SocialChain’s Next Chapter with CEO Jacinta Faul
This year marks 20 years since Facebook was founded. It’s also the year SocialChain celebrated its tenth birthday and welcomed its new CEO Jacinta Faul. Talk about milestone moments.
One month into her role, there was no better time for Jacinta to sit down with our CMO Hannah Baker to look back on the past ten years – and pull out some predictions for the future – than at SocialMinds LIVE.
Jacinta highlights a common theme that unites all of the day’s sessions: change. And rapid change at that. Today’s social landscape is a world apart from the one Jacinta encountered over a decade ago when she started out in media planning and buying. “It was so hard to prove value with social. We were always scrambling for budget.”
Since then, she’s worked at creative agencies and spent a decade spearheading huge growth for clients as Gravity Road’s MD. So what attracted her to the role of CEO at SocialChain? “Brave Bison offers something genuinely powerful for partners: hardworking creative excellence combined with tech that actually gets products into people’s hands. And within that, SocialChain is an agency of skilled creatives who are multidisciplined. In fact, Manchester in general has a wealth of creative talent and energy.”
“Social is becoming more curated, but your device will power this more than tech organisations. Brands need to use storytelling to cut through, so they can meet the need for entertainment while staying relevant.”
It isn’t just the industry that’s growing up. Our attitudes to an increasingly digital-first world are evolving along with it. Millennials have more of an addictive mentality, says Jacinta, whereas Gen Z and even Gen Alpha approach tech with decidedly more caution. “Today’s kids are digital natives. They’ve grown up with CTV, gaming, and iPhones. But they’re better at understanding the divide between the offline and online world.”
Looking ahead, what does that mean for marketers’ priorities? Be prepared to continue to fight for attention as content becomes hyper-personalised. Jacinta points out that just as millennials flicked through Sky channels to find entertainment, the future of social is one where users can shape their own social feeds according to content that most interests them. “Social is becoming more curated, but your device will power this more than tech organisations. Brands need to use storytelling to cut through, so they can meet the need for entertainment while staying relevant.”
For our second Mini Cini session at SocialMinds LIVE: Future Casting Social’s Next 20, Jacinta sat down in conversation with our CMO Hannah Baker to give social marketers insight into what the future holds.
Watch the session back now to find out:
- What Jacinta’s learnt from over a decade working at the front lines of digital
- Why Gen Z talent are the “Swiss Army knives” of our marketing teams
- What marketers need to do right now to stay ahead next year
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