SOCIALDEVIANT

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The Covid Shift

Linda Johnson

Many of us remember when the Internet came onto the scene, big time.

Most of us thought at the time, 'this will change everything."

There were a lot of very smart people, who trumpeted the end of the "traditional" advertising era.

Ads are dead - long live digital marketing!

What actually happened is that digital marketing did not extinct traditional advertising. Not at all.

What it did do, fundamentally, was shift the curve in terms of consumer expectations. In a digital world, consumers now expected, at minimum:

  1. Personalization
    Show me you know me, through customized offers tailored to my preferences and interests

  2. Speed
    The digital age brought with it, an urgency and pace never seen or possible previously

  3. Connection
    The digital age also ushered in an immediacy driven by connection, to ideas and people that were simply unprecedented

So, what about the COVID shift in marketing?

A lot are predicting, more of the same - a literal extension of 2020 with lower budgets, Zoom videos and low production content.

As the founder and CEO of SOCIALDEVIANT, a creative and content agency living right in the marketing middle of this pandemic, here's what I see:

  1. Speed is the New Black
    Urgency is the new normal. What took months previously must now take weeks, or days. There will be no going back, as brands demand pace and urgency, throughput and output

  2. Efficiency Driven by a Lower Cost Base
    The fixed costs of large agencies are weighing them down, as they struggle to respond to the day in day out campaign and content needs of brands of all sizes. Budgets will come back, sort of. But as marketing dollars get restored, there will be a fundamental shift in:

    How those budgets get allocated. More content, more measurable campaigns, more concepts brought to life in new platforms.

    The scrutiny applied to all spending. It's all about who can do what most efficiently. Why spend $1mm on one campaign, when for that same money, you can get a year's worth of amazing content that drives engagement and brand value every single week.

  3. Market Impact
    The new COVID mantra is simply this: "the deck is not the deliverable." Brands will continue to demand market impact. The time for long debates and more decks is over. It will continue to be about getting content in market, assessing the impact and optimizing along the way

  4. Iterate to Great
    Related to each point above, brands will no longer wait for perfection. This is a fundamental shift in the curve and there will be no turning back. Brand’s urgency will translate into seeing more work, more quickly. They will demand to be engaged as early in the process as possible, and rightly so. The COVID shift will be this - agencies must learn to bake the cake with ingredients tossed in at every step by their clients. As it should be.

  5. Brands Become Makers
    All brands, as budgets come back a bit, are re-thinking their staffing mix. Increasingly, they are attracting makers and doers, amazing talent that can turn thoughts into things. This started long before COVID - many brands hiring Creative Officers, building production studios, and more. This will only accelerate, as brands neither have the patience nor the money to simply hand over content creation to agencies. Our new role will be as conceptors and creation collaborators, working side by side with the highly talented creative women and men now walking the virtual hallways of every brand.

At SOCIALDEVIANT, we were built for this moment. Born of the digital age, we:

  • Move at the speed of light

  • Ideate right alongside our clients, and take their input with grace and intention

  • Take time and cost out of the system by producing 85% of all content we conceive of, right in our own production studio called All Oars

  • Have almost no overhead, so the only costs passed along, are the transparent costs of the deviant makers delivering excellence and market impact for our clients

  • Have a maker mojo and maker mentality, a powerhouse collection of hybrid thinkers and doers with a bias for turning thoughts into things

  • Think big, act quickly

  • Have a project mentality, so clients only pay for the deliverables they've agreed to in our scopes, and have line of sight to every dollar they spend. With us, there are no "retained" fees

So, the Covid shift?

No, advertising is not dead. There will always be a need for great ideas, for big ideas, for creativity that stirs souls and moves the sales needle.

Yes, COVID has created a tectonic, fundamental and permanent shift in how marketing gets done, and in the traditional relationship between brands and agencies.

And at SOCIALDEVIANT, we're just getting started, driving this shift and leaning in at every turn to deliver the goods for our clients, COVID or not.