Welcome to another episode of Marketers of the Universe, delivered by the international powerhouse that is the Brew Digital marketing team. 

In this episode we start by picking up on last month’s Twitter/X Vs Threads conversation, and whether the rebrand will hurt or hinder Musk’s $44bn purchase. We then looked at how AI can be used to support your marketing efforts – and the times when it shouldn’t! The Lionesses have us excited for the future of female football, and we also pick apart the essentials and the desirables of a marketing campaign. We conclude with an examination of the world of influencers, and when to use macro or micro influencers!

[00:00] Introduction

[01:01] Twitter becomes X: genius, or self-sabotage?

[07:10] Using AI as a marketing tool

[13:53] #LionessesDownUnder

[20:35] Marketing campaign must-haves

[26:57] Macro v micro influencers

[31:02] Wrap-up

Transcript

Rich Harper: 0:01

In a way, it's obvious to the world that this was written by ChatGPT or by an AI. Fine. If you're trying to use it to palm it off as your own work, that's when I think you're going to get in trouble.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 0:17

Welcome to episode two, where we, the Brew Digital team, choose some key marketing topics to chat about for about five minutes each. This month. We're chatting lionesses down under, we're chatting X, we're talking AI, we're talking campaign must- haves, and we're also going to look at macro versus micro influences. I'm Haydn and this is the Marketers of the Universe podcast. So what can you do in five minutes? Well, I think you can microwave a jacket potato, you could put away the washing that's been sitting on the stairs for the last week, or you could launch a competitor to Twitter, gain 44 million users and then lose 80% of them. Now, in the last episode, we spoke about Threads. With Elon Musk, there seems to be continuous Twitter drama. What has been the immediate impact that you've seen from Twitter rebranding?

Mark Bundle: 1:35

T he funniest kind of thing I've seen about rebranding a lot of people have taken it in this way, but was one comment from a user where they were having to help their nan use her smartphone because she couldn't find her Twitter app anymore and that's honestly the most– the biggest impact I've seen from the change.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 1:51

I like that. Nan can't find her app anymore.

Rich Harper: 1:53

I personally haven't shifted the way I use it. People will talk about rebranding a company as being, you know, the death of that company, but Twitter was on the decline anyway s ince Musk took over. There was never going to be any reason why he wouldn't make these bold decisions. He's done it everywhere he's been. I don't think it's come as much as a surprise anyway, because he changed the legal name of Twitter to X C orp in March this year anyway. So I don't really feel that shocked by what he's done.

Ross Stratton: 2:22

I think it will be interesting to see if he changes the domain name as well, because any website beginning with X has a certain connotation, I think. So, apparently he wants to kind of transform Twitter into this WeChat clone, which is like a payments app and social media and chat platform. I don't necessarily think I would want to start sending payments through Twitter – certainly security issues and trust issues with Elon Musk. If I'm going to use a payment app, I want it to be solely focused on being a payments app, and the idea of Twitter being kind of a jack-of-all-trades app isn't that appealing. I personally just use it to look at football news and that's it.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 3:00

I mean, you say that about payments, but you look back at Elon Musk's interesting history and PayPal is in there, which I think is a brand that we do trust.

Ross Stratton: 3:10

That is true. I completely forgot that he was one of the founding members, but then surely it just makes more sense to just have a PayPal integration with a trusted name, as opposed to sending payments solely through Twitter.

Freya Willcocks: 3:21

When the Twitter sort of rebrand came about for the first about two weeks got Be Real and Twitter notifications– X notifications confused constantly, and the way BeR eal works is that you get one notification a day and that's your one post for the day. And so if anybody posted anything on X w ith the little warning triangle, which is the logo that comes up when you have to upload to BeReal, the panic that went through my body, thinking that it was my BeReal that had gone off again or something like that, it's not worth the stress and I ended up muting X.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 3:56

So I guess that leads on to that question is what do we think of the X brand? Does anyone think it's good?

Ross Stratton: 4:04

Well, it depends how you define good. Really, I think it's.. I have no real opinion of it. I wasn't particularly wild about the Twitter branding in general. I think it depends entirely on where he goes with it. Is this just purely an aesthetic change or is this an X as in the crossroads for all sorts of different functionalities.

Michele Raffaelli: 4:22

I see it in a different way. If his long term objective is to make a Western version of WeChat, in my opinion, if you want to build it from scratch, it's going to cost more than acquiring Twitter and, in a few years, change the nature of it and make it become the new WeChat. From what I'm seeing now, I think it's cheaper to rebrand and change the nature of something that is pretty well known, whether it's because he's behind it or whether because it's an app that actually is used. Change little things every few months so people will continue talking about him and then have the full rebrand when the transformation from Twitter to Western WeChat will happen.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 5:09

From a brand's point of view, the idea that it could evolve into this WeChat... Obviously, Twitter had a lot of brand equity that X has built on. I don't think X would have stood out as a brand in its own, but actually the controversy around rebranding something like Twitter that was so well known has caused so many people to be having this conversation Just to tie things up. What do you think for someone listening can go away or not go away and do right now, when it comes to X from a brand marketing point of view?

Rich Harper: 5:46

It's still Twitter, just with a facelift. The fact that Meta tried to launch something to compete against Twitter in Threads seems to have now gone off the radar. We saw huge volumes of people have moved to Threads because of the easy sign up process with Instagram, but I think we read a report earlier today that, of the initial interest, the current rate of engagement on the site, or active users per day, has dropped by 82%. There's always going to be these fads. The fact that they've changed Twitter to X, I don't think is going to cause an immediate issue for brands that are advertising on there. There's still celebrities using it. There's still brands using it. There's still an audience there that are avid followers of the platform. For now, my advice is to just keep doing what we're doing, but watch the space.

Mark Bundle: 6:40

Channel 4 actually tweeted kind of in reply to a similar thing. Don't be too sensitive if you rebrand. Even throughout this we've keep referring to it as Twitter, not X. Channel 4 pointed out there on demand service has been All 4 for a few years now. Everyone still refers to it as 4oD. If you've got a strong enough brand and you try rebrand, you've got to be prepared that your old brand doesn't just disappear. People are still going to use it, refer to it. Don't just kind of imagine it's gone.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 7:10

The second topic we're going to talk about here is what you should or shouldn't be doing when using AI as a marketing tool. What are the big do's when it comes to using AI and digital marketing?

Mark Bundle: 7:21

Make sure it fits in with what you want. It's an incredibly clever thing, AI. Obviously it's smarter than most of us, but just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it. So make sure, whatever you're doing, you're giving it the right context and you're actually using it for something that is going to provide value for you, as opposed to just going hey, here's a new toy, let's play with it.

Rich Harper: 7:40

I think it's great for helping create ideas and to give you a starting point, I would use it as a tool there as a do, because it speeds up some of that research phase and helps identify, say, trends or ideas for blog posts. On the flip side of that, and absolutely don't don't use it as a copywriter, don't use it to say, write me a blog post and then copy and paste that blog post onto your website. A lot of people are going to look at the tool and go do we need a copywriter? Why don't we just use this? My early days of using it: language, tone of voice and the humanity of the way that content comes across is missing. It feels very robotic and a bit repetitive. There's no real personality behind it. So don't just use it to copy and paste.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 8:27

Have you seen the Ryan Reynolds ads? I can't remember the brand. I think it was a mobile brand in the US, the one he's affiliated with. They build their script using the correct prompts. You say don't create a blog. Do you think, if you have the right prompts, that it can be right?

Mark Bundle: 8:43

It's Mint mobile that references Ryan Reynolds. The funny thing about that ad campaign was there were kind of glaring bits where it jarred against the normal tone of that. So as much as yes, it can write a blog, write a script, write an entire film in some cases people have used it for, it still needs a human touch just around the edges and to fact check it! The number of errors still coming out of ChatGPT is staggering. Even simple things like I usually try some Google formulas, it would give you results which are factually wrong. They didn't work. You do have to make sure you're keeping a close eye on it as well and not just taking everything just says as right.

Rich Harper: 9:21

They made it very clear that it was written by AI. I think that's the key point. If you use it in a way that is obvious to the world that this was written by ChatGPT or an AI, fine. If you're trying to use it to then palm it off as your own work, that's when I think you're going to get in trouble.

Mark Bundle: 9:38

Especially with Google's next generation tools. They're always saying they're looking as part of the search rankings to spot stuff that is AI generated. So even if you're veering towards using some of that content, it might be that you'll end up getting penalised in the future.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 9:51

I think one interesting use case I've seen is academically. Someone I know used it to pull together an academic research piece. It was fascinating. To the untrained eye it looked exactly what you'd expect an essay to look like, but when you dug into what those references were, AI just made them up. What other don'ts do you think there are that need to be taken into consideration when using AI?

Mark Bundle: 10:20

Don't expect whatever you you put in first time to output what you want. Unless you're a trained prompt engineer, which is already becoming a thing, expect to iterate. You might give it a prompt to ask you to do something and then go okay, that but, and ask it to make a change. Don't expect that first draft to be exactly what you want. You're going to need to teach the engine what it is you're looking for.

Michele Raffaelli: 10:40

The way I'm using it. It's not to substitute my work, it's just to speed it up, as the example we were saying before, I think. Unless you're a prompt generator – I don't remember what's the job title that Mark mentioned – you should be worried about what you ask. If I know already what I want, I can ask for, I don't know, headlines, descriptions or landing pages analysis, but because I know the results, I know that it works very well in every language. I tested in Italian, French, English and I've seen that actually this translation, provided with AI, are way better than a normal Google Translate. But again, it can help to speed up work, but it cannot substitute yet because it's limited. Whenever I have big workload, I can just get things speed up for normal paid media tasks.

Saufi Mohd Nor: 11:31

I think just kind of bring it back from what, like I guess Mark and Michele said as well, just don't just use it and then assume they give you the right answer. At least on my end, in terms of like just the social side, like making copies and all, I usually include the specific thing I want, like include a reference, include a joke or something like that, and kind of try to tweak it as much as we can. If I already make like a one social media copy and I'm supposed to make another three more for the full outpost, it's going to take so much time to just keep thinking how to rephrase it. So if I could just use the one that I made and just kind of use AI to kind of speed up a bit in terms of rephrase it and just kind of get the different, different options of it, I think that's the best way to use it.

Freya Willcocks: 12:13

So I've been learning HTML. I found it quite useful to just sort of spell check it for me. Every now and then I'll just miss out a dash or like a bracket, and it will drive me a bit nuts trying to figure out what I've missed and where. And so if I pop it into AI, sometimes it will come back with what's wrong and where and highlight it for me, rather than me sitting at my desk for ages trying to find out where I went wrong.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 12:39

Listen. I like that use case. I've not. I've not seen that done before. What can someone who's listening today go away and start doing immediately to help them improve how they're working in digital marketing?

Saufi Mohd Nor: 12:54

Use it as a supportive tool. Whatever data content generated by AI, it must be analyzed by us just to make more informed decisions.

Mark Bundle: 13:12

Last point is, p ractically, the input as the output. A lot of the tools are obviously public use, things like ChatGPT is all on public servers. So as much as the output, we have to be careful with the input as well. They can be seen by other people, and so you have to make sure not to use any kind of confidential information in there, because it's– it can produce wonderful things, but we don't necessarily want to share everything we're having it produce.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 13:38

That's a future GDPR that'll probably be brought in at some point. Chat GDPR chat GDPR the horror. I love that, it's not funny, it's terrifying. Next section is going to look at a marketing campaign that we've chosen that we think has been quite striking. What we've chosen is to look at the #LionessesDownUnder. This is actually very timely. We are recording this over the semifinal, where England have just beaten Australia three goals to one. I'm going to kick things off. What have you been impressed with when, seeing all that the marketing teams for the England women's team has approached, both selling the World Cup but also selling the England teams involvement in the World Cup?

Mark Bundle: 14:25

They're starting more in line with the different brand partnerships as well, and this isn't due to them, this is more to other people where you find it taking notice of them. So where before there was the England men's team and that was it and blah, blah, blah, the women's team has become much more recognised, obviously primarily off the back of the Euro success last year, which was a really good result, but the interest that's garnered and I think the women's super league booking engine for all the teams broke not long after the Euro final, because it's the absolute surge in interest. They're now being used as a actually different brand partnerships. Can we take these off I mean the most prominent one's ITV, which is a bit of a given, given they're the broadcaster, but they're compared with the actual lions walking around the streets of the country. Interestingly, not all of those are CGI. Some of those are real lions in front of the green screen apparently. I didn't know that, but yeah, that the opportunities now are a lot broader for them.

Rich Harper: 15:19

Yeah, I think the fact that they won the Euros means people know they are. Now people are aware of the lioness, people are aware of women's football in general, so they haven't done a campaign about the football. I saw a campaign of the French women's team where they had CGI'd the men's faces onto the women playing football to kind of showcase whatever the men can do, the women can do as well, and we've tapped into it in a slightly different way. We don't need to show what the girls are capable of. They've already proven that they're world-class football players in their own right. So this is more about getting the country behind them and using some of that patriotism, I guess.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 15:58

I think it's been been interesting seeing so many more of the club football teams as well start involving the women's teams into things like kit launches. You know, you look at the M&S partnership. That's been a big thing with the men's team for a long time, so I think that's been quite impactful. I think one of the things that I've been really impressed with on their approach to marketing the team, and I guess this is in a way linked to using influencers and having that brand behind each of those players is any of the content that has come out of the camp that I've seen – even the Lauren James red card – has been dealt with really professionally and every video has really shown the team having a lot of fun and being really happy. I think that's been something that's really struck me is the tone that has been around the whole campaign.

Mark Bundle: 16:55

I think the England team specifically has a very careful air of that kind of fun curated around them, like at the last I don't know if it's the World Cup, the Euros from the men all the photos came out from jumping around on the different floats in the swimming pool and other things you should listen to George's which is a big training base, which also is a training base for the men and the women, which is a positive as well. You see, there's an awful lot of stuff there that is just for fun. I think the England team is framed very carefully as fun, energetic role models as much as they can. But that is now including the women's scene.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 17:29

Now, the target audience for women's football has evolved over the last five, six years, even more so the last two, three years. We've spoken about it a little bit before. In the past there's been a lot of focus on targeting young women or young girls who are starting to play football and, having those as a target audience, We've seen a bit of a shift to start marketing both to young men and boys who are growing up and supporting not just the men's team but also the women's team. We've seen terms like 'dadvocates' come into play, dads who have girls who play football and are being targeted, being used as a customer audience for the marketing. How do we think that marketing teams can learn from that audience approach and the variety in audience?

Michele Raffaelli: 18:14

What I liked and I start seeing most more and more on TV is this new ad from Google Pixel. Google Pixel 7 apparently has a new feature on images that they can retouch old pictures and make them look good, which is a sponsor or partner of the Lionesses. In that case, they are using the moment, the trending time of this football team, by some message for a product that actually doesn't belong on one gender or the other, or even hasn't had a very specific and segmented placement in the society at the moment.

Mark Bundle: 18:50

Across the older society, there is more of a shift towards a less gender defined approach to everything. Really, there's not so much there's men's this and there's women's this, there's just people's things. I think the Barbie movie is also showing that as well, as we discussed last time that primarily you think it's a film for the young girls and for people that are baby dogs, but it's not. It's marketed across the board and everyone's really brought into that. I think that's possibly one of the things to take away is it's not men's and women's football anymore, it's just football. When you're looking at your branding, I think the targeting to men and women unless it's for something like clothes which, yes, that's still going to be gender based, largely, I think you can take that out of your targeting now. I don't think that's something you need to be so aware of. I think it's your marketing to people and that's all you need to be aware of.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 19:36

I completely agree. You know, if you look at technology or the technology B2B space, that's something that's always been male dominated. What has always been an issue in the past is women don't see themselves reflected in a lot of the marketing and, as you said, Mark, that shift is happening across a lot of places. So actually, I think for brands who are working in any kind of marketing space but focusing just on the tech B2B space is actually really think about how your message lands.

Mark Bundle: 20:13

The thing is just being inclusive. Make sure you are bringing in men, women, whatever other genders people might identify, as people with different ethnic origins, people with different educational backgrounds. Just make sure you've got a nice diverse mix and you're going to have a better outcome, and that's that's not even just marketing? That's just the best way to be a case of cross the board.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 20:36

This topic is looking at what you need for your campaigns versus what do you just want for your campaigns. Now, I think when we talk about marketing campaigns, it can be one of these terms that means different things to different people. So I'm going to ask a pretty difficult question to kick this off: What is a marketing campaign? Who's brave enough to answer?

Mark Bundle: 21:00

The old definition if I remember is that any marketing is just an attempt to hold people's attention long enough to make them purchase. That's not phrased quite as nicely as that, but basically it. Essentially any marketing campaign is anything we put together across whatever media to try and persuade someone to do something that we want them to do.

Ross Stratton: 21:20

I can refer back to the Google definition of marketing campaign.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 21:23

Go on, what's the Google definition of a marketing campaign?

Ross Stratton: 21:25

The activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. So I think Mark essentially was bang on with this slightly abstract. Yeah, I think we should refer back to that one.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 21:38

We now know what the most SEO- able answer of what a marketing campaign is. Okay, and when we're looking at a marketing campaign, what are the things that we 100% need. We can't do without them.

Rich Harper: 21:51

I would say an achievable goal 100%. How many people enter into doing a marketing campaign without actually knowing what the end result is? I've seen it time and time again and then trying to understand whether or not that campaign was successful or not. If you go into it not knowing what you're measuring or what you're trying to achieve, then how do you know whether it's worth repeating or not?

Michele Raffaelli: 22:15

I would agree with Rich, that would be perfect. What I've experienced now everyone of us is if you have loads and loads of budget, you can do miracles. If we think at one of the most recent campaign, I don't want to mention it but it's pink, having basically unlimited budget, even if the product is not so good as we discussed, you can achieve all the results you want. If the huge budget is not available, then I agree with Rich, then you need set objectives and target.

Mark Bundle: 22:48

I mean any goal you're setting you should use the smart framework, so it's: specific, major or attainable, relevant and time-bound. As Rich said, it's kind of the attainable or the achievable is kind of the main thing. But for Michele, if you're down with unlimited budget, it's still has to be measurable. It was still time-bound and their objective is to get X number of people through the gates at the cinema. I imagine they'll have a target on the revenue for that.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 23:11

Nice. Thank you, Mark. What do we think are some of those things when it comes to campaigns that are really nice to have, but actually we shouldn't get too caught up on them. We can do it without them.

Ross Stratton: 23:23

One aspect is definitely the creative side. I think it's very appealing for brands to have this kind of high production, edited into the ground videos that are a minute long that look fantastic but in reality, on Facebook certainly, or even LinkedIn, customers are really going to be watching, on average, three to four seconds of that creative. So these kind of things are unnecessary. This is why you see movie trailers on YouTube where within the first five seconds they're just summarizing the entire trailer and then they just show you the title purely because they need to get that messaging in the first five seconds. I think the shorter the better. If you can cram as much info as you can into the first five seconds, that's the most important bit.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 24:09

Yeah, I think that's really impactful. I think as well, we talk about that high-budget gloss finish on some video campaigns. I think brands sometimes forget and brand and marketers sometimes forget that the context of where that video is going to be. So actually it doesn't have to be the most punished thing in the world. Actually, sometimes there is a real benefit to having something that's been recorded on the smartphone and edited nicely, especially when you look at the likes of TikToks and Snapchat and the content that people are consuming on stories and reels or whatever. They're really short, they're punchy, they're not highly polished pieces of content. I think it's really about being authentic in the space.

Saufi Mohd Nor: 24:58

Yeah, I just kind of want to add a little bit on what you and Ross mentioned. It's always nice to have a really nice product, like on nice creative assets, and not to publish. But I think one thing that people forget is it's more of a need. Actually you need to know what the content is actually for, like who actually you can reach out with your content. Like it's no matter how nice your video, no matter how much money you spend on it, no matter how much money you boost, but if the content is not something that's going to be useful to your target audience, it's not something they can relate to, then how is it going to do anything?

Haydn Woods-Williams: 25:36

think, sometimes, something people forget is when putting campaigns together is that the audience research and the planning should come before the content. Sometimes we try to– we have a nice bit of content that's been created and we try and shoehorn it into a marketing campaign and what I often see happen is there is a piece of content that's had a lot of time sunk into it that just doesn't really answer anyone's problems. If anyone can take away a little bit of information from this section. Asking yourself the question whenever you put any kind of content is who cares? Yes, you care because you work for the brand. But take yourself out of that brand bubble and think does anyone really honestly give a **** about what I'm putting out into the world? And if the answer is no, don't do it. Don't do it. Put things out that solve problems, that add value, and by doing the research and the planning first, you're much more likely to create content that is going to be hitting the right point to the audience. Okay and on to our last topic for today. We are looking at macro versus micro influencers, and Saufi, you've been leading the influencer charge at Brew Digital. What is the difference between a macro and a micro influencer?

Saufi Mohd Nor: 27:13

I would say in terms of if you want the big, splashy attention, then macro is the way to go, but if you want something more of a specific kind of action, then the micro will work better. But I think, based on my experience, it's not so much on who you work with, because sometimes I've worked with a lot of campaigns that we have a mixture. You know, we could have like a five macro and then 10 mid tier and then another 30 like the micro ones, so it could be like a mixture. So it doesn't really necessarily matter who you work with in terms of just number of followers. But I think ultimately, when it comes to like influencer marketing, just try to treat it as you're hiring someone to kind of represent your product, your company and so on. Think of it as if you are hiring a new team member, like, do you want to work with this person? Do they represent what you are doing, and so on. So yeah, before you even think like micro, micro, just kind of understand your brand and also understand who you are targeting. Then we can discuss further on whether macro or micro are a mixture of both.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 28:21

How do you know to trust the influence you're bringing in? How do you know that those followers they have aren't fraudulent? How do you get past that stumbling block?

Saufi Mohd Nor: 28:32

So if you just see on the surface you'd be like, oh, cool videos, a lot of followers and all. It's easy to get fooled into thinking that that might be the best person to work with. That's why I think in our process we're always going to ask for their previous work, to just kind of get reference. Who are the previous clients that they've worked with and see the result. Is it good, is it bad? If all the previous company they've worked with, the result are not so good? That's pretty telling in the first place. You know, like may be, all of those are just fake numbers. So when you come to the influencers, if they have a manager's or maybe they manage themselves, seeing demos of how they share their rates, share their previous work, they have a media kit or so on how timely they can discuss or jump in a call and kind of discuss further what they can do and all. Can they like talk with us and just have this really good communication and give honest feedback? I usually like to work with influencers who already kind of check the company website or the product and they see like, oh, I like something, or they just start asking, even if it's a negative thing, that shows that they actually care who they work with.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 29:40

And just to wrap things up, when we think about influencers, I think immediately we jump straight to social media. How can we use influencer created content and influencers across those other channels?

Mark Bundle: 29:54

I mean same way with any other content. I guess it's going to be running partnership with what we do, certainly with emails, you can include videos, you can include quotes from the thing and snippets and things. So it's just from my perspective it's just another form of content that we can broadcast in the same way.

Saufi Mohd Nor: 30:12

If you're interested in influencer marketing, just don't think of it as influencer marketing and campaign and it's just one single campaign. Try to think of it as one branch of your overall campaign. Influencer marketing works well when it's supported by all these other activities as well by pay it, by the email site, by the SEO site and also the organic social side of stuff. So don't always think like, oh, I want to do influencer marketing and, yeah, that's my only campaign. Try to make sure it's just one of the parts. Never, ever, assume influencer marketing will can do all that. It will create awareness and also generate sales. If you still think it's just a part of marketing, you still need all these other channels to kind of work with it, and only then you get a more holistic and strong campaign.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 31:03

That wraps things up for today. I just want to thank the Blue Digital team Joining from the UK we've had Ross, Freya, Mark and Rich. Joining from Italy we've had Michele, and, all the way from Malaysia, Saufi and Nasya. Make sure to go and check out our past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts and we'll see you on the next one. I've been Haydn and this has been the Marketers of the Universe podcast.