The Brand Panel with ITV Studios, Monzo, Surreal and Lick
Only a decade ago, brands existed on the fringes of social. Now, entire businesses are built and marketed around it. Impressive, right? Even more so when you remember that two decades ago, most social apps we use today hadn’t even been invented.
Twenty years on, how are Monzo, Surreal and Lick – three brands who owe a lot of their success to their thriving social channels – integrating this into their wider marketing mix? And how are traditional publishers like ITV Studios adapting to a social-first mindset as the lines between content and broadcast blur?
At SocialMinds LIVE: Future Casting Social’s next 20, over 100 marketers gathered at Manchester’s Ducie Street Warehouse to find out.
Paint brand Lick made its first foray into bricks-and-mortar retail in March this year, but it’s retained its digital-first ethos for a generation of modern consumers. “When we launched in B&Q, we wanted the sales experience to feel the same whether you were buying on our website, browsing on social or in a physical store,” explains Amie Caswell, head of brand at Lick. “We have digital screens in our B&Q stands where you can take a colour quiz with Tash, our head of interior design, or find inspiration through UGC.”
“You’ve got to trust the people you hire in your social teams to do those roles. If you do that, you shouldn’t need four or five rounds of feedback and amends.”
-Amie Caswell, head of brand, Lick
Just like Lick has made a name for itself as a modern challenger brand using social in favour of traditional advertising, so too has Monzo. In fact, millennials’ favourite banking app ventured into performance marketing just two years ago. “We did a big TV and out-of-home ad campaign in 2017 and again this year. Before that, we had so much organic growth through social and word of mouth that we didn’t need anything else,” says Abbie Green, Monzo’s senior growth marketer.
Organic growth is arguably more difficult to come by since Monzo launched in 2015, but it’s not impossible – you just have to think outside the (cereal) box. Take it from Surreal, whose viral posts about their “celebrity endorsement” ad campaigns and low-fi January billboards consistently do the numbers on LinkedIn. It’s not usually the platform of choice for a D2C brand, but that’s arguably why it works so well.
“We treat LinkedIn as a consumer channel,” says its senior creative John Thornton. “It is more business focused, but consumers use it – probably as a distraction while at work! So the use case for entertainment still stands.”
Speaking of entertainment, ITV Studios’ vice president of social media Claire Hoang has some wise words for traditional publishers focused on keeping in step with the growing appetite for short-form entertainment on social. And unlike Monzo, Lick and Surreal, ITV Studios is a different beast entirely: a combination of 60 different production companies with productions for Netflix and Disney under its belt. “Our challenge isn’t just to get people’s attention. We also have to get people to like our content enough to go offline and tune in for an hour on a specific day at a specific time.” The solution to that challenge: letting your content speak for itself.
“Social has changed so much since I started 18 years ago,” adds Claire. “Back then it was an afterthought. Now, the higher-ups want to know what you’re doing on social before anything else.”
For the first panel at SocialMinds LIVE: Future Casting Social’s Next 20, Claire, Abbie, John and Amie took to the stage to help you integrate a savvy social strategy into your marketing mix.
Catch up with the panel now and you’ll learn:
- Amie’s content hack that saved you time creating content and gives you more time building innovative ideas
- What ‘brandformance’ is and why it’s top of the priority list for Surreal’s marketing team in 2025
- Claire’s top tip for your internal teams to make your storytelling shine
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