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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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Digital marketing continues to steamroll the competition. Online ad spend has been increasing ever year for two decades, but we can see the emergence of a “third wave” of digital marketing built upon the early successes of Internet pioneers. The downfall of some of those original marketers whose good ideas just didn’t quite work out.
Here are a few of the surprise winners. People and companies that dared to look beyond conventional wisdom to find great success:
Have you been following GoPro? The video camera company GoPro has fabricated its digital strategy around remarkable visuals. With 3.2 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and 6,000 GoPro-labeled videos uploaded each day the company has a client base that is locked in. Close by YouTube, GoPro has a few hundred thousand sucscribers of its other channels (World, MX, and Tutorials) while its Instagram sustain brags 4.2 million followers which include amazing pictures and videos that feature its product without really concentrating on the product itself.
Yes, this is a skateboarding cat… but it’s also a genuinely authentic piece of content that originated organically via the community of GoPro users all over the world – a far cry from any big-budget agency brief and ad campaign.
They engage with authentic and often impressive content. Consuming GoPro’s content is widely shared and reported on, and is fast becoming a natural part of the lives of all consumers of digital media.
No One Had More Success than Donald Trump
Political campaigns have been dominated by Big Money, Huge Organizations, and the Two-Party System since George Washington’s day. Now, Mr. Trump blew that paradigm away. Not only did he win despite spending way less money that everyone, he did it without the massive ground game in 50 states that Ms. Clinton had organized and without the support of the Republican Party. In pulling off the Biggest Upset Ever, Trump leveraged digital marketing campaigns like no one has ever. More accurately, Trump leveraged his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a media-savvy guy married to Ivanka Trump, a media-savvy gal. Kushner founded the New York Observer, an online news magazine in 2006 and later, Cadre, an internet portal for large real estate projects. According to a ForbesMagazine interview, after joining the Trump campaign, Kushner called in chits from some of his Silicon Valley connections to design a social media strategy. Utilizing Facebookmicro-targeting and focusing on the states they identified would have to be flipped from Clinton’s Electoral College “Blue Wall,” Kushner began with the campaigns merchandising initiative and quickly ramped sales from less than $8,000 a day to over $80,000 a day. The strategy synced with Trump’s personal style of blunt, concise talking points and exaggerated hyperbole that had already captured a huge Twitter and Facebook audience and billions of dollars’ worth of free television exposure. Trump was already a media juggernaut, but Kushner quickly monetized and focused the campaign. Next, he produced a series of YouTube videos for a mere $160,000 that featured the same low-tech, blunt style. More than 74 million views later, Trump’s internet presence dwarfed Clinton’s best efforts. Just as Trump’s business success required a keen eye on the bottom line, the campaign’s strategies based on ROI. Rather than depending on wealthy donors to fund whatever-it-costs initiatives, the Trump campaign made decisions based on which program got the most “bang for the buck. For more info – Forbes
Nothing is Bigger than the Super Bowl
Source- respect-mag.com
As the Number 1 television event year after year with more than 114 million viewers last year, 30 seconds of Super Bowl airtime is an advertiser’s dream. But, it’s a pricey dream – last year’s event sold half-minute ads for $4.5 million and CBS is asking $5 million for this year’s game. When your budget can only buy a couple of seconds at that rate, you have to innovate. That’s exactly what the creative minds at advertising agency Newcastle Brown Ale did. With a couple of clients looking for a way to get a toehold on that Super Bowl audience, without the dollars to buy in, they had to break the mold. The result: The Super Bowl Battle of the Brands – a melee of second-tier brands battling it out in one TV commercial. Nominated by Salesforce.comas one of the year’s top marketing campaigns, Newcastle borrowed the concept of crowdsourcing and shared economies that make Kickstarter, Uber, AirBnB and others successful. The agency recruited 20-30 (who could count?) companies to join in one Super Bowl ad with everyone sharing the cost and competing for exposure. In a way no one could predict, it clicked, earning the consortium more than 2.3 billion campaign impressions during the game and afterward on social media. Rather than presenting a confusing message with no one company able to rise above the pack, the ad was seen as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the high cost of Super Bowl ads in general. People got it, the brands got their logos in front of the people, and Newcastle got a whole lot more clients. Viewers may not have learned a lot about Rotel, McClures Specialty Foods, Krave Jerky, Vanity Fair, Blettner Engineering, Lee apparel, April, Mr. Cheese Os, Match.com or the other participating brands, but the brands got the toehold they paid for, and a chance to parlay that into even more success through their own follow-up initiatives. For more info– Adweek
The Most Watchable Train Wreck
Even products we don’t want to talk about need love to. We usually see marketing campaigns from an assortment of gross or unmentionable products breaking new ground where only the likes of Depends and Tampex dared tread in the past. None was more innovative and successful than Squatty Potty, a toilet-training tool for new parents and their out-of-control toddlers. How does one go about making Number 2 Number 1? The digital marketers at Squatty Potty decided to just grab the bull by the horns and make us comfortable with their product by, essentially, making us uncomfortable with their product. How else does one explain in-your-face imagery of brightly colored soft serve ice cream spiraling from the bottom of an enthusiastically delighted, big-eyed unicorn seated over a waffle-cone conveyor belt in the universal posture of imminent excretion? Any child instantly identified with the animal’s self-pride as each cone was precisely filled in order. Who would have thought potty training could be so much fun? Parents certainly did, and so did the marketing gurus at AdHere, a Houston B2B ad agency. According to their research, the Squatty Potty social media marketing campaign received 10 million views in its first two months, and those clicks weren’t all two-year olds on their smartphones. You don’t even want to know how “sticky” it was, or how many viewers visited the potty over and over. Can a co-marketing campaign with PeptoBismal be far behind? Today, Squatty Potty is the #1 Best Seller in Amazon’s Toilet Training Potties & Seats category and unicorns will never quite be viewed the same again. For more info – Squattypotty
#LikeAGirl
One of the most powerful integrated marketing communications campaigns launched in recent times is the #Like A Girl campaign for Procter & Gamble’s feminine hygiene brand always. And the campaign is continuing to tackle the artificial limitations society places on girls. A recent iteration features girls lamenting the lack of female emojis on their phone. Always has filmed girls smashing stereotypes in different fields. There are also a “confidence summit” developed in partnership with TED that launched in 10 cities around the world.
The campaign was mentioned more than 1000 times in the media, and generated more than 4 billion earned impressions. The intent to purchase the Always product grew by more than 50 per cent among the target audience.
What’s Next in Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing campaigns continues to evolve. Will Yahoo become the next AOL? Can Twitter become more than just a PR machine for politicians and celebrities? Will younger folks return to active use of Facebook? With so many huge questions to be answered, we often lose track of the small. Incremental changes that eventually prove to be the Next Big Thing. The success of this year’s innovators provides ample evidence that out of the box is where it’s at. Our advice: don’t take “huh?” for an answer.
This “third wave” of digital marketing is defined by its strategic focus on authenticity, community engagement, and measurable return on investment over raw spending. It marks a shift from broad, expensive campaigns to highly efficient, targeted initiatives that leverage organic reach and data analytics. For example, while a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs $5 million, the Trump campaign generated over 74 million views on YouTube for a mere $160,000. This new wave proves that smarter, data-driven strategies can outperform sheer financial power by building genuine connections and optimizing for cost-effective results. This approach allows unconventional players and brands with limited resources to achieve massive impact by focusing on what truly resonates with their audience. Explore the full article to see how this model is reshaping modern marketing.
GoPro built its brand by making its community the hero, effectively shifting its marketing from selling a camera to celebrating the experiences it captures. Instead of creating polished ads, the company built a platform for its users' authentic, often breathtaking, content. This strategy is powerfully effective for several reasons:
It crowdsources a massive volume of high-quality, low-cost marketing material.
It builds immense social proof and trust, as the content comes from real users.
It fosters a deeply engaged community that feels co-ownership of the brand's narrative.
The result is a self-sustaining marketing engine fueled by the creativity and passion of its own customers, which is far more credible and engaging than any traditional campaign could be. Learn more about harnessing user-generated content by reading the complete analysis.
The Trump campaign executed a disciplined, data-driven digital strategy that treated every dollar as a strategic investment requiring a measurable return. Guided by Jared Kushner, the team leveraged Facebook micro-targeting to deliver precise messages to key voter segments in critical states, avoiding the waste of broad-based advertising. This ROI-first approach was applied to everything from merchandise, where sales were ramped from $8,000 to over $80,000 a day, to content creation. A series of low-tech YouTube videos produced for $160,000 secured over 74 million views, demonstrating a keen focus on maximizing impact per dollar spent. This agile, analytical method allowed them to achieve outsized results and dominate the digital landscape without a massive budget. The full article details how this model is changing political marketing.
The core difference lies in their primary objectives and methods. GoPro executes a brand-building pull strategy, focusing on long-term loyalty by creating a platform for inspiring, user-generated content. Its goal is to foster a community and make the brand synonymous with adventure. Conversely, the Trump campaign employed a conversion-focused push strategy, using data and Facebook micro-targeting to deliver persuasive messages directly to specific individuals to elicit an immediate action, like a vote or a donation. One model builds a culture around a product, while the other mobilizes an audience for a specific outcome. Choosing between them depends entirely on whether your goal is sustained brand affinity or direct, measurable short-term results. Discover which approach best suits different business objectives in the full post.
To successfully emulate GoPro's community-centric model, you must shift your focus from simply selling a product to enabling and celebrating your customers' creativity. A practical plan involves these key steps:
Establish a Content Hub: Designate a primary channel, like YouTube or Instagram, as the official showcase for the best user-submitted content.
Incentivize Participation: Launch regular contests, feature a user-of-the-week, and provide public recognition to motivate your customers to create and share.
Prioritize Authenticity: Actively seek and promote genuine, unpolished content that reflects real-world use, as this builds more trust than slick, professional ads.
By consistently executing this strategy, you transform customers from passive buyers into active brand evangelists, creating a powerful and sustainable content engine. See more examples of this strategy in action in the complete article.
These examples highlight a critical shift where digital precision and engagement can generate a far greater ROI than traditional mass media. A $5 million Super Bowl ad buys 30 seconds of attention, but the Trump campaign spent just $160,000 on YouTube videos to gain 74 million views, while GoPro cultivates continuous, free engagement from millions of followers. This stark contrast shows that a sustained, targeted digital presence offers more measurable and cost-effective value than a single, high-priced media event. As marketers become more adept at leveraging data and analytics, the justification for massive, untargeted ad spends will weaken, accelerating the flow of budgets toward more efficient digital channels. Our full analysis explores how this trend is reshaping marketing allocations.
The most common mistake is believing that outspending competitors is a viable strategy, an outdated idea from the era of mass media dominance. The Trump campaign provided a powerful solution by operating with a Silicon Valley-inspired, ROI-driven discipline. Instead of funding every idea, the team, led by Jared Kushner, rigorously measured the “bang for the buck” of each initiative. They used data to scale what worked, like boosting merchandise sales from $8,000 to $80,000 daily, and cut what did not. The solution is to treat marketing as a performance-driven investment, not just an expense, using analytics to ensure every dollar is optimized for maximum impact. This approach allows leaner, smarter operations to consistently outperform larger, less efficient competitors.
User-generated content (UGC) is more persuasive because it provides powerful social proof and builds trust in a way that corporate advertising cannot. Today’s consumers are skeptical of polished marketing messages but are highly influenced by the authentic experiences of their peers. When GoPro showcases a video from a real customer, it serves as a credible, third-party endorsement of the product and the lifestyle it enables. This approach creates a virtuous cycle where customers become your most effective marketers, generating a constant stream of relatable and engaging content. By amplifying genuine user stories, brands can connect with audiences on an emotional level that traditional ads struggle to achieve. Dive deeper into the psychology behind UGC's effectiveness in the full article.
This combination creates a powerful synergy between strategic vision and tactical execution. A media-savvy leader like Jared Kushner understands how to craft a compelling narrative, while his Silicon Valley connections provided the technical expertise to deploy that narrative with data-driven precision. This allowed the Trump campaign to move beyond traditional political advertising and operate like a lean tech startup. They could rapidly test messaging on Facebook, analyze real-time results, and scale the most effective tactics to maximize ROI. This fusion of skills ensures that creative instincts are validated by empirical data, leading to faster, smarter, and more cost-effective campaign decisions than those made by more conventional, siloed organizations.
This success signals a fundamental shift toward direct-to-supporter funding models powered by strong digital engagement. It implies that future movements will be less reliant on large, institutional donors and more capable of financing themselves through grassroots e-commerce and micro-donations. By building a massive and loyal online audience, a personal brand or cause can convert digital attention directly into sustainable revenue streams. This approach not only provides financial independence but also strengthens the bond between a movement and its base, creating a more transactional and responsive relationship. This trend is democratizing fundraising and changing the power dynamics of political and social advocacy. The full article explores the long-term consequences.
The fundamental error is attempting to manufacture authenticity internally, where corporate objectives and formal processes often strip the genuineness out of creative work. This top-down approach results in content that feels staged and fails to connect with real-world customer experiences. GoPro provides a clear solution by inverting this model entirely: it sources authenticity from its community rather than trying to create it from scratch. By curating and celebrating the 6,000 videos that users upload daily, the brand’s marketing becomes a reflection of its actual customers. This user-generated approach inherently solves the authenticity problem by ensuring all content is grounded in a real person's genuine passion and experience.
An organization with limited funds can maximize its impact by adopting a lean, data-first methodology. The process requires discipline and agility:
Define Clear Conversion Goals: Start by identifying specific, measurable actions you want users to take, such as making a small donation or signing a petition.
Implement Micro-Targeted Tests: Use platforms like Facebook to run small, inexpensive ad tests on diverse audience segments with varied messaging.
Analyze Performance Data: Meticulously track which ads deliver the lowest cost-per-conversion and the highest engagement rates.
Scale Winning Formulas: Reallocate the majority of your budget to the proven ad sets and audiences that deliver the best ROI.
This iterative, performance-based approach ensures every dollar is spent with maximum efficiency, as shown by the campaign's ability to boost daily sales from $8,000 to $80,000.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
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