Overcoming the Art of Seduction: Can Ad Agencies Learn How to Have a Conversation in Social Media?

I was checking my Facebook account briefly this afternoon and encountered as usual a sponsored posting on my news feed page. I've grown used to these ads easily enough and they're really not bothersome thanks to the limits of the format. Some might even make me think about their brand for a trillionth of a second. But for the most part it seems like the talents of most ad agencies are wasted on social media.

Who on earth amongst my friends would ever suggest to me that I might want to "discover my Epsonality?" Who among them in their right mind would go to a studio, have a nicely lit backdrop behind them and have professional photos snapped of them smiling while they were holding a printer? The teaser is supposed to get me to click through to try their "Epsonality Test" but the way that it's worded you'd think that I was going to Match.com to check out a hot date through a personality test. It's clever enough copy, but it's all about the basic concept behind media advertising: seduction.

It seems to me that if I am a brand I want to look at a platform like Facebook not as a singles bar but as a place where I can have a nice cup of coffee and a chat. Social media marketing is about conversations that build towards valuable relationships, not a quick ride around the block. To me this ad says that Epson is like Viagra for technology, trying to get someone pumped up about something that is no longer exciting. With increasingly disposable technology like personal computer printers perhaps that's what it takes to get someone's attention. But if it is then perhaps Epson's in the wrong place with the wrong message.

With the Inherent limitations of the Facebook ad technology it's not easy to embed a quiz into the ad itself - which is probably just fine for now as far as most Facebook users are concerned, probably - so you have to get what you can from a small photo and a snippet of text. But I think that this ad is indicative of the overall disconnect between the marketing world based on seduction and the emerging marketing world that is rediscovering how to have conversations with its markets. The truth in the long run is that many consumer brands may not survive the transition to social media. Perhaps this inherent disconnect between trying to make someone want what they may not really want or need is going to fade away as social media enables needs to be met far more exactly without the need of huge marketing campaigns to match builders, sellers and buyers.

Many advertisers are worried about their ads in social media because of the potential negative connotations of being next to potentially inflammatory or inappropriate user-generated content, but at the same time many people generating that content are worried about having an inappropriate ad next to their media. Marketers have to come to the party dressed appropriately. In social media expect to dress themselves the way that they want to irrespective of their audience. You can see that problem on the public side of Content Nation at times, of course, with ads that may match something contextually in terms of their placement but which sometimes "look" and "act" like the people coming to Content Nation about as much as an Amsterdam prostitute looks and acts like her potential clientele on the other side of her window glass.

Moving out from behind the window glass of seduction and into the streets of social media to walk alongside their customers is going to take practice for ad agencies and other players in product marketing, but should they be able to make that transition the payoffs will be huge. Right now social media advertising is still about CPMs and perhaps some contextual keyword matching along the way. Tomorrow's social media advertising is going to use many more contextual clues to determine just how to dress its messages and to think about how they can use that knowledge to engage its audiences conversationally. In the meantime, sorry Epson, you should know that about the only things that I print are checks for my vendors.