Over the last few weeks the Medieval Reactions Twitter account (@MedievalReacts) has been getting a lot of love.
You may even follow it yourself. If not, then you could have seen it featured in Metro, the Mirror or even Spanish daily newspaper El País, all of whom have featured the parody account since it debuted in March.
And well they might have done: Medieval Reactions is one of those accounts Twitter is made for, delivering simple laughs at a rate of roughly once a day by pairing Medieval paintings with 2015 issues. (“When you’re in town and get stopped by a club promoter”, for example, which accompanies a picture of a Medieval man offering a book to an uninterested dragon.)
What the majority of these reports don’t tell us, though, is where Medieval Reactions comes from – and this might just be the single most interesting thing about it. Medieval Reactions is, according to El País, the work of Cathal Berragan, a 19-year-old philosophy student at Warwick University who was also behind the Exam Problems Twitter (@ExamProblems), which debuted in 2013 and now has 70k followers.
Berragan is also a content creator for Social Chain, a company that bills itself as “the UK’s largest influencer marketing agency” and both Exam Problems and Medieval Reactions are part of the Social Chain’s network of Twitter accounts.
The last two weeks have seen Social Chain have a bit of a coming out party, with media appearances in Buzzfeed, Vice UK and The Sunday Times. “We’re not so secretly taking over twitter anymore!” the company tweeted on Monday.
The company is also a master of the trending topic as it demonstrated when Buzzfeed came to visit, pushing #YouKnowYoureBritishWhen to the top of Twitter’s UK trending list in just 26 minutes.
(This, incidentally, is a trick Social Chain is fond of, pushing #FictionDeathsIllNeverGetOver onto the UK’s trending chart in under 20 minutes to mark founder Steve Bartlett’s appearance at the Youth Marketing Summit in London in March.)
You can understand why people are interested: on its websites Social Chain claims it can reach more than 209m people and its clients include Asos, Haribo, Spotify, Universal and Microsoft. The company’s founders told Buzzfeed that their top clients have spent in the region of £250,000 – £280,000, while the smallest campaign starts at £20,000.
This, then, is very big business indeed. It’s a young business too: Bartlett is just 22 and the company’s oldest employee is aged 27.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Social Chain, though, is what it tells us about digital marketing and social media in 2015. Digital advertising spend, you won’t be too surprised to learn, is growing rapidly around the world. In the UK, internet advertising rose 15% in 2014, while mobile ad spend climbed 58.9%, according to the Advertising Association / Warc Expenditure report (via Campaign).
But internet advertising is a massive beast and the idea that banner ads can be lumped in with innovative social media campaigns seems wrong. One is, essentially, the good old magazine advert of our youth pasted on a website; the other a whole new medium.
But social media has long proved a challenge for brands. There have been gaffes, like an HMV staff member live tweeting a mass firing, insensitive, ill-timed Facebook posts (Pepsi Sweden’s Facebook ads, which featured a voodoo doll of Cristiano Ronaldo tied to train tracks) and rumours of companies who require even the smallest tweet to pass through umpteen layers of corporate approval, thus rendering the whole process pretty much pointless. Then there are those companies who treat their social media channels as little more than a space for overt sales messages and corporate bumpf.
Filling this void, we have seen the rise of the social media marketing expert, helping to nudge brands into better social media use and to create something of a buzz around them.
On the one hand, this is essentially what Social Chain does: it works with brands to share their message via social media.
But the big difference is that Social Chain does this via its own network of social media accounts, including British Logic, Primary School Problems and Fitness Motivation, pushing a brand’s message without using that brand’s own social media properties. That’s pretty clever, ushering in a whole new level of subterranean social media marketing. It is also a little sneaky.
To give an example from the Vice article: on March 26 popular Twitter accounts including Year 11 Banter (@Year11Bants), Student Problems (@ProblemsAtUni) and Hogwarts Logic (@HogwartsLogic) all apparently started tweeting about British online clothing store Asos.
(Asos is a Social Chain client and Hogwarts Logic is a Social Chain account, according to Buzzfeed. But we don’t actually know that this was the work of Social Chain. I asked them about this but they had yet to reply by time of publication.)
The Student Problems and Hogwarts Logic tweets have since disappeared. But the Year 11 Banter tweets remain: one has a picture of Will from The Inbetweeners looking stressed, accompanied by the caption “When the 20% ASOS sale ends tomorrow”; the other features a picture of an elderly looking man with the caption: “Me after spending all of my money on the ASOS sale”. The former has 40 retweets and 108 favourites, the latter 69 retweets and 137 favourites, a reasonable result.
It’s all pretty inoffensive. But, as the Advertising Standards Authority told Buzzfeed, “If any social media account (including celebrity and ‘parody’ Twitter accounts) are tweeting ads and it’s not clear from the context that these are marketing communications, then they need to be labelled as an ad.”
Perhaps more worrying for Social Chain is the reaction that their various Twitter followers will have when they discover that the account in question is, far from being down to the inspiration of one randomly inspired individual, actually part of a wider strategy to help brands push their messages to social media audiences.
Perhaps I’m being naive. Perhaps we’re all so used to advertising invading every part of our life that no one will care. But on a personal level, while I’m very impressed with what Social Chain has done, there’s a part of me that likes Medieval Reactions just that little bit less after discovering its roots.
Maybe that’s illogical – it doesn’t fundamentally change what has been a highly amusing account – and I’m yet to unfollow it. But the innocence has gone.
That wouldn’t matter on most media. I hardly expect the actors I see on TV flogging coffee to really believe in the product, after all. But there’s something about social media (and especially Twitter) that is meant to be more “real” – it’s meant to be a place where we can hear from our idols unrestrained by the channels of PR and spin, where Lady Gaga can tell us what she really thinks rather than having to rely on her record label’s PR machine, refracted throughout a journalist’s own agenda. That makes Social Chain’s modus operandi slightly problematic.
I should probably just get used to it, though. Social Chain are pioneering something genuinely new and clever in digital marketing and social media. And I can’t see it going away anytime soon.