058: Could Threads re-invent the future of advertising?
The stakes and capabilities are high enough to take the swing
Dear Zuck and Mosseri,
What a week!
Kudos to your team on creating a space with 100 million apparently well-mannered users! I’m thrilled to be among them—and appreciate what Threads is enabling.
If your goal is to grow into an environment with 1 billion users, could I suggest an even more audacious outcome?
What if Threads could also invent an entirely new approach to advertising?
You’ve got the audience.
You’ve got the tech stack.
Hopefully you’ve got the talent.
Here’s a 25+ year ad creative’s perspective on vision.
First, you’re wise to move slowly
Maybe you’re channeling architect William H. Whyte, among others, who observed how people used a place before instituting rules like sidewalks.
The solutions which will appeal to audiences (ad viewers), marketers (ad buyers), and creatives (ad makers) equally are probably observable and test-able. But I will argue the most potent and useful voices are those speaking to behavioral change, to persuasion. And not to the status quo.
The outliers may be on to something.
If the advertising experience on Threads fails to elicit the (positive) reaction, “Huh, I hadn’t thought of it that way before”—try again. And I realize you aren’t in control of individual ad content, which is heavily the gist of that impact; but you do control the stage, the mechanics, and the feeling in which each ad maker’s words, images and motion will appear.
Which is another way of saying, please don’t just merely port the (truly amazing) Facebook or Instagram ad machine into Threads. While (truly) amazing, those machines have been refined to reflect existing patterns and habits which (see Whyte above) might not ever exist inside Threads.
Second, what if the Threads ad experience celebrated ideas?
Let’s be honest, the world collectively invented the Internet then decided it was a direct marketing platform.
I can’t name an ad environment on the Internet designed or used primarily to build brands. Can you? The genius of what you’ve built on Facebook and Instagram is the direct targeting and ability to measure ever-finer degrees of interaction; to test and iterate granularity. And clearly that works! Hooray for hacking. Well done! But that’s incremental effort, not larger picture idea-making.
Yes, cumulative base hits help win the game. But the bases-loaded home runs are the stories we write about in the history books.
What if the Threads ad experience could be as singular, fresh and game-changing as, oh, The Sphere in Las Vegas? What if the Threads ad experience suggested and encouraged provocative ideas more than the efficacy of individual ad components?
The other vertically-oriented, text-centric platform failed to “command the space it occupies” noted Prof Galloway. And I’d argue that failure was largely a lack of imagination.
The U.S. advertising industry was born in Boston in 1704. For over 200 years the industry codified. We got better at audience insights, concepts and graphic design. Then the arrival of broadcast actually reinvented advertising. The toolkit expanded to include motion. And 50-odd years later, the Internet…well, we tried.
Your audience of 100 million and growing gives you both the legitimacy and viability to swing for the fences.
Please do.
Some assumptions and caveats
Of course you’ll leverage the already brilliant segmenting and targeting capabilities inside of Facebook and Instagram. Of course you’ll continue to provide feedback to ad makers and buyers to hone and improve individual facets of a campaign. No doubt you’ll leverage the magic of AI to suggest ways in which ad makers could be even more persuasive. (Idea: license and build a corpus of copy writing tools trained on legends like Howard Gossage, Kara Goodrich, Dave Trott, Janet Champ, et al. But seriously, pay them.)
A premise: Words more than images
The good news is you already have perhaps the world’s best visual advertising platform in Instagram.
Now, create the same but for text. And differently, please.
This won’t be easy. As Ben Evans suggests, “I always wondered whether Instagram did so much better because it was much better managed or because the problem was so much easier - that pictures are easier than text.”
In a sense, they are. The image which contains a thousand words is so often a more efficient mechanism for persuasion.
But as you noted on the Hard Fork podcast, Adam, the genius of text-based social platforms is the visual democracy of the reply. The instigation and its reaction are the same visual weight, despite having different authors.
Advertising in this context might likely prioritize words over images. No doubt you’ll have the data to prove one way or another.
The point, however, is to try—to try different, absurd, contrary.
Because I wonder if a distinctly fresh approach to brand storytelling in the context of a global text-centric conversation might nurture and cement the future of that conversation.
The ads could lead the way.
All you have to do is try.