News was out this week that Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube.

The announcement quickly created discussion about whether doing away with campaign sites and focusing presence on existing social media platforms is wise, risky, or threatens ad agencies.

Campaign microsites, like banner ads, are a form of online advertising that, for advertisers and agencies coming from traditional advertising, have been easier to define, plan, control, and measure. It’s reminiscent of the old order, and therefore easier to grasp.

However, it doesn’t mean that’s where the online audience is going. Generating awareness and driving people to the microsite takes effort, and has no guaranteed outcome. People get annoyed when a brand tries to interrupt their online activity with “incoming messages”. So it makes sense, then, to go where the people already are: existing, and hugely popular social media platforms.

Coca-Cola and Unilever will undoubtedly benefit from moving away from the old model of buying traffic for short-term experiences, but there is still something here that smacks of old channel-based thinking. People I heard talk about this during the week seemed to think of it as an either-or question: it’s either sites, or Facebook. From the news article, it’s difficult to tell whether that’s how Coke and Unilever themselves see it.

In the old, channel-based thinking, there’s a box for everything. “Social media” is one box, and television, banner ad and billboard are others. But in the digital age, that’s not how things work. The whole of the Internet is social – people are social. The boxes, i.e. the channels, are connected, linked to each other, and instead of choosing just one, smart marketers need to see how to connect them in a way that interests the audience. If Coke, Unilever, and other brands really get it, they won’t just do away with campaign sites completely and switch to another channel, “social media”, but learn how to best connect them and look at the digital experience holistically.

Karri Ojanen