Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Fake News Memes

This year, fake news has made serious inroads towards toppling house prices and Rupert’s Tesla as the dominant dinner party topic of conversation.

While chatting and chomping with Stephen Waddington in the more down to earth surroundings of Frank’s cafe on Southwark Street, we talked about the demise of the sub-editor, rediscovering the lighter side of Twitter and the joy of making and doing.

The conversation led to the idea of creating memes based on word plays of fake news. Over the following week, I peppered social media at odd hours with a range of these memes. The full collection is displayed below.

This isn’t a clever commentary on the news business. It’s not an analysis of the state of our civic debate. It’s certainly not content marketing designed to build trust, show leadership or sell consultancy. It’s a little bit of fun. Because it’s fun to have fun.

Twitter ads, disclaimers and highly regulated industries

Twitter is a tricky medium for advertising but its user base is valuable.

On average, Twitter’s UK user base is better educated and higher earning than the population as a whole. That makes it a bit of a prize for some products, including some which are highly regulated like financial services.

Twitter users are also an opinionated bunch who often angrily coalesce around an issue and their regular flare ups become fodder for news outlets. So there’s a notable risk when advertising to them.

A look at financial services

So how to advertise Twitter users? Let’s take a look at some ads by financial services firms to see the approaches different firms are taking.

Hargreaves Lansdown, which provides investment services to retail investors, has been running ads that link to information about the funds that are most popular with its ISA clients. They have a clear disclaimer that there is a, “risk of loss.”

Meanwhile, UBS bank’s digital wealth management offering, called SmartWealth, is running ads with a clear call to action telling investors to, “place your money into UBS SmartWealth.” They too run a disclaimer that informs us, “Capital @ risk.” The disclaimer is certainly less blunt Hargreaves Lansdown’s but is just a clear. Interestingly, UBS SmartWealth only uses Twitter to run ads. It has not tweeted in an effort to build an audience or a conversation.

Standard Life Invest, use no disclaimer in this Twitter ad. The account, which in its description says it’s only for investment professionals, instead takes an approach whereby you click through to a screen which requires you to confirm you are an investment professional before proceeding to take you through to the advertised content. This approach certainly frees up characters in tweets and also allows for longer and more complete disclaimers. A drawback to this approach is that the bounce rate is likely to be quite high.

Brand building

BNY Mellon take the approach of using Twitter as a brand building tool. A simple ad, linking to a nicely designed (if a little too self-reverential) quiz that seeks to place BNY Mellon as an innovator.

What should we take from this array of approaches? Well, firstly, on Twitter there’s no standard way to deploy the disclaimers highly regulated industries need to use. That’s probably a good thing from a creative perspective. Certainly, in the examples cited, when sharing information that might be seen as financial advice, the disclaimers are delivered before you get to the content.

Another point to note is that targeting is poor. One of the ads is for investment professionals (and I’m a long way from being one) and two others promote wealth and investment management brands which provide services that, to put it politely, I’m probably not the target customer. That’s not to say those managing the accounts have chosen the wrong audience targeting. We all know that Twitter’s targeting can be a little off sometimes.

Finally, we should note that Twitter, in its thus far fruitless drive to turn a decent profit, is constantly developing new ad products. Financial services and other highly regulated industries tend to be cautious spenders but also big spenders. It’s likely Twitter will keep launching new ad products and tweaking its services to capture this lucrative market.

Political sketch – 14/10/17

Asked a pointless hypothetical,
Deployed as a ruse,
To score the lead headline,
on the evening news.

The May-bot fluffed it,
A tweetstorm ensued,
Leave and Remain activists,
Need no excuse to feud.

While politicians strategise,
About which Brexit to pursue,
Their chess moves are pointless,
Talk radio’s playing Buckaroo.

Who’s controlling the social media treadmill?

The ideas that attention spans are shorter and audiences operate in discrete silos are received wisdom. As a result, companies produce and repurpose more content than they previously did. All this happens under the presumption that consumer habits are changing and firms need to keep up.

Last week, Instagram rolled out polls. The move, mimicking functionality from Twitter, enables users to run polls in their Instagram Stories. It’s an incremental and unsurprising move. And yet, when you note the vast array of other changes (like trialling swipe up links for some accounts) that are only available for those publishing Stories, it’s obvious that it’s all designed to encourage more, and more frequent, posting.

Meanwhile, posts published on Google’s My Business, which helps firms take control of how they appear in search, only appear in search results for a week after they are published. After that, they expire. Again, this is a move to encourage more frequent publishing.

Over on Facebook, for those seeking to maximise their organic reach the consensus seems to be the consistency with which you post (alongside how well received your posts are) has a dramatic impact on reach.

So, alongside the received wisdom that consumers want targeted, bite-sized content, we have social networks increasingly shrinking the lifespan of content.

Consumers and platforms are turning up the speed of the treadmill. Companies are the ones doing the running, but they’re not in control.

Hire the best

Today, FuturePRoof has published my analysis showing that the PR industry is further behind on ethnic minority representation than it believes. I’ve tried to construct and present that analysis in a dispassionate and reasoned way. But here I’d like to outline why I think the lack of diversity, in all its forms, needs addressing.

At the heart of the analysis lies a simple assumption: that no ethnic group has a greater proportion of creative or talented people. In the wider context of diversity, I’d extend that to say that regardless of its wealth, sexual orientation or gender, no group of people are more creative or talented than another. This is an assumption I strongly believe to be true.

If you gather a group of industry leaders together, you’ll hear the same refrains about the lack of talent. Talk to awards judges and they’ll lament the paucity of truly creative campaigns.

Despite this, dataset after dataset reveals that we continue to hire from the same tiny strata of society. Let’s take graduates as an example. The industry tends to look for graduates from redbrick universities. We compete with Goldman Sachs and Clifford Chance and Accenture and almost every other business out there to fight for the attention of this tiny group. We fight for newly minted classicists, economists and historians.

And yet there are a group of people for whom ‘Classics’ is a type of shoe. This group has creative and talented people but they’re not travelling along the formal education channels that we use as a proxy for talent. So we ignore them.

That ignored group contains award-winning campaigns that will never happen. Ideas that could, but won’t, transform companies and countries. Words that would sell millions of products, if only their creator was given the chance.

But we’ll never see any of this. Because we do things the way we always have. Because we want to get the best we can of the group everyone’s fighting for (except when we’re hiring friends’ kids or clients’ nieces and nephews).

To me, the need for diversity is not primarily about ethics. It is about getting the best, most creative talent. Looking at the skewed demographic structure of the industry, it’s not surprising we complain about a lack of creativity. We’re not hiring the best talent.