Today, everyone is a marketer. Therefore everyone is responsible for the “sloppy” advertising and “crappy” content that is clogging up the interweb.

Bryan Kramer, chief executive of US-based social agency PureMatter, argued that in today’s connected world everyone is a marketer and everyone’s brand is shaped by what they share online.

Social giants such as Facebook have also levelled the field, with their marketing tools available to small-business owners right through to giants such as Coke.

This access is driving what Kramer describes as miss-advertising.

“We are getting ads that make no-sense to us,” Kramer, who is presenting at ADMA’s Global Forum, said.

“Facebook gives you the tools and the platform but they don’t tell you how to be specific.”

Facebook recently expanded its retargeting capabilities and said it will not be honouring the do-not-track setting on web browsers “because there is currently no industry consensus”. See AdAge for more. This is set to compound the issue of irrelevant ads, according to Kramer.

“People are just going to see it as a fun ‘oh cool, I’ll just ad retarget everything’, and here we go again. Because it is easy, anyone can do it and everyone is a marketer now.

“People are being sloppy and they are not taking the time to target their ads correctly.”

Kramer also believes we are in the midst of a content war.

“Everyone is trying to be a content creator and there is a lot of bad content.”

“It is the same issue that we had when direct mail was in play…The noise level has simply shifted over from direct mail to a digital embodiment.”

In order to cut through the noise bands need to have a human voice.

“People are automating and delivering robotic messaging and crappy content….if you want to have a much bigger impact right now than you have to engage, you have to deliver quality content and doing that means you have to be more human than ever.”

When BuzzFeed’s executive director of international strategy, Keith Hernandez, was in town for the Mumbrella 360 conference he said people do not want to be friends with brands.

“People inherently don’t want to be friends with brands. The reality is they align to the content more and it speaks to them in a great way,” Hernandez told the audience.

Kramer completely agrees with the statement but took it one step further.

“People have a much stronger brand reach then brands themselves and I think that we identify with the people behind brands and we buy from people, we don’t buy from brands…we are buying into the vision of people and leaders.”

 

To hear more about human-to-human marketing Bryan Kramer is at the ADMA Global Forum in conjunction with B&T’s Mad Week. Register here. The ADMA Global Forum runs from 29-30 July at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel.