An awful lot of old school marketing thinking has been transferred into the digital landscape, this is a place that now allows us to get even closer to the groups of people we most want to intrusively  'broadcast' our message into because our stats tell us they are most likely to respond.

We know their browsing history, we can tell gender, geography, and age range, however with the continued onslaught of GDPR, Ad skipping and blocking its not quite the one to one personalised approach we were all promised but for now, close enough - even with a 97% failure rate!

So, what have we done with all that information? - we have ended up shooting ourselves firmly in the foot with programmatic, a technology that can fire out bland, meaningless creative ads at the precision of a machine gun for a fraction of the cost of what we used to have to pay.

And as the saying goes, 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should'.

"My Children tell me that inventing banner ad is like inventing smallpox" J.McCambley (inventor of the banner ad)

Brands via their agency still approach 'content discovery' with the same 'advertise and promote' mentality as they have done for years, but we all know its the corporate message with a sneaky advert hidden in there dressed up as content that you think social audiences will devour, then magically become instant customers and convert to the corporate diatribe - really, I mean really!

If we take a look at the key age demographics (16-34) for 'ad blockers' around the world we see a stark correlation with those age groups who are tech savvy, and not used to having to see adverts because they know how to find the 'free' stuff'.

These are the so called millenial's, and right behind them are 'Generation Z'.

Take a moment to think about who you spend a lot of your 'ad' budget trying to target, go on just have a think?

So, as the Gen Z enter into the world of influence, and they continue to tell you they don't want to put up with your intrusive adverts what are you going to tell your board when 'what used to work' no longer does?

There are a plethora of 'social listening' tools out there, but as with most tools they can be used for good, or evil, or in far to many cases not used at all. 

Social listening that is used to simply target more people with adverts most definitely isn't the way to go, but with an internally aligned social media strategy 'listening' could in fact be one of the key tools that can help you on the road to building a truly authentic social media relationship with your existing customers, and of course help you to find all those new ones.