by Yasmine Saab, Associate Business Director, Social Content, Publicis Groupe
In 2014, ‘doing social’ as an advertiser usually meant uploading a few images to the brand page every month, accompanied by a lengthy caption studded with hashtags. Thinking about the way we used to advertise is like looking at old photos: you want to laugh (or cry) at the way you dressed, but at the time, it felt like you were at the cutting edge of innovation. Social advertising is completely different today of course: the landscape evolves so quickly that you either move with time or get left behind, looking like you’re dressed for 2014, in 2024.
This is epitomized in ‘trends’: simple, typically video content replicated by thousands of social users, each putting their own spin on it. (Think ‘Tell me without telling me’ or ‘Things in my home that just make sense’.) Being part of a trend is a great way for brands to become more visible and relatable. The only problem? The shelf-life of a trend is usually two weeks, barring a few exceptions. We’ve all seen it: an advertiser who finally stumbles into a trend, weeks after it has disappeared from social feeds. The tone of voice rings false and betrays a try-hard marketing effort. Rather than bringing the advertiser closer to consumers, it harms the brand image – if its social creative is musty, its business proposition can’t be much better. More than ever, we need rapid insights and agile production to avoid falling behind on consumer tastes and ending up as ‘that brand people used to love back in the 2020s’.
Developing a video from scratch, only for it to be outdated in a couple of weeks… doesn’t sound like a sustainable business model. It can work, however, and yield amazing results: since adopting this tack, we’ve driven incredible success for our brands - especially those catering to Gen Z and millennials - and for our own agency, sweeping multiple awards in the process.
This is how we cracked the code on trend-based agile production powered by Content Intelligence (CI): a proprietary Publicis software that combs search and social signals, transforming data into actionable insights.
Live in the future
What’s trending today is going to be passé by the time the content is published, so it’s not worth looking there. Spot the train before it pulls into the station by scouring the internet for trends that are still percolating; this can be done by monitoring the volume of mentions for a certain hashtag, or how many reposts a piece of audio has gotten in the last 48 hours. Is the line graph going up? If so, the next question becomes, how can I make this relevant for my brand? If it doesn’t align with the equity or just feels like a cringey force fit, best to drop it and find another trend.
De-risk and decide
Content Intelligence helps advertisers make data-informed decisions, thereby de-risking their content ideas. With that said, advertisers will always need to take calculated and measured risks when it comes to jumping on a trend. In the world of social, the tide turns quickly, and advertisers need to prepare scenarios with agencies on how to act if it does. A solid community management protocol should be in place to define the immediate questions: Who should be notified? At what point do we respond? How do we measure the extent of brand impact?
Move quickly
For this, you need to have the infrastructure in place: a nimble production team that can be mobilized immediately. Once a concept is greenlit, filming and editing shouldn’t take more than a week. The motto here is: ‘Done is better than perfect’. To embrace social trends, we must move away from the mindset that every last detail in a video represents the brand. As long as we’re landing the message and bringing the trend to life correctly, we march (or, rather, sprint) forward.
Test-and-learn, nonstop
Every piece of published content is a data point added to the brand’s social performance, worth analyzing immediately. With agile production, we don’t have the luxury of sitting back until the quarterly report is due. The best place to look is engagement KPIs within the individual post metrics: What was the view-through rate like? Why did people stop watching when they did? What does the comment section look like? All these lead to the most important question, which is: how can I refine the next batch of content knowing what I know now?
The framework for agile production sounds simple enough, but operationalizing it takes a ton of creativity and legwork. It’s especially challenging because the imperative is to move at a frenzied pace: the content is not something we can mull over a few weeks in advance, like an in-store promo or back-to-school campaign. Brands that do pull off agile production however have the coveted status of being ‘trendy’ and ‘relevant’. At the same time, those who agonize over detail and make decisions based on aging data will ultimately publish content that is out of touch – the social media equivalent of skinny jeans and ankle socks. The difference between these two scenarios will be in a matter of days.
