A Dead Thread

GM Marketers ☕

It’s been a while, and I do apologise to the grand total of 5 of you who are reading these for taking a break already. However, the world of marketing kept moving at breakneck speed, and it very much picks up from where we left off this week. If I asked you 12 months ago if the world’s richest man would take one of the most beloved brands on the planet and change it to a name that comes with some raunchy connotations, would you have believed me?… possibly. If I asked you if you believe Mark Zuckerberg would be getting his elbows out even harder against competition, you wouldn’t have doubted it for a second. Let’s dig in 🧇

Threads was a thing.

Marketers are like Magpies - shiny object syndrome is a very real thing.

So given the chance to play with a brand new platform, we all flocked over there to have a go, see what other marketers are doing, and see the japes and whimsy Wendy’s social person is creating.

How come we all got so bored of it so quickly, though? The very thing that drove us there. Shiny. Object. Syndrome. Besides that, there are some other factors, and a deeper opportunity that lies ahead.

Let’s have a look.

The smart people at SimilarWeb have provided this chart to show a bit of the usage stats we saw from Threads. Now you may say “hype’s obviously going to create a peak and through effect”, but would an app with nearly perfected functionality retain, or evening grow usage minutes per user? Possibly.

Long term, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t going to lose any sleep at all over this. Even the “active users down 80% since its peak” headlines won’t be scary. Consider the total Meta ecosystem user count of over 2.9 billion. Twitter (X) had about 450 million users in 2022. It’s not hard to fathom that funneling more users from Facebook and IG won’t be a gradual and considerably growing source of users. Before we know it, Threads could very well be larger than Twitter ever has been, and we’d just never really notice that shift.

For now, let’s just keep on aimless scrolling it and getting confused at the UI. Maybe they’ll livestream the Musk v Zuck fight on there?

Ogilvy is just like the rest of us

Considered one of the most desirable agencies in the world, Ogilvy have always tried to make themselves stand out from the rest of the pack. But, is that so today? We got quite the stir up on socials.

Going from this…

To this.

A big shout out to John Long who described the change as “emblematic of a larger problem in the industry -- a lack of confience and clairty about what we do. (It’s also just louse copywriting).

Couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m sure David Ogilvy is spinning in his grave.

Sometimes, you have to stick to the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

‘Till next time.