So there’s this bar near my office. Let’s call it Elon’s. It’s been around a while and at one point was the place to be seen. If you wanted to meet anyone in tech, politics or media, then Elon’s was the only show in town.
As Elon’s got more popular, it started to attract a wider variety of patrons and before long it began to feel pretty mainstream.
What we saw as a big, fun, slightly weird crowd, clever advertisers and a bunch of government departments saw as an audience. If they wanted to get their messages out, sticking a notice on the wall at Elon’s (plus one at Zuck’s, the bigger place across the road) did the job. Everyone saw it, and for starters at least, it cost nothing or close enough to it.
The advertisers and government departments loved this, and set up whole departments just to write messages to stick on the bar-room walls, paid for, in part, by pulling back on old-fashioned stuff like radio, TV and billboards.
Then, recently, things started getting weird at Elon’s. People would turn up and discover there was a cover charge just to get into the better parts of the bar. Then they said unless you were a member you could only look at a set number of notices on the noticeboard each day.
Finally, one day we turned up to the bar and discovered it had closed down and been turned into a charging station for electric cars.
The advertisers and government departments were pretty cranky at these developments. After all, people had come to expect that they could find important information – sometimes some real life or death stuff – on the noticeboard at Elon’s.
But there was nothing they could do about it. Elon’s was owned by some guy overseas who’d never even been to New Zealand. It was his bar and he got to make the rules. And when he got sick of running a bar, he closed it.
Now, you could say that relying on some privately owned, relatively unregulated platform to get important information to customers, citizens and ratepayers is a bit of a high-risk strategy.
And you’d be right. Since the literally free-for-all early days of social media ended, audiences have become more and more expensive to connect to.
Advertisers, including government departments and essential services, have seen what was once a powerful way to spread vital information and hear from communities deliberately transformed to a pay-per-play media channel.
Most recently, in just the latest of a series of deeply unpopular moves, Twitter has announced that users will only see a limited number of posts each day. If they pay a monthly fee, they can see more.
Twitter is completely entitled to do that. It’s a privately owned company, not a public utility. It could just as easily cut its losses and shut down entirely.
So, what are all those advertisers, government departments and essential services to do?
The answer isn’t as much staring them in the face as tapping them on the shoulder.
The channels and platforms that social media relegated to second place are about to get called back into the spotlight. Paid advertising channels – radio, TV, news sites and outdoor – are proven, effective and can be held to account. Yes, we’ll pay, but we can expect to get what we pay for.
“Owned media” – organisations’ own websites, apps and email lists – have a place too. Sure, they’re unsexy, but they offer a direct connection to audiences without the worry of wondering if an offshore billionaire woke up feeling grumpy.
We had some good times at Elon’s. Great times.
And bars being bars, people are already working on new ones to take its place. New bars are great news for punters – who doesn’t want somewhere cool to hang out with friends and meet new ones?
But if you’re an advertiser or a government department, don’t expect them to take the place of the boring but effective channels your audiences trusted long before Elon pulled his first beer.