Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Social-First Marketing

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

In 2013, I drew a cartoon with an executive telling his colleagues, “I support word-of-mouth marketing, just as long as we tightly control exactly what they say.”

That tension of control and letting go has long been a tricky one for marketers to navigate, both inside and outside a company.

I’ve been thinking about that sentiment in the context of Unilever’s recent huge bet on influencer marketing (spending 50% of media on social channels and increasing influencer marketing investment 20X).

The WSJ reported this week that Unilever is investing in a custom AI content generation platform to generate thousands of personalized brand assets to arm their influencers.

But ultimately, social-first marketing represents a massive shift in control.

Last year, I heard Zaria Parvez, senior social media manager at Duolingo, give a talk about what she calls their “unhinged” approach to TikTok, which grew under her watch from 50,000 followers to 16M+, largely by having the freedom to experiment (including killing off their own mascot earlier this year).

As Zaria described that freedom in a recent interview:

“This is a two-day cycle, and then we approve the content within the team ourselves, so we’re not waiting for senior leadership to say yes or no…

“Even if everyone internally is not happy, if it’s good for the brand and people think it’ll lead to impressions and lead to impact, then we move forward with it.”

I once spoke at a marketing summit hosted by Procter & Gamble. One of their attorneys talked about the challenge of balancing experimentation with safeguards at the speed of social media.

She shared a model that resonated with me called “freedom within a framework.” Both are needed, she said. A brand with no freedom can stagnate. A brand with no framework can lose itself.

Keynote Speaking

I learned there was a permissions glitch in the video link I shared last week. Sorry about that and thanks to the readers who let me know!

The video is a full 45-minute keynote from one of my favorite events last year — the Gartner CMO Symposium in Denver.

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit.

Cartoon From The Archives

And here’s that cartoon I referenced that I drew in 2013:

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.