraced Google’s advertising model where commercial messages target people already interested in a subject via search query, solving their needs trough content with the less friction possible. Marketing’s main functions became managing a brand’s PPC budget, SEO and SEM while constantly optimizing its digital properties. SEO agencies and Digital Media agencies boomed.
The Consumer Insight and the Emotional Single Minded Proposition were discarded; Content, Utility and UX become marketing´s new gods to be worshiped.
