July 21, 2022
Meta hosted a pretty great and insightful webinar last week, Culture Codes: How Platform Native Advertising Builds Brands with Humanity and I wanted to take a moment to go through it a little bit and share some of my thoughts.
Essentially, Meta were reminding all of us that lo-fi editing is far more humanising than over produced assets.
In a study of Instagram Stories ads we conducted in 2019, we found that ads that were shot on mobile and that exhibited a more lo-fi, language of the platform feel outperformed more polished studio ads for ad recall (with 78% probability) and content views (with 84% probability).
So, why is that? Why is a smartphone shot video outperforming a higher quality video on social media? It’s simple. It *feels* more accessible to the audience. You can potentially see yourself as part of the community rather than an audience member being told what to like or buy. Using creators and influencers you may have followed on social media for years, garners trust as well as having the added bonus of genuine relatability and familiarity.
Another point Meta made was to talk about the “behind the scenes” posts, which they noted are highly successful. As a designer, I absolutely love seeing these kinds of videos, and for the curious who always wondered how that shot was made, it makes for a perfect engaging and informative post.
The idea that deliberate imperfection makes social media far more relatable is quite telling of us as an audience. We *know* when things are fake, it’s almost like uncanny valley – you know it’s off. Deliberate imperfection embraces the wonky, and allows us to let go a little, creating work without the limits of “perfection”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love beautiful and polished work, but I also love the chaos and rawness of imperfections and I truly believe more brands should be embracing this side of social media creativity, it’ll definitely make for some interesting content.
And speaking of lo-fi – this doesn’t mean it has to be low quality, it just has to feel like it’s handmade. Much like going into a shop and buying something that’s mass produced over something that an indie crafter has made, there are slight imperfections, but it’s beautiful and unique.
I’m interested to see where this trend will continue to go and what other ant-digital techniques creatives and brands will come out with.
If you liked the sound of all of that, why not get in touch and let’s talk about deliberate imperfections 😉