“Success Online Belongs to Those Who Know Who They’re Talking To”

– I read in one of your interviews that you dream of the day marketing stops being associated with “manipulation.” For many people, including me, I admit, the two really are inseparable. I’ve tried to learn marketing myself, and this is what always put me off—that somehow the goal is to present not how things are, but how you’d like them to look. Is there any truth to that?

– It’s very easy to get someone to buy from you once. But that’s where the hard work begins.

To get someone to buy from you a second time, you can’t just have manipulated them.

You have to have given them something that was meant for them, tailored to them in some way, something that matches the expectations you created beforehand. Because a product you’ve advertised brilliantly, even if it’s very good, may simply not work for that particular person. If the ad was shown to the very wrong audience, the person just won’t use it, or won’t stick with it, and will tell everyone they know: “This product is total garbage.”

It’s easy to reach some initial, quick success through manipulation, and we see that all the time. But from there on, if your goal is for those customers to come back and to build a sustainable business, I don’t think marketing that relies on manipulation will bring any success.

– Success online very often looks random, at least from the outside. Is it really, or does it also depend on creativity?

– I don’t think it necessarily depends on creativity. I’ve seen plenty of people who are terribly creative and still can’t cope with the online format. Meanwhile there are others who aren’t necessarily that creative, who don’t do anything unheard of or never seen before, and yet they’re received very well. In my view, the key factor is knowing your audience and learning through experimentation what works specifically for them. Because no matter how many best practices you apply, no matter how closely you follow what others are doing, in the end

the people you’re talking to will be completely different from the ones who get excited about other brands or content creators.

So for me that’s the magic key—getting to know your audience and constantly testing new things to see what will work and is worth pursuing.

– The online battle for our attention is formidable, and every attempt to succeed is genuinely hard. Besides knowing your audience, what wins that battle? What kinds of ideas work most often?

– I can only speak about the things I mainly work on—creating content for marketing purposes. For me, the practices that work are the ones oriented toward, and coming from, the needs of the audience, not from what you want to say. When I say “needs,” we can start with basic, standard “how to” content, which works very well, especially for more complex and b2b-oriented brands. The goal is to give people value and, in some way, answer their questions. To make them more successful.

On the other hand, we can also talk about purely emotional needs. Everyone has shared some Nike ad at least once in their digital life, simply because they are very good at meeting our need for extra motivation, for getting fired up.

If I had to look for a bigger generalization, it would be exactly that—understanding what people need and letting that guide you when you create content.

– It really is very convenient that online you can experiment and see the result immediately. You know every step of every visitor to the site, and that’s how you learn what works and what kind of information gets read. But doesn’t that kill originality, your own point of view? Doesn’t it turn content creation and copywriting into some kind of robotic process? You end up with something like the filter bubble—you create only what’s in demand, and that limits you…

– That’s nothing new. All the luminaries of the American advertising business, going back to David Ogilvy and Joseph Sugarman, start from the same principle: you have to know who you’re talking to and how. It’s the same in advertising as a whole—the most creative campaigns are built on a so-called insight.

You have to have thought hard about what interests the audience, so you can then get to the creative seed that will sprout and grow into a creative idea.

I don’t think the two things clash in any way—quite the opposite. When you know your audience, you approach generating ideas not from the position of what you personally like, but of what would interest a large group of people. You can take many more trends and factors into account.

Here’s an example that’s quite topical right now. Skapto burgers ran a really cool campaign on the eve of the elections, aimed at encouraging more people to vote. I assume the idea was born in the head of someone at their creative agency. On the one hand, it was shaped by what the brand stands for as a whole—they’ve been running socially engaged campaigns for years. On the other, it’s based on a very good knowledge of the audience. Because they know that these—I really hate this label, but I’ll use it here—active young people who are socially engaged are the natural audience Skapto speaks to anyway. So a lot of things align here. And the idea is actually good because it fits in every direction. It’s interesting and cool for us to do, and it suits both the brand and the audience we’re talking to.

– In a sense, this has always been part of communication. Because if, say, a novel was ahead of its time, or simply didn’t find its readers, even if it’s a work of genius, it will soon be forgotten. You’re a reader too. Do you think your favorite writers would make good copywriters?

– With many of the writers I follow closely, I see them using approaches that copywriters use too. Brandon Sanderson, for example, one of the coolest fantasy authors around right now, spends a very long time at the start planning what will happen in the book itself, how he’ll build the narrative, where the different characters will end up. Which is a good approach in copywriting as well.

It’s not just about knowing which little word should go next to which so that it sounds nice.

You also need to be clear about where you ultimately want to get to.

Some of the most popular authors are also very disciplined. If we go beyond books, Quentin Tarantino says his scripts started turning out well when he moved from chaotic writing at random times of day, counting on the muse to show up, to structuring his time like a normal working day. Sitting down in the morning and writing from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and at the end of the day looking at which of the things he’d written were any good and what had to be thrown out.

These are individual signs that tell me authors would make good copywriters. Or the other way round—that copywriters could take a few lessons from artists.

– The Sanderson example strikes me as very apt too. He always has a long list of beta readers, he likes to check what works and what needs changing. Besides, he writes at astonishing speed, which is something we can all learn from.

Do you think a media outlet can be a working brand today?

– That’s really interesting. For me, the line between media and content creators is starting to blur a little. I don’t know to what extent that’s good or bad. To some degree, content creators in marketing work exactly like media in terms of their production cycle.

But on the other hand, they are terribly subjective. You can’t count on any journalistic ethics, on a duty to cover different points of view.

If I put myself in a consumer’s shoes, the media I follow usually have a fairly serious digital presence. Including individual shows—John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, for example, communicates very actively on YouTube and Facebook. They don’t aim just to have people watch their content on the channel where they produce it; they look for ways to reach a bigger audience. I think that’s very useful, because it creates an additional dialogue.

That’s also where my knowledge of media as a functioning business ends, because this imposes quite a few additional constraints on how revenue is generated. Advertising on YouTube doesn’t command the same prices as on a television channel. As a consumer, I like the digitalization of media, the break from simply having one segment that airs at such-and-such an hour on such-and-such a channel. But I realize it causes quite big problems for funding.

And the harder it is for a media outlet to fund itself, the less likely it is to be objective.

– Absolutely! And I think that’s also dictated in some way by an audience that has forgotten how to read carefully. And how to choose carefully what it reads. Is there something to that?

– I’m a bit skeptical on that front. The moment television appeared, everyone jumped up and said: here, this technology will make people more distracted and stop them paying attention to content. And before that, when radio came along, the same ideas were around. If we go further and further back, Socrates talked about how the young were far more distracted and didn’t pay enough attention to the important things.

I don’t think the digital environment will kill our focus. What needs emphasis, rather, is teaching people to approach information more critically.

It’s becoming easier and easier for unverified things to reach much larger audiences.

I think people today pay the same amount of attention to information. The problem is that there are far more unverified, or even deliberately fake, texts we can pay attention to.

– Yes, but that also happens because we’re in a hurry. You glance at the headline, you don’t have time, you have to scroll, you leave, the next thing is fighting for your attention…

– I think we simply get information from many more channels, and the skill of choosing the right ones needs to be developed. Ever since my days at the Faculty of Journalism, it has seemed strange to me that at school we don’t have classes in critical thinking, media literacy and similar subjects.

– And not only in Bulgaria… Why does communication online so often become ruder, more aggressive? Hate pops up instantly, whatever the topic…

– First, I think it’s much easier, when you’re not face to face with someone, to say something you’d hesitate to say in another situation. Even in terms of emotion and empathy, you don’t immediately see the reaction your words provoke. The link between what you do as a verbal act and the result on the other end is far more broken. And we are, more or less, social conformists. We evolved to get along with those around us, to build larger societies.

The second factor is the possibility of anonymity. There are still lots of channels where you can be anonymous, however hard Facebook and YouTube try to fight it.

And third, there’s a kind of cumulative effect. The more people speak negatively online, the more we, as readers, interpret things as negative comments. It has happened to me to read an opinion that sounds like a very sharp attack. And after I’ve sat for 10 minutes, come back and tried to look at it a bit more objectively, the person hasn’t actually said anything terrible. But when someone starts criticizing you, you don’t know how, or in what tone, they would say it. Something gets lost in translation. And since we generally know that people are much more negative online, we are much more likely to read words on the web as more aggressive than the person intended.

– Stories have thrilled us for as long as they’ve existed. From campfires, through books, all the way to digital marketing. Do you believe it will still be that way in 10, 20… or more years?

– Considering that everything from Homer to Apple’s “1984” ad is, in some way, a story… That everything that moves us falls under that definition—I think so, yes.

Because it’s through stories that we learn, through stories that we understand other people, through stories that we manage to pass on information that is even vital to our species.

And I see no indication that this will change in any way, at least for now.

– Before we say goodbye, I’d like us to talk about Ratio as well. You’re one of the founders of the project, which aims to present science “in human language.” Clearly, organizing science events for almost a decade is hard and thankless work. What keeps you going?

– To a large extent, we started out of selfish motives. Because Lubomir Baburov, with whom I created the project, and I wanted to spend more time talking with interesting science communicators. It turned out the way to do that was to organize events and invite those people. And right now my main motivation is to keep that conversation going.

Because I work in digital marketing, I’m quite driven by numbers. Over time I see a pleasing development that makes me very happy, and I’d like to believe it’s the fruit of our many years of work—ours as well as that of other organizations. The audience of people interested in these topics is growing.

We manage to do more and more things, not just live events. The podcast series we launched a few years ago now has 4 segments that come out almost every week. We’re also working on video formats that are fully planned, not just recordings of events.

The environment, in my view, is developing. When we started, in 2012, there was only one other event format for science communication—the British Council’s science festival. Now there are quite a few similar events every month, including ones organized by traditional institutions such as the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) and Sofia University. They, too, are starting to see the need to communicate in understandable language and to reach larger audiences. There are also more and more young people there who do it willingly.

The progress is certainly slower than we’d like. But we can see that it’s there, that there is change. And if we have in some way sparked an interest in science, even in just a few people, I’m very happy.