Commercial: Wolff on advertising and social media

You might have missed this piece by Michael Wolff yesterday. Do go back to it; it's well worth your time. Mainly because it poses the real question about the relationship between advertising and social media that most of us in the industry have been dancing around, to whit:

Right now, the indisputable point is that plain old media, even as it steadily loses its claim on people's time, continues to attract a larger, and increasingly disproportionate share, of advertising dollars, just as social media becomes increasingly dependent on them. Eighty-two per cent of Facebook's revenues come from advertising – a much higher percentage even than that of plain old media.

Before drawing out the what should be obvious point that social media as it stands isn't necessarily going to deliver the type of advertising - that is to say, TV advertising - that might start to justify some of the more absurd social media valuations going around.


Plus it has this wonderful definition:

Giving power to your audience certainly seems to have a historical imperative behind it. But awkwardly, social media still depends on advertising which, fundamentally, depends in turn on a set of top-down manipulations that control what your audience thinks and feels at a given moment.