The attention games
Slideshows, ad agencies and how to star ahead of the internet economy
I’m giving a talk next week at FWB Fest about “the content codes” aka… internet string theory.
The core idea idea that if you understand how content flows in the modern era you have the infinite cheat code for promoting truly anything, a bigger advantage than any of us have had the opportunity to access in our lifetimes.
Then I’m going through every tactic and network and how to understand it and build a plan to do it. Will be an extremely tactical talk anyone in media will want to understand, and I’m excited to join a murderers row of thought leaders (sorry) including Emily Segal, Ruby Justice Thelot, Weiwei Hsu and Ben Ditto for the incredible FWB lineup.
My talk is at 3:15 in the library, you can view the rest of the talks here: https://www.fwbfest.info/schedule
I am also giving away a handful of tickets, if you want to come to Idyllwild next Friday and can make it, shoot me an email at oren@orenjohn.com.
Related…
It’s all up for grabs.
At dinner in LA the other night a friend was discussing an RFP from a major brand to help them build a news-driven education Instagram account in their niche. Good idea, but the consensus was that the agency that won the (rather large) retainer simply… wouldn’t be able to execute.
The conversation escalated to the question “if you put the biggest marketing agencies in the world in a room and ask them to scale a carousel account in a niche on social media in 60 days… could they do it?”. Could… any of the top 100? Maybe Vayner? Remove paid ads and it would get even lower.
We are in a k-shaped marketing economy. I see this in the pitches I’ve been a part of at Darkroom, in the workshops with major brands, we spend more time explaining “creator”, even “carousels”, and then now with the nuance required to execute those well, attempting to explain that even to people in the CMO role is starting from close to scratch. Your ability to act is based on what you understand and are able to explain, and what works is getting considerably more fringe to the normal marketers, and they’re too busy plagiarizing creators in their reporting then getting good at the ideas themselves.
Here I’m going to illustrate a bit of whats happening, with carousels at the center of them.
To start, a reminder that all mainstream media consumption hours, your tv, your newspapers, your media sites, magazines, every second of that attention is being subverted to social media. The curve is farther along than you’d think, but with still astronomical opportunities ahead.
All of that attention that once required dollars and access through media companies enriched off the offerings and agencies enriched off selling access, is completely open to anyone who takes the time to create content and/or use the ad products offered by Meta, Google, TikTok etc.
With this shift has come what I’ll call the “scale of minute interaction”. The news, launches and information we consume is done PRIMARILY through little text boxes over an image on Instagram.
Not because we want to consume that way or even chose to, because it’s effective. The human brain loves a quick lil tidbit with an aesthetic background to then feel like they know something. We subconsciously digest hundreds of these a day, share them, and it is replacing almost all deep dive media, which is mostly AI slop or a terrible UI of paywalls and interstitials anyway.
This is also the first form of social media that legacy media has been able to effectively crack.
ID Magazine posts a ton of these carousels, it's easy to promote the core idea of an article and hope someone follows through (they won’t).
They continue to participate in they own demise versus understanding long and short form video to download flows that everyone else who makes money on the internet grasps… but thats another newsletter.
These carousels accounts play to how our brains like to consume, they’re effective. I follow an account called Because of Marketing. In our Cut30 group chat one of our recurring bits is we should all be making and encouraging far dumber content (you read that right). Often the best carousel isn’t cerebral it’s quite literally something like “what is a saddle?”. This one is a great example. Excellent carousel, incredibly dumbed down idea, this is the world we live in.
I only realized when I shared this into the group chat that this account was “Because of Marketing” - with the logo and the way I quickly scan social media, I thought it was “Business of Marketing” and an offshoot of Business of Fashion, the way they have Business of Beauty. Whether intentional or not (I'll give the benefit of the doubt), the format and presentation buys credibility.
To bring this around back to the agency conversation: these carousels should be in your ad account.
The exact aesthetic styles above announcing products, trends, stories of the brand. Native-looking ads work and so often “statics” are just new age banner ads.
As I’ve started digging in in my new role at Darkroom with an eye on all creative, one thing has become clearer and clearer. Ad accounts and the agencies that run them thrive when they have a thorough grasp on the formats that work on the internet now.
Not what’s in ad accounts from other hitters, what is being consumed by what demographics. The faster you’re on it, the more workflows you have, the more variations that can get through ridiculous corporate approvals and into testing, the more chance you have to win. Sounds simple, its not.
Because there are so few agencies and marketing people tapped in enough to the fringe.
The modern software, info and telehealth world runs on TikTok slideshows. Brands make thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Native captions, often AI generated people, sometimes UGC, they pump these out relentlessly.
This escalates into more designed options etc, but is still so far away from what any big agency is saying to put in the ad account. They are so far separated from what works, and this is where the alpha is for you.
Same goes for every aspect of marketing. Want to crack LinkedIn? Follow the Buffer model. This is completely achievable for any brand that cares, and if you were to do it RIGHT NOW, today, forward this email, make a plan, and begin, you will be ahead of the curve in your industry.
This is a world of format alpha - being online enough to see the content thats breaking through, and having systems in place to be able to create versions and get them on organic and in ad accounts without friction.
Formats happening right now:
You’ve heard me talk about the brand world vs brand owned theme before.
A brand’s core organic social is becoming a sidelined asset, it matters so little, whereas the brands world of employees, customers, ugc creators, influencers, owned secondary accounts and being able to run ads with those and whitelist is the machinery driving success in software, physical goods, info, media and services.
You NEED to make this priority shift if you haven’t already, because your industry is.
If you’re looking for more ideas for ads, Dara and I broke down a few of our favs in person on Youtube. A good insight into how working strategists think about ad connecting and execution:
Until next week,
Oren
Want to scale your brand with us? darkroomagency.com
The next Cut30 short form bootcamp starts August 5th: https://cut30.co
Like most things business related (and societal) people keep only looking at the effects (font templates, Obsession’s ticket sales, regret in paying $3k for that suitcase) rather than the causes (actually tracking why what’s working works, why people aren’t wanting to or better yet, much able to, scan past the template headline, that we’ve been sold dopamine trips to the casino slot machines for nourishment when we all are dying for oxytocin)