Adland Thinks Threads Will Be A Boon For Brands

Threads, the much-vaunted Twitter-killer app from Instagram, launched in more than 100 countries yesterday to much fanfare.

But adland insiders have told B&T that while they are slightly more hesitant about the newest runner and rider to emerge from the Meta stable, the consensus is that Threads could be very powerful for brands and creators alike.

“I would be using it to experiment for sure,” said Carl Moggridge, managing partner at Hopeful Monsters.

“If you gave it enough time that it wasn’t going to be another Wild West of the internet and they did have things in place which meant it was a trustworthy platform. As with any of these new platforms, it’s worth investing in but I would be a big ask to say that you could steal some big margins on a platform like that in such a short space of time.”

Carl Moggridge

Meta said that there would be no monetisation on the platform until 2024 at the earliest and that its first priority with the app would be to gain a decently sized user base. And, it seems to be on the right track, as Mark Zuckerberg posted  (threaded?) on the new app that it had achieved five million signups within the first four hours.

Of course, interest from around the world does not necessarily translate to interest in Australia.

“I’m excited by it, I think it’s a good move,” said Ashleigh Bruton, head of social at Digitas.

“It’s very reminiscent of what Twitter used to be when it was more popular in the Australian market. I do believe that it will have much more of an impact in those international markets where Twitter still dominates like a big share of that market or users’ attention span.”

Ashleigh Bruton

Bruton was also quick to caution that BeReal — another vaunted next-big-thing in the world of social couldn’t sustain its early momentum.

“It was very exciting for the first two months and now its users in Australia have declined quite drastically. So I am a little bit hesitant,” she said.

However, Threads does have a couple of notable advantages over BeReal. For one, the signup is seamless (provided you already have an Instagram account and don’t mind the two being linked) and it has access to Meta’s seemingly bottomless pit of money.

“A number of PHDers have jumped onto Threads on launch day, with a couple of us already caught up in Thread conversations,” said Gemma Dawkins, national head of digital at the Omnicom-owned agency.

Gemma Dawkins

“Push notifications from Instagram appear to be encouraging downloads of Threads, so it’s no surprise that we have seen user growth in such a short period of time – Mark Zuckerberg has almost half a million followers already,” she added.

Max Thorley, GroupM’s head of social and influencer, said that he had spent a lot of time with the app on launch day and that he was “impressed” with the rollout.

“Launches are always a bit scary from a platform perspective because you’ve got no idea how it’s going to be interpreted. I thought it was a smart decision to use Instagram log-ins, even though it is a separate app because the network effects of that can really turbocharge the growth, I think it was 30 million downloads in the first 24 hours globally,” he said.

Max Thorley

However, Thorley did note that the app was “a little bit light” on functionality but it was clear that Meta is moving towards a fuller feature set.

The lack of monetisation on offer was also not a major concern for Thorley.

“We chat to Meta a lot and I think, at some point if the app is successful they’ll monetise it because that’s the broader business model. A lot of apps launch and have a couple of months in the sun and they can’t scale it. With the amount of DevOps and sales team focus that would need to go into monetising the app early, they’ll want to make sure it’s working before they start making those investments,” he explained.

But, industry consensus shows that there is certainly a role for brands on Threads already — despite the lack of an ad product.

“There are already brands utilising Threads organically though, PepsiCo, Domino’s and Sony are examples of brands who have been quick to start conversations on the platform. And locally we are seeing media networks jump on board, with Nine, News.com.au and Nova all getting in on the action today,” said Dawkins.

Bruton added that the app is already proving to be an exciting development for creators.

“A lot of our creators and the people we work with get really hyped up about it… [they’re] saying it’s a much easier way to engage with their audiences and it can be less curated because it is text-based,” she explained.

“I had one today that said it was easier to show personality through it because you can actually use GIFs and things like that. Whereas Instagram has quite a delayed functionality for that.”

Meta made a bit of a song and dance about its plan to get Threads working with the ActivityPub protocol and make it interoperable with other apps such as the decentralised social media platform Mastodon. For Thorley, this represents a particularly exciting part of the app.

“The historic business models of social media platforms have been very walled garden-esque. To see [interoperability] called out on launch is encouraging and exciting. A lot of it is yet to be defined on what it actually means but it’s an encouraging signal that we will be watching really closely,” he explained.

In fact, in Thorley’s view, Threads’ proposed interoperability demonstrated that, rather than an opportunistic land grab for the hole left by Twitter, it is part of a broader Meta strategy.

“Whenever you talk to Meta about the future state of the metaverse, everything in its ecosystem will be very interconnected and totally interoperable.

“Meta is obviously a very successful business in its own right and I think that they’ve made some pretty smart business decisions about the products and platforms that they’ve built. I understand that narrative [the opportunism] but I think at the same time, there’s a much bigger conversation at play here from Meta.”