Billy Mcfarland suffers from a mentality that many millennials struggle with, the notion that you can skip hard work and go straight to success. We are in the age of the 30 year old tech millionaire and instagram influencer, which means we have a skewed perception of the paths to success.
There is no Elevator to Success, You Have to Take the Stairs
The reality is it takes years to establish yourself in any industry. Even the most successful digital entrepreneurs fail to illustrate how much work is involved in coding an app, creating a curated aesthetic, and professionally branding a product or service.
As a professional digital marketer, who went to business school, I am just now getting to a point where I feel like an expert in my industry at 6 years in the game. Success in business is built off of informed trial, error and the ability to parse the experience of your peers and mentors for personally relevant tactics. Becoming an industry leader, staying sharp and being able to influence others is predicated on education, innovating on what you know and collaborating with people who have different resources than you.
Impressing the Bots
In this digital age we have been reduced to our search history and the data collected by the cookies in our browsers. Recently, I was chatting with the head of creative at my agency and she remarked, “I draw the line at glitter, never in my life have I Googled body glitter.” After laughing at how ridiculous her outrage was for being served an add about body glitter on instagram, we discussed how we have become hyper conscious of the things we search and say in earshot of our phones because we will inevitably be served ads for corresponding products on all social platforms. We will save the “phones are listening” conspiracy theory for another post.
“Fyre is the festival equivalent to “flying the plane while it’s still being built.””
The innate need to impress our digital peers and the inevitable groupthink that follows is another major pitfall of social media. The fact that all it took for the Fyre Festival to generate actionable demand was paid social media posts by influencers who had no tangible connection to the festival shows the power of appearance versus reality. At no point did the creators prioritize infrastructure of the festival, similarly all of the media agencies involved glady neglected all the red flags associated with putting marketing campaigns before the product.
The Great Facebook Outage of 2019
On March 13th, Facebook and instagram experienced their biggest outage to date. As a platform that generates 110 Million dollars in ad revenue a day, an unplanned almost 24 hour outage has had seismic effects on businesses all over the world. As a professional social media buyer, the outage has a direct impact on my client accounts and the way we will build strategies going forward.
Technological downtime has a profound effect on the millennial mind. With the average attention span of consumers hovering between 1-3 seconds per piece of content, businesses now have to have surgical precision when creating content. The ability to maintain critical thinking skills when absorbing all the of the media we are bombarded with on hourly basis will always reign supreme in setting you apart from your peers.
The opportunity lies within the flaws, competing ad platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Snapchat have a unique window to grab market share with new advertising feature rollouts and better data management. Advertisers must diversify their media spend in order to avoid being at the mercy of any particular social network.
As always, please share your own stories and thoughts in the comments. Don’t forget to subscribe!