Orchestras are wasting money with these terrible adverts

I regularly get adverts from orchestras and other classical media accounts when I go on social media. Over the last year, I’ve been bombarded by a new trend. A type of advert that is truly, astonishingly terrible.

I’m not talking about something complex where the strategy behind the advert isn’t working. I’m talking about bad adverts that create broken posts that would never be clicked on. They are as effective as the orchestra setting its marketing budget on fire. These, are terrible Instagram story adverts.

Now, Instagram stories are a great way to engage with your existing audience, connect to new people, and push events as they have the feature to include a link. But to be effective, these need to be engaging, interesting, and bespoke. As people consume Instagram adverts at speed, they also need to hook people’s attention. The adverts I’m talking about are far from this. Take a look…

What even is this story? What is it about? How is it grabbing my attention? What am I learning more about? Why on earth would I click on it?

As well as being boring it provides zero context or information about what is on offer. Is it a concert, album launch, giveaway… what is it?! It’s certainly not going to grab attention or build enough interest to click to learn more.

With the speed at which users consume Instagram stories, this will be swiped past in an instant, making the money the orchestra spent showing to them totally wasted.

There are plenty of adverts just like this.

Would you click on any of these?

None of these are going to reach anywhere near the threshold for grabbing enough attention and building enough interest or intrigue to ever be clicked it. The money spent in showing this to users is totally wasted as these will never, ever convert.

We also see terrible adverts on stories in a slightly different format. A photo with no context as the first story, followed by a second story that pops up with some text that makes little sense on its own and the follower count of the orchestra.

Again, this format isn’t engaging and will be ignored instantly. 

But it doesn’t just stop with dull images with links. There are others that fundamentally don’t work. Looking at these, actually shows how such bad and irresponsible advertising happens.

An uninspiring photo that is the wrong aspect ratio, and text that randomly gets cut off… How on earth would this ever work as an advert?

This certainly isn’t a one-off…

So why are such terrible adverts happening all over? Well, the good news is that it isn’t entirely down to humans.

Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) has an “Ads Manager”. After an update a few years ago, it has become a bit of a mess, and it is always been trying to get you to spend more money.

In Meta’s bid to be helpful, when creating an advert they offer help as to where to show it and who to show it to. In the past, this was auto-selecting all platforms and post types for your post, but has now become a “Advantage+ placements” button. It promises to “maximise your budget across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Meta Audience Network to help show your ad to more people”. And it will certainly show it to more people… it just isn’t really a good idea.

You can see the result of this in action here:

Here The Hallé has created an advert for Facebook, and Meta has tried to reformat it to work in two different places, an Instagram post and a story. It’s the same image and text, and in both posts, they don’t work.

What would work as an advert as a post on Facebook, isn’t going to work as an Instagram post or story. They are totally different formats with totally different functionality.

So, all of these bad adverts and waste of money is Meta’s fault? Sadly, no. This ultimately comes down to human choice. Marketing teams at orchestras are choosing the easy and lazy option of clicking this button without thinking of the consequences of what it would mean. It would take much more effort to think about what would be effective on different platforms and then make multiple ad campaigns for each one. 

If you work in digital marketing, it is a minimum requirement that you understand how different social media platforms work and what is effective on each one. You should also be looking at the adverts that have run to see what has been effective and adapt your future strategy based on this. I can’t think that any of the adverts that have been shown in this blog have made many, if any sales, and this will come back clearly in the analytics.

If this industry was tech, media, sport, or anything else, we would be reliant on how effective our marketing is. You can’t image Apple, Disney, or Liverpool FC making any of these mistakes. Come to think of it, you can’t imagine a lower-league football teams or local businesses making them either. We live in a world where individuals are setting up small businesses with no digital marketing experience and figuring this out for themselves through Google and trial and error.

However, we as an industry continue to fail to give any real scrutiny to how effectively we market. In this instance, it feels like the organisations have just ticked the box that says “we have done social media advertising” which means they can write something in a future funding application or fill an allocation of money in the budget. This also goes above the marketing team. I’ve previously written about “classical music’s unspoken problem: digital illiteracy in leadership”. Many leaders will understand programming and funding, but few understand digital. If they don’t, how are they able to understand if what their marketing team is doing is effective or utterly useless? As most arts organisations are charities, is it responsible for us to continue to waste the money we receive in such an overt and careless way without any scrutiny or improvement?

If we continue to consciously run such terrible adverts and ignore the data that says they aren’t working, we may as well get the funding we receive, pile it up, and set fire to it. It would be just as effective and save everyone some time.

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