Surprise: It’s almost impossible to cut through if your communications, whether ads or social posts, lack an element of the unexpected.  A classic example of Surprise in action was the Taco Bell “Viva Young” spot, in which a gang of geriatrics party like there’s no tomorrow.  This spot also proves you can still surprise people with an idea borrowed from a now “old” ‘80’s movie.

Emotion: When the Budweiser Clydesdale “Brotherhood” spot ended, even the most macho of football fans were reaching for their hankies, and the Twitteratti were almost too weepy to tweet.  The fact that this touching ad ranked highest on USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter reminds us of the power of emotion and the enduring connection brands can but all too often forget to make with consumers.

Relevance: The circus that is Super Bowl advertising can lead to surprising and emotionally rich ads that still fall way short, such as the Beck’s ad with a singing goldfish, which AgAge lambasted as the worst of the night.  Recognizing the power of relevance, Adobe took a clever swipe at all the Super Bowl advertisers with a parody video that ran the next day and only online, garnering over 130,000 views among the close-knit marketing community.

Socialize: While trying to bake social media into your ads is almost a “duh” these days, it’s actually harder to do well than you might think.  In fact, one critic felt Coke worked so hard to make their “Chase” ad a participation sport that they lost their way.  One brand that succeeded in socializing their advertising effort was Oreo, whose Whisper Fight ad drove +50,000 fans to Instagram while its impromptu blackout meme stole the show online.

Searchify: Given that 70% of purchase journeys begin on Google, it would be simply insane not to consider search when creating ads and other marketing materials.  Nonetheless, only a handful of Super Bowl advertisers served up a memorable hashtag or URL to cue consumers to search for them after the game.  Audi, on the other hand, with its audaciously memorable ad and #BraveryWins hashtag, ran away with nearly 10 million post-game views, assisted by 2,670 game-time tweets (see Amy Vernon’s helpful hashtag analysis).

Extend: Though we are in obvious territory here, it is remarkable how many Super Bowl ads lacked an idea that extended beyond the thirty-second spot.  This was certainly not the case with the AXE “Lifeguard” ad that met all the criteria above AND set the stage for the AXE Apollo Space Academy, an on-going promotion that includes sending 23 “brave civilians” into space.  For a more detailed look at this particular campaign, see my review on PSFK.

Final note: While this article focused on big-time TV ads, the same principles of surprise, emotion, relevance, socialize, searchify and extend apply to just about any marketing endeavor, big or small, B2B or B2C.

Below you see a graph representing a branded Facebook page’s posts from July 2012 through October 2012 in which we examined a few key elements: reach, post type and virality. As you may know, virality is the number of people “talking about this” divided by the total reach of the post.  We chose this particular brand because it had long enjoyed significant engagement with an organically built fan base and had been consistent with the types and quantity of posts over the four-month time period.

We’ve chosen to show reach as a percentage of total page likes to normalize the change in fan growth; essentially, this makes all posts equal relative to the number of fans. If it is true that posts on average are seen by 16% of your fans, then most of the posts should hover around that blue line, with the more viral ones (larger bubbles) above that line. However, that was not the case--overall page reach declined, and with some types of content, the decline was remarkable.

The reach of a post is represented as a percent of total likes. Virality displayed as the size of the bubble.

Even more disturbing is the fact that despite similar virality of many October posts, they simply didn’t achieve anywhere near the same kind of reach as equally or even less viral posts in August.  This means that even if your fans are demonstrating legitimate engagement with a particular post, the reach of that post is still going to be throttled by the new algorithm.

One other finding of note is that rich media content—that is, posts that include photos or video—saw a greater decline in reach than your basic all-text status updates.  Represented by the orange and red dots, respectively, on the graph, photo and video posts showed a huge decline in reach regardless of the level of virality.  In contrast, the reach of text-only status updates, represented by the green dots on the graph, hovered around the 16% line and even showed some upward movement towards the end of October.

Just in case you found the above chart confusing, the one below simply plots out the absolute reach of each post over the same time period (with the numbers removed to protect confidentiality).  With this chart, you can see the dramatic decline in average daily reach (-35%) between August posts and October posts.  This is what most pages have reported and why the accusations against Facebook have been flying across the net.

In order to make sure we were comparing apples to apples in terms of post types, we broke this down even further to compare posts with photos, posts with videos and text-only status updates in the chart below. And then to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, we selected comparable posts from October that had higher levels of total actions (likes, comments and shares) and more engaged users.  Amazingly, despite the head start we gave the October posts, Facebook’s new algorithm has decreased reach by 30% or more for both photo and video posts. However, less engaging status updates (plain text with no previews) seem to be unaffected or only slightly affected by the changes.

Recognizing that the branded page we are studying here is but one example, we ran the same kind of analysis on other branded Facebook pages, and the results were consistent with the example above, regardless of the size or nature of the fan base.  For example, a brand page that had grown organically and another that had grown through sponsored posts both saw the same declines in reach during the same time frame.

Whether it’s intentional or not, Facebook is sending a complex message to marketers. First, don’t over-do it with photos and videos—you’ll reach and engage about the same number of fans with a pithy text-only status update.  In fact, it would be safe to conclude from this data that Facebook’s changes to EdgeRank have significantly devalued rich content posts like photos and videos.  Second, if you want to reach more of your fans, you’ll just have to pay for it, regardless of the quality of your content or the genuine interest of your fan base.

The findings above are consistent with a recent study by Group M Next that revealed a 38% drop in percent of Facebook users that see an organic post by a brand they like.  While Renegade does not believe that Facebook made these changes out of avarice, the results are pretty much the same—the value of a fan has been deflated and the cost of engaging more than a small percentage of them has increased.