Mark Ritson: Live streaming has no impact or reach, but marketers will do it anyway
Live streaming is just the latest in a line of nausea-inducing trends that have no impact or reach but are still lapped up by credulous marketers.
By Mark Ritson
You know that feeling when you went a bit hard the night before and then ended it with a massive, fuck-off curry? Of course you do. You work in marketing. You know that feeling better than me.
You also know that dull burning sensation the next morning in your lower intestine and the feeling that someone is playing the bongos with increasing vehemence down below. And then the weary acquiescence to the fact that you are only moments away from a controlled explosion of epic proportions.
That’s how I feel about live streaming. It’s been attracting marketing attention for about 18 months but with Twitter, YouTube and Facebook now openly touting their live streaming capabilities for brands, the bongos are getting louder and that toilet pan moment is not far away.
READ MORE: Mark Ritson – Dodgy video metrics prove TV is way ahead
We should pause at this point and appreciate what live streaming is, which is essentially the Coke Life of social media. Just as Coke’s accursed green beverage managed to combine the disappointment of astringent sweetener with the dangers of too much sugar, live streaming offers up a potent mix of the total lack of interest that consumers have for organic interactions with brands and the lacklustre viewing endurance of digital video.
According to Salesforce.com, Facebook is managing to get about 15% of people who get to the three-second mark of a digital video to watch through to the end. And that’s usually a 30-second clip of highly polished, professionally shot stuff with celebrities and models in it. Imagine what will happen to those numbers when a bloke from customer service delivers his 20-minute soliloquy about the latest flavours of his edible crayon brand from a dimly lit warehouse in Nuneaton.
Yes, you guessed it. What will happen is massive social media impact and success for marketers who cannot afford to miss the chance to expose their brand to live streaming at every possible fucking opportunity. At least that will be the narrative sold to marketers and, based on past experience, we should fully expect them to fall for it. The rest of 2017 will follow the same old dreary digital schedule of the past few years.
READ MORE: Mark Ritson – Facebook’s erroneous video metrics show no one has a clue about digital
First, marketers will be told that live streaming offers them unprecedented advantages over crap old technologies that are dead anyway. Live streaming’s advantages appear to hinge on being more natural and interactive than traditional video formats. If marketers are still buying that crap in 2017 then there really is no hope for them.
Next comes the exemplar of brand success. Twitter had Oreo cookies, Facebook had Coke. Live streaming has Dunkin’ Donuts. The American fast food chain broadcast Chef Geoff and Chef Molly on Facebook Live in 2016 and that live stream is frequently cited when articles claim big brands are now live streaming their way to success.
Our first-ever LIVE tour of the DD test kitchen + a big announcement for engaged Valentines!
Posted by Dunkin’ Donuts on Thursday, 11 February 2016
I’ve seen the video. The two chefs read some tweets, they walked around their HQ, they looked at some donuts and 14 minutes later it came to an end. I’m not sure how many live viewers watched but, 11 months later, the video has garnered 40,000 views. Awesome. If we apply the 15% completion metric (and I highly doubt it was anywhere near that high) they managed to get about 6,000 people to view their live stream to its dramatic conclusion (they have a contest). Dunkin’ Donuts sells 2.3 billion donuts a year by the way.
By late 2017 we will start to see marketing conferences on live streaming with important insights on how brands can win with this revolutionary new tool. These insights are already appearing in various digital guides and include (and these are real, not me taking the piss) “be authentic and warm”, “initiate conversations with new arrivals” and “thank people for stopping by”. So, a bit like your grandma at Christmas apparently.
Next we will see a small army of digital savants change their job titles to ‘head of live streaming’ or ‘live digital manager’. There will be a ridiculous push for businesses to appoint ‘chief live streaming officers’ or face strategic ruin. At established conferences senior marketers will be asked to explain why they do not live stream and they will look uncomfortable and then reassure the much younger audience that they are “all about live streaming” while making a mental note to hire someone in the morning who knows about this stuff.
Finally, with brands now spending millions on live stream events that resemble badly made home pornos without the sex, the industry will have to quickly invent a raft of metrics that don’t make any sense, can’t be compared to traditional media but can be used to prove – despite the total and utter lack of impact – that live streaming delivers incredible ROI.
If you’ll excuse me, I have to head to the men’s room.
HNY Mark. Enjoyed this one immensely and agree broadly. Some thoughts on it though.
Twitch (a live streaming video platform for games) works well for us in the eSports world where it has effectively become what Sky Sports is to football. It works because its content i.e. tournaments, personal streams and tuition based talk shows, is genuinely interesting, entertaining or useful to its male 18-34 audience.
To your point though, on launch Twitch rapidly eclipsed its general-interest counterpart, so I think this is about specialising, niching AND being useful. Being generalist and disposable clearly wont cut it.
P.S. I was spent some time in a dimly lit warehouse in Nuneaton and it scarred me for life.
Mark … you bastard ! You made me watch that bloody Dunkin Donuts video and now I gotta run for the crapper !! What a load of garbage. How can they or anyone else that I have unfortunately seen streaming vids from of late – possibly think that their markets will be turned on by such uninteresting uninspiring ill-conceived self-flatulating crap ? Spot on piece again – showing it to my marketing team today as a warning … not to !!
I expect there’ll be a few standout brand pieces a la Red Bull & Felix Baumgartner and then, well the other 99%. Although Al King makes a good point on sports broadcasting.
I can also see that because it was ‘free’ (filmed by the Live Streaming Strategist on their phone) the resulting small amount of reach and engagement will be seen as a triumph.
I did a live stream of a Burberry show in Beijing back in 2011 which was live streamed to over 120 millions viewers.
Although it made me laugh and it certainly resonates, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the technology. Like any platform, surely it comes down to content? I was at a late-night show at Ronnie Scott’s the other night which was being live-streamed. There were 150 people in the room and 68,000 people tuned in to watch it on Facebook. Totally agree about the Dunkin’ Donuts though.
Live streaming is STILL VIDEO. If video marketing works, then so does live streaming video. People don’t do it if it does not work. It works when done right just like anything else.
Didn’t we just have the same discussion about social media marketing not so long ago? The truth is that advertising has no quantifiable impact or reach. There’s no formula. There’s no checklist for success. If there was, then we’d be able formalise advertising into a science – and the consumer experience with the product/service wouldn’t matter as much as it does. When it comes to advertising, there’s just the human condition and dumb luck. On balance though, if you delight someone with your brand in any way they’ll tell someone else about it, which makes a live stream about as valid as any other marketing activity. It’s never been about the tools; it’s always been about what you do with the tools.
One thing that marketers have today, to a much greater extent than ever before, is choice. There is a vast arsenal of marketing weapons available of which live streaming is but one.
It isn’t right for every campaign but it will be right for some. How many times have I heard such opinions as “Facebook Ads don’t work” or “no one ever clicks on banner ads” etc, etc. Well, I’ve had massive success with both of those despite the wise-men of “proper” marketing telling me they don’t work – they didn’t work for them because they either did it wrong or they used them for the wrong campaign. Live streaming, as someone else pointed out, is still video marketing and we know, because we’ve actually done it, that video marketing works – if you know how to do it properly, and thereby hangs a tale!
Fun post but I disagree with your point of view on this one… in my experience Facebook Live has worked brilliantly compared to the standard video posts. The organic reach is better and providing the content is designed to engage the engagement is also better and continues after the video is no longer live. Oh and lets not forget it can also legitimately be hacked to create super engaging polls.
This is just the classic content marketing rant though. This situation happens repeatedly and the lifetime cycle usually follows this path:
A new medium for advertising exists. The agency wants to be pitching cutting edge ideas and regardless of the product/client they will sell it in and be too full of hubris to appreciate that they are perhaps better versed in creating more traditional adverts rather than content that actually people want to watch. They will attempt to spin a dull advertising concept as must-see viewing. And when nobody gives a shit – the industry will blame the format rather than its lack of ability to choose the right client/product for this kind of approach or turn out the kind of content that people are actually likely to want to sit and watch.
When Facebook first introduced live streaming one of my favourite bands started doing it by accident. It appeared on my timeline and was a video of them in their hotel room questioning what was going on and why so many people were watching it, in the language appropriate for a hungover metal band. It made me smile for approximately 5 seconds, then I went and checked to see if they had any gigs coming up, turns out they did, so I bought a ticket.
Perhaps companies should appoint a CSNOO – a Chief Shiny New Objects Officer.
Instead of having to add new ‘experts’ for each new thing, one individual could simply switch his attention to the latest fad.
I’m in! Where do I send me CV to?
Entertaining read, but really? Like most things, if its done properly and all factors considered, Live Streaming can be extremely effective and successful on many levels. Yes, I have a vested interest, but objectively it sounds like you’ve never been involved in a successful streaming campaign. The technology and platforms are there, so whether a live TV style debate on Linkedin for an indexed B2B audience, or a reveal for an excited audience (think Star Wars toys for real fans!!), if you give the audience something they want to watch, and the ability to engage with, you see the results….and by way of results, measurable and tracked including purchase!
Mark at least the purpose of your statement has achieved some engagement which I presume is the purpose of your article. However I am surprised that a man of your calibre and responsibility has released such an article. While I agree with some of you writing I think your article should be aimed at ‘content’ not live streaming. There is plenty of research to show that future generations, starting with Millennial’s, consume live content. Also there are a number of exceptionally large business’s and brands that have updated their products to cater for this such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. So my feedback would be to address your frustrations at the content that is out there not the platform or deliver mechanism.
If the streaming of e-sports is the only valid example of successful live streaming, it kind of proves Mr Ritson’s point.
If the only good example is the one that most closely copies TV’s sports broadcasting model, isn’t it really demonstrating the value of good TV broadcasting?
Great pushback everyone.
Just waiting for….. examples of brands getting it to do the business. In my extensive research (two glasses of red wine and ok one more) I found almost all the best examples were sub-100,000 likes for brands with millions of consumers. Hmmm.