While brands usually shy away from controversial issues, the rise of fake news represents an opportunity worth considering

Nothing highlights the changing nature of news better than, well… fake news. Since the US presidential election, it’s been firmly at the top of the agenda because of its alleged role in turning voters towards Trump. So should brands be worried about fake news spilling over from politics to products and services—and, if so, what can we do about it?

The good news is there have already been some worthy attempts to stem the flow. Facebook and Google are already stopping ads from appearing on fake news sites. They’re hitting the publishers of such content where it hurts: their advertising revenues. By removing the profit motive, these brands have taken an important first step. But even so, vetting sites is hard work, as Facebook and Twitter have found. And its effectiveness is sometimes questionable: though Google now monitors its ads, fake news still appears in your regular search results.

There’s a bigger problem here, though. Even if Facebook and Google’s attempts eventually work, we’ve given them an immense responsibility. They’re now, in effect, the gatekeepers of what content is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’. I’m not sure how this will play out in the long run. After all, there’s no doubt that detecting fake news is hard work. It takes an understanding of the area in question—as well as the time and human resources to do it. There must be a better way.

And this is where brands could come in. They have resources, scale and expertise in all kinds of sectors. That makes them powerful in the fight against fake news.

A hidden opportunity for brands

It’s no secret that every brand is an expert in something. Take a look at any corporate blog or social-media account and it should be plain to see. And it’s here that there’s an opportunity.

Most marketing teams have content writers, social-media managers and researchers—whether that’s in-house or through an agency. These are all the people you need to start adding to the conversation in a meaningful way. Sure, you may have to move your focus from run-of-the-mill content to more reactive pieces, but it’ll be worth it if the story gets picked up.

The key thing is, this isn’t about upskilling or growing teams, it’s about shifting our focus outwards. Then we might see tech brands or healthcare companies calling out fake news stories, rather than just ignoring them. We might even see brands commenting on, dare I say it, politics. Every company spends time and money on knowing its industry better than anyone else, and at the moment, that’s a huge untapped resource.

So my question for brands and agencies is this: why don’t we become the experts here? Then rather than worrying about whether—or, more likely, when—fake news will start hitting brands, we can take the fight to the purveyors of fake news. And we could create some incredible content and PR in the process.

*This article is originally published via Campaign Asia on Jan 4th 2017.

Luke Janich, CEO of RED².

Politics has always been the laboratory for advertising and marketing. The 2016 US Presidential Elections were no different, writes Oliver Woods.

Donald Trump’s election to the United States Presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. With inaccurate polling, press coverage dripping with disdain and a candidate that broke all the conventional rules, even the most perceptive political commentators were left stunned.

As Trump makes his first significant policy moves and appointments, the professions most closely associated with elections face unprecedented scrutiny. Pollsters desperately explained themselves, with one going so far as to eat a bug on live television after predicting a Clinton victory.

Digital marketing: the Trump campaign’s strategy was widely panned. A Bloomberg journalist claimed that Trump’s digital marketing team ‘knew they were going to lose’ after touring their set-up. A respected political journalist labeled it a ‘Comically Bad Digital Campaign’.

In reality, Trump’s unexpected victory was powered by digital. In one of his few post-election interviews, he said social media ‘helped me win’. Google said Trump “ won the election in search”. His audiences of Facebook Likes & Twitter Followers were both millions ahead of Clinton on Election Day. Trump beat Clinton every single state in Facebook interest.

How did Trump do it? Here are the six elements behind his digital marketing victory.

Loyal & Able Talent

Trump’s small team was composed of family members, loyal company men and trusted contractors. His Director of Digital, Brad Parscale, was a cut-price web contractor for Trump’s businesses, with no political marketing experience. Dan Scavino, the campaign’s Social Media Director, first met Trump as a teenager as a golf caddie and spent over a decade working for the latter’s businesses, only to switch to Trump’s digital marketing team in mid-2015.

Despite this ‘attitude over aptitude’ approach, both men have been lauded as digital marketing geniuses since the election result. One of their greatest strengths? They knew when to reach out to outsiders for help. Gary Coby, Trump’s Director of Advertising, lauded a Facebook employee James Barnes as their ‘Most Valuable Player’ for his massive contribution to the campaign’s digital marketing.

Below-The-Radar Data Operation

There remains a widely held perception that the campaign’s digital operations were crudely hewn together, a communications rollercoaster defined by Trump’s fluctuating temperament. A leading Republican strategist (who opposed Trump) said “data died” as election results streamed in.

There was method to the madness. Trump’s data operation operated largely below the radar, blending the best of their own activities to build up a database of supporters, the Republican National Committee’s own significant investments in data and a ‘shady’ third party consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, which had provided data for the successful ‘Leave’ campaign in the Brexit referendum.

For Trump, they apparently leveraged an innovative approach that blended different data sources, with a focus on people who ‘felt left out of the political process’. This rich perspective on voters enabled Parscale and the rest of the team to make the unconventional decisions they did – particularly their focus on rural voters.

‘Direct Social’

Good strategy has three elements: a diagnosis of a challenge, a policy for dealing with that challenge, and actions that bring that policy to life.

Trump nailed on all accounts in the final weeks of the campaign: he zeroed his advertising dollars on a handful of critical swing states, while Clinton’s team spread their ad buys across the whole country.

With Trump blanketing traditional media, YouTube played a critical role in the digital execution of this rigorous targeting approach. The campaign openly shared their strategy of limiting his YouTube spend to surgically bombard crucial swing states (Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) with videos of his speeches, attack ads and interviews.

Authentic Engagement

Trump’s emphasis on Twitter as an engagement tool and a direct way of addressing his supporters is unmistakable.

His tactics were simple: The platform became an “unvarnished extension of his public persona”. Trump’s ‘straight talk’ contrasted strikingly with the ‘managed and staged’ feel of Hilary’s slick design and clever copywriting.

Another tactic that generated controversy was retweeting supporters content, at one point inadvertently sharing a Mussolini quote. While liberal commentators continue to lash out at Trump’s superficially careless heroing of supportive tweets, it helps generate more conversation and drive more views on Trump’s Twitter feed.

“Aggressive Learning”

As Mark Zuckerberg publicly plays down the role of his platform in the election, Republicans were publicly celebrating Facebook’s role in Trump’s win. Parscale went so far as to say that “Facebook was the single most important platform to help grow our fundraising base.”

Multi-variate testing was their not-so-secret weapon. Working in conjunction with the Republican National Committee, Parscale’s team was testing up to 60,000 variations of Facebook Ads a day for fundraising alone. This enabled them to generate $90 million in August and increasing amounts as the campaign went on.

Beyond fundraising, the campaign realised that policy-focused content performed better than negative messaging – and they used this to guide Trump to dial up his policy content in his rallies.

Digital Demobilisation

Attack ads are common in the brutal cut and thrust of American politics. But Trump’s campaign went further: they inadvertently admitted to journalists late in the campaign that they had implemented what they openly called a ‘voter suppression’ strategy.

Targeting primarily three segments – “idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans” – the campaign would micro-target these groups through Facebook, sharing polarising content that would ‘sow doubt’ about Clinton.

Concluding Remarks

Trump’s digital strategy connected with voters online in unique and unusual ways.

He built digital engagement at scale, relying on his existing base of online fans as a mobilization base and tactics that flew below the radar of standard online political marketing.

Most critical of all, Trump has destroyed the conventional narrative that Republicans lag behind Democrats when it comes to digital.

This analysis is originally published on Dec 1st 2016 on Mumbrella Asia. Oliver Wood is currently Director of Social & Digital Strategy of Red² Digital

With Facebook apparently set to remove the ‘like’ counter from fan pages, savvy marketers are already investing in a post-like future. Luke Janich of Red2 explains.

Ah, the Facebook like. An obsession of social media marketers, the envy of competitors and a key metric in many of today’s marketing campaigns. But is the like over-hyped—and is it time we moved away from this much-loved social metric?

Well, it seems Facebook certainly thinks so. Those with their finger on the social media pulse may have already noticed one or two changes afoot behind the scenes. The big one is that it looks like they’re testing the removal of displayed likes from fan pages. This means that, while likes are still visible in Facebook’s search bar, they’re missing from the fan page itself. To be completely clear: pages are not losing their likes, they’re just going to be less visible on your page.

So why is Facebook doing this and what does it mean for brands? For some time now, marketers have been grumbling and there’s one criticism that’s getting hard to ignore: effectiveness. Facebook knows likes are not that useful to brands and they’re taking the interests of marketers seriously. After all, many marketers invest heavily in their social media activity and Facebook is keen to be seen as the brand partner of choice. They want to help drive business for their partners, rather than just help them to get lots of likes. And true to form, they’re shaking up their platform once again.

Changes are coming

We don’t know exactly when the new changes will be rolled out but, as ever, it pays to be prepared. Some marketers will be annoyed, and understandably so. Many will have invested in monitoring and growing likes and, of course, there’s a massive benefit from having lots of likes displayed on your page. Even so, there could be a massive opportunity here.

Growing your fans and building your following is still going to be an essential part of how Facebook works – it’s just now visitors to your page will have no idea how many fans you have. Only page administrators will have access to the specific numbers, which changes the game somewhat. Now pages will live or die based on the quality of their content rather than the halo effect of having lots of likes. And that could be a good thing.

I think we’re going to see a shift towards building smaller, tighter communities on Facebook. That means better, more engaging content. Without displayed likes, there’ll be one less reason to invest in growing fan numbers. Instead, brands will start to focus on targeting and building the right audience – crucially, the audience that has the potential to be customers. And the savviest marketers are already doing this.

The future of Likes

So where do we go from here? I’d say, if you’ve invested time and resources in building your Facebook page, it’s time to review your strategy. Start to push resources towards quality content, targeting and engagement. Move resources away from like-building and monitoring.

Sure, likes will still be around for a while yet but it looks like their importance will fade—and that means having an active, engaged community will be more important than ever. For today’s leading digital marketers, this may not be such a bad thing after all. The challenge for the rest is how to keep up.

*This article is originally published via Campaign Asia on Nov 23rd 2016.

Luke Janich, CEO of RED².

What to watch out for in Google’s latest algorithm update, Penguin 4.0, and why brands need to embrace AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

If you’ve never heard of Google latest algorithm update Penguin 4.0 or Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), I don’t blame you. Both have largely gone under the radar for many marketers. But they are set to have significant effects on the digital marketing industry. In short, the two together represent the biggest change to how Google ranks websites and content in over two years.

Let’s start with Penguin. What is it and what does it mean for your typical marketer? Penguin 4.0 is the latest update to Google’s ranking algorithm. It identifies sites that try to game the search results to boost their rankings. And—crucially—it punishes them. The latest update makes old-fashioned SEO techniques, like spammy pages and link networks, a thing of the past. And it does it all in real time.

Google is incredibly protective of its algorithm, so there’s no foolproof way of knowing if you’ve been hit. Sure, any drop in search rankings is worrying, but the real risk of Penguin is blacklisting. If Google thinks you’ve been spamming its algorithm, then it punishes your site in the search results. If you’re a digital marketer who’s noticed a significant drop in web traffic, this could well be due to the latest Penguin update.

And this is only the start for digital marketers. Many brands have a ‘set-and-forget’ approach when it comes to building websites: cheaply developing their site, rushing out content and using out-of-date tactics like buying links to build their traffic. Many have invested considerable resources into SEO link schemes, which are now going to be completely ineffective. In future, marketers are going to have to look at other ways to protect and future-proof their sites. Luckily, there are many on offer.

One such emerging technology is AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages—though it too presents challenges for less digitally-savvy brands.

So what is AMP and why is it important? Well, Google has long been unhappy with long load times for mobile content. We’ve all been there, staring at a black screen for seconds—seemingly minutes—while a laggy article or webpage loads. Well, Google wants AMP to make slow-loading pages on mobile a thing of the past. And many experts expect AMP-optimised content to become the new normal.

The big news for brands is that they won’t want to get left behind. Google has already announced that it’s going to give preferential treatment to AMP-optimised sites in search results. And some big names have already started to optimise their content: Twitter, LinkedIn and BuzzFeed, to name just a few.

As Google rolls this out globally, we’ll start to see AMP-based content dominating the search results. First, because sections like Google’s Top Stories will factor AMP into their rankings. This means non-optimised pages will be regularly outranked by optimised ones. Second, web traffic will be higher for AMP content, thanks for its faster performance. Crucially, these pages are more likely to keep their audience’s attention. For brands this means more time to deliver their message, generate a lead or convert.

In the coming months, AMP, combined with the Penguin update, is going to become a real game-changer. And, as ever, it pays to be prepared. The challenge for digital marketers today, is not just how to counteract the effects of Google’s recent updates, but how to take advantage of them in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

*This article is originally published via Campaign Asia-Pacific on Oct 24th 2016.

Luke Janich, CEO of RED².