It’s certainly an exciting time these days for advertising. With new technologies being rolled out like fast food, advertising might be in line for a new golden age, where demand and venue options actually exceed supply. This skewed balance of supply and demand is not due to a lack of ad agencies, believe me, there are plenty – but rather because new technologies and ad mediums are popping up ever so quickly. This creates two major challenges for the ad industry:

First- Technologies are diversifying in so many different directions, and so quickly, one advertiser might specialize in post click optimization for mobile, while another might specialize in social gamming. Both industries are too new and are growing too fast for one company to have been able to specialize in both at this early stage.   

Second- There are no industry standards yet as to best practices for many of these mediums. It’s like the Wild West out there, with new methods and approaches being attempted all the time, and in many cases, advertisers are still learning as they go.

One such example of advertising’s many new mediums is social media. Social media is only a few years old but has exploded in popularity with hundreds of millions of users world-wide, and that number is growing exponentially. What throws most advertisers off is that there are really two sides to social media advertising. One side deals with the classic form of advertising, i.e. banners, visuals and copy. The thumbnail sized ad pictures on Facebook and the 140 character limit on Twitter are nothing new for advertisers. Creative minds have always been plagued with the challenge of reigning in their imaginations to fit the dimensions of paid for real-estate, chromatic boilerplates and character limitations. But then there’s the other side of social media advertising which many brands are still not aware that they are even involved in.  

Social media users of today are not the old media sponges that sat passively by as they absorbed a carefully crafted message built from weeks of collaborative efforts from creative professionals. These media targets are interactive, participating in a dialogue not only with the brand itself, but also with their own network about the brand, playing an active role, if not the main role, in painting a brand’s image in the eyes of the market. Many brands have made the mistake of ignoring the buzz that reverberates across the walls of the socialscape, not realizing how much it affects them until it is too late. 

Last year’s infamous incident of United Airlines ignoring the complaints of a disgruntled passenger who had his guitar broken by luggage handlers, made headlines and caused a whole lot of headache for the airlines corporate arm. It wasn’t the headlines though that caused all the trouble, but rather the passenger’s use of social media. The passenger, Dave Carroll, also happened to be a country singer, and he informed the intransigent customer service rep that he was going to make a YouTube music video highlighting his customer service, and that’s exactly what he did. What even Carroll didn’t expect was for the video to go viral overnight and actually cause United’s stock to drop dramatically costing United shareholders upwards of $180 million dollars. The company backtracked fairly quickly after that, offering to pay for all the damage, although the damage to United’s reputation and dollar value had already been done. Pretty powerful for one man with nothing but a video camera and a social profile at his disposal.   

And it’s not just the unknown power of social media that brands and advertisers have to be aware of, but the still forming social language and etiquette that can make the difference between a diehard fan base and a vengeful one. For example, advertisers and brands have to get used to the unwritten rule that brands should not be promoting themselves directly through their social profiles. If every other tweet by a given brand is about how great they are, not only do people not listen, they begin to resent the brand and label it as a spammer (one of the gravest insults one can be given in social media land). Instead, brands have to accustom themselves to providing their network with worthwhile media, either as information or entertainment, which does not necessarily have to have anything to do with the actual brand itself. In fact, it often shouldn’t. By not self promoting, brands come off as more genuine and can manage to convince their network that they are a viable social network friend. The thing about friends is that they trust each other, and help each other out. So the next time a prospective customer is looking for accurate news, why not choose the network they feel personally friendly with.

We can see from here that social media advertising is somewhat counter intuitive and its rules are still being ironed out. This post was not meant to offer solutions as much as it was to highlight the dynamic times and challenges that modern day advertising is facing, and to get advertisers to begin to think differently about how they plan on reaching their target market. The important thing for advertisers r to do right now, is to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry, and try to anticipate a trend shift where they can be a first mover in specializing in that area. The shifts should be plenty and not hard to find. Catching them before they happen as opposed to after, now that’s the hard part. Welcome to the frontier.