Your Social Strategy Is Built on Assumptions That No Longer Hold

I've been working on a strategy project this week for a major IP owner.  They are trying to figure out what their investment in social content should look like over the next five years to build value that endures. 

The deeper I went, the more I kept coming back to the same uncomfortable truth.

Most of the assumptions that have guided brand investment in social content for the last decade are no longer true and the pace of change is only increasing.

Content was your moat

When I helped build Jungle Creations, to a £60m social video business the world was very different.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Only a decade ago the barriers to content creation were much higher. We raised $5m from a VC which gave us the head start over any competition. We were able to invest in a 4000 sq ft studio space, production infrastructure and large team of young, smart, hungry creatives. Said smart, hungry creatives didn’t yet have access to the tools for to become creators in their own right and thus, for all intents and purposes we were able to build a super efficient content factory. The more content you made, the more reach you got. The logic for a brand was straightforward: piggyback on the organic reach of big social channels, measure in (3s) views, repeat.

It worked all the way up until it didn't.

We sold in 2021 and in the years since, three forces have dismantled almost every assumption that model rested on.

Where does that leave the CMO?

Three forces of changes

Claude code has already reshaped software development and fundamentally changed what it means to be a developer in the AI era.

Just this morning Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says his technology firm Block is laying off almost half its workforce because artificial intelligence (AI) "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company."

The agency model is predicated on cheap labour arbitrage. Ooops said it out loud. We had whole teams of people subtitling, localising, thumbnail testing, editing short form cutdowns. All these jobs have been automated because now it's possible to buy “human cognition” in the form of AI credits.

You can already see from the graph below the speed at which various AI capabilities are improving relative to human performance. In the past, big technological upgrades, like the industrial revolution or the advent of computers and from there the internet, have shaped societal change over the course of decades. Now we are talking about months and years.

In my last newsletter I spoke about how more than half of all new online articles are already written by AI. The same wave is coming for video and based on the above graph, faster than most people in media want to admit.

For brand marketers, the implication is significant: content is no longer a scarce resource or a competitive advantage.

So the question is no longer how much you create. It becomes about what only you can say. 

Many have begun to consider how technology has reshaped creative fields in the past to understand where we might be going. The camera, a new piece of technology, saw the rise of photography as a means to document the world. But it didn't kill painting, rather it changed what painting was for. Painting was free to become something else entirely: expression, abstraction, impressionism. 

So, in this new world, you have to automate the repetitive tasks to create more space for original thinking. Then think. Really think. To find what gives YOU resonance? 

The designer Jacquemus did just this. He made his 80-year-old grandmother the first ever brand ambassador.

Last year L’Oreals Garnier ran an influencer campaign that saw six creators run from a place called Dull to Brighton to promote a new skincare product.

And recently they followed it up with Olivia Attwood’s ‘Spicy Blondes’ activation which is more proof that the future of brand ideas looks less like a strategy doc and more like a fever dream with a media plan.

No amount of prompting could have delivered the randomness that is required for ideas like these.

The social graph used to underpin the algorithm. You followed people you knew. Content spread through genuine relationships.

TikTok destroyed that logic and forced every other platform to follow. The interest graph doesn't care who you follow. It surfaces content based on what you've engaged with in the last session. Which means a brand new account can reach millions overnight and a brand with 2 million followers can post to silence if the first five seconds don't hold attention.

For a brand, or even an IP owner, organic used to play a clear role in the upper funnel. Building engagement and familiarity. By comparison, paid sat v. separately, chasing people around and capturing intent. This has all changed. Organic and paid have to be used in concert and done right brands can navigate the messy middle with elegance, taking consumers right through from first exposure to final decision.

TLDR: Organic social and paid social cannot be treated as separate channels. They cannot be run by separate teams on different floors. They have to work in concert to create an always on content flywheel that is learning in real time.

IP owners need to get more comfortable leaning into paid channels, dialling in on the right performance metrics that support their audience growth strategies. In contrast marketers need to get more comfortable with building brand metrics in the upper funnel to broaden their understanding of who their customer actually is.

At NoBrakes we’ve seen that for performance brands, brands that have grown up on META, their paid social CPM’s have increased by over a third in recent months, this has significantly impacted their customer acquisition costs and slowed growth. Interestingly, brands that have been able to build this always on content flywheel have seen CPMs fall. I love this world, it’s where science meets art. Would love to chat to any marketers or IP owners who are intrigued by this new methodology.

YouTube is already the world's second largest search engine. TikTok is now the default discovery tool. Instagram is the shop window. AI-generated answers are now pulling from organic creator content and Reddit threads to respond to queries that used to drive people to brand websites.

Think about what that means in practice. A 25-year-old deciding which running shoe to buy doesn't Google it and click through to your website. They search TikTok, find a creator that lives in this world, they watch, check the comments, and make a decision. A whole chunk of your traditional marketing strategy be it SEO, PPC, programmatic doesn’t touch this journey.

This is a structural shift in where purchase decisions are actually being made and brands need to get ahead.

Smart brands like Sol de Janeiro are building these evergreen creator led content strategies that are optimised for social search.

Where should a brand or IP owner start?

Audience first. Define your audience segments!

What keywords or phrases are these audience segments are using when searching for content like yours. TikTok does the hard work for you here just start searching.

From there it’s connecting these insights to the creator powered content flywheel we spoke about up top.

If you’re a consumer brand and you’ve hit a ceiling or if you’re an IP owner and thinking about how you launch a new show you’ve got to stop asking how many people you can reach. 

You’ve got to build methodology that connects insights, organic channels, creators and paid. This integrated approach allows you to build a depth of relationship with your audience so they can, unknowingly, charter their own course through the traditional marketing funnel without getting distracted by the increasingly noisy world they are living in.

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