Published on
August 27, 2024
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Welcome to the Breakdown, a weekly roundup of the best real-life marketing examples, created for marketers and agency folk that want to create work that actually works.
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In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ standalone social ✨ - individual social posts from brands fully handing over the reins to a social media manager who spends all their life on TikTok, or brands just wanting to get down with the kids.
Sort of, it’s a bit weird.
In July of this year, British celebs Maya Jama and Stormzy announced they were breaking up. As a beloved couple, they felt the need to explain to their fans properly, rather than let the media do it for them, and so they posted a few paragraphs about the break-up.
I’m sure many brands looked at this and created their own versions of the post, but WeTransfer’s stood out - partly because they paid meme pages (that I follow) to repost it. Here’s the post:
It uses the classic comedy tactic of a bait-and-switch. It’s weird for brands to post like this, so you naturally assume WeTransfer is shutting down after the first line. I’m not a power-user or anything, but WeTransfer is incredibly useful sometimes, so that really did hit me hard.
Then they switch on you. “WeTransfer links will no longer expire.” Well, that was a lie, because a few sentences later they say, “[we have] extended the expiration date up to 30 days in the WeTransfer mobile app.”
I think this is funny? The bait-and-switch is good, and the idea of breaking up with expiring file transfers is too. The meme format they used was actually relevant and recent - but the thing you have to ask whenever brands do this kind of thing is what the objective is.
It’s easy to hide behind a bland “Let’s get people to feel more X about our brand by posting on social media!” With WeTransfer, though, it must be about driving free usage. There are a million and one different ways to send files using tech we already have (email, Airdrop, Google drive etc.). WeTransfer’s funnel from free file sending to paid users is probably the part of the process they have most visibility on. So if they can get 10,000 people to use the free service, they can predictably earn an amount of revenue. This post, and the insight that people don’t like when a WeTransfer link goes out of date, actually might work in convincing people to use them over another service.
In the sense that I think this post is shit.
I don’t really like to dump on brands and their advertising. It’s pretty lazy, and I know how much care, love and thought goes into making every asset. But I can’t help but feel like that care, love and thought was slightly rushed on this one.
This is a tiny post. The kind that has been displayed to 50% of the target audience once as part of a big test. But that doesn’t mean it gets a pass.
The post copy is straightforward enough, if lazily formatted.
“Enjoy 30% off your next 2 trips.”
Cool, that’s the main message - an LTO to get people to book a cab. But the accompanying post. Oh dear. I like the Notes app idea, really I do. But let’s take the issues one at a time:
Yes yes, I’m nitpicking as usual. But I think brands seem to forget something on social that is common in other forms of advertising. When you make a TV ad, you are inviting yourself into someone’s home and interrupting what they want to do. You don’t need to apologise for it, but you need to entertain them. The same goes for social media. Yeah, it’s more transient. It’s cheaper. People scroll by without reading. But that makes the point even stronger - you need to entertain them.
I don’t think brands need to ‘blend in’ with social feeds by creating content that is similar to what people are already looking at, as some people say. But when you hear jargon like “thumb-stopping creative”, it’s not budget that matters, it’s attention. Both winning attention, and attention to detail.
This time, it is actually shitposting.
I’ve mentioned KFC Portugal’s TikTok account in a previous Breakdown. It’s incredible. Their content is so absurd that it fits right in with the rest of the internet’s shitposters.
Dominos are a little more restrained. Everything is always on product, and is all a bit less chaotic that KFC Portugal’s posts (for reference, here are 3 personal favs: 1, 2, 3)
Recently, Dominos have been posting about the Premier League, slotting in to the gargantuan amount of content that comes with the start of the season. But I wanted to focus on this post in particular:
This was a sponsored post. I’m not sure if Dominos put money behind every post they make, but they did for this one. If you’re going to pay for people to see your ad, you need to know what you want that money to do. It could be to drive follows for your account, with the assumption being that if more people see more of your content more of the time, then more people will buy pizza from you more often. Or, wrapped inside this weird AI voiceover, it could be that showing off the pizza-making process is a quality message. We all know that cooking content and ‘making’ content (where the process of making a thing gets squeezed into short-form video) does well online. Showing that Dominos pizzas are made (rather than manufactured) could be an effort to drive perceptions around quality for Dominos. Which are tracked in some survey somewhere.
And it’s hard to hate them for it.
TikTok has had slideshows for a while now. People have gotten used to seeing the faint dots at the bottom of the screen indicating that they can swipe to see the next image in the slideshow.
And recently, brands have been abusing this.
Amazon have a series of ads out right now that are just a regular video, but with those same dots superimposed. People try to swipe left - and when you do that on a video ad, you are taken to the ad landing page. That’s right, it’s a conversion.
So Amazon dropped this ad (I haven’t included the whole video, everything that happens after the first second isn’t even important):
And were met with these comments:
Weirdly enough, it seems like the commenters find it funny. Like it’s an in-joke with everyone else on the platform.
Before I saw this, I would have said that this is a terrible idea. It annoys people, even if it does technically get them to the landing page / app and boost conversion scores. Those scores are fake anyway, since most people will immediately back out of the app and go back to TikTok.
But it doesn’t annoy people. Well, not as much as I thought it would. When you’re Amazon, and public perception really doesn’t track that much with performance (how many years has it been since Amazon’s awful business practices were public information? And how much has their value risen since then?), then you don’t care that people get a little annoyed.
Amazon is one of the internet’s most effective conversion engines, even though the web and app design hasn’t changed for years. There are long long tales about Amazon’s engineering efficiency and commitment to data. They will know that if they can get X many people to spend Y many seconds just on the homepage of the app, they will win Z in revenue. And this ad, as annoying and underhand as it is, achieves that with surprising effectiveness.