This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Your new book is a follow-up to one you wrote a decade ago titled “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.” Why did you decide now was the time to revisit the topic of social media marketing?
When you’re talking about the current state of creative strategy and social [media], it’s probably a good idea to update it more often than once every 10 years. Because, as you can imagine, my thesis is that it’s changing daily—it’s the title of the book. When I wrote the book back in 2014, the Ad Age crowd could’ve cared less about social media creative, but this is what I’ve been yelling about for years. And we’re in a time where cable and network TV is transitioning to streaming and CTV, and you’ve got AI and VR on the horizon ready to change the world. So, I wanted to get this thesis down in “Day Trading Attention,” which is that it’s not about social—it’s just about marketing.
In your book, you talk about the “TikTokification of social media.” What do you mean by that?
It means, for the first time in marketing history, the creative is the variable in creating reach, which is profound. TikTok changed everything. Social media for a decade was [like] email marketing— get as many followers as you can, and a percentage of them will see your posts, just like open rates in email. Now, with all these algorithms based on the interests of people, the individual commercial, the ad, has the potential to reach millions of people even if you have 1,000 followers. That is profoundly game-changing for advertising.
If I make a video for Blue Bottle [Coffee] that’s funny or clever or informative, and I post it and it has all the things I talk about in the book—the first three seconds, the thumbnail, the creative, the copy—there is a chance that that video could get 17 million views; 17 million actual organic consumed views is probably equivalent to the value of 100 million paid social views, and 100 million paid social views is probably equivalent to a $50 million media buy. [Social] is not taken seriously enough considering how profound that is. The industry has to respect that social media is more powerful than every other medium, creatively. But I don’t believe that that’s how the industry sees it right now.
I often hear marketers talking about their struggle to keep up with the volume of content they need to be putting out on social media nowadays. How many posts would you say brands should be putting out to see success? Are there any metrics or goals they should keep in mind?
The official answer is as many [posts] as humanly possible. I think there are seven or so major platforms that everybody who does marketing for Fortune 500 brands should take seriously: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts. And I think, if you’re a Fortune 500 brand, you should be posting two or three organic posts per platform per day. And the reality is that that should be incredibly easy, given how much money [these brands] spend on advertising. The problem is they don’t allocate enough dollars to creative social—and even if they do, they don’t operationalize it in an effective manner to maximize meaningful creative output.