Fact vs Fiction: Lessons in marketing from Emily in Paris
If, like several of our team, you binge watched the latest series of Netflix’s Emily In Paris over the festive break, you’ll be well aware of her flourishing career in digital marketing. The show, whilst watchable and arguably innocuous entertainment, has in fact set some misconceptions about what our career path really entails. We wanted to set the record straight.
For anyone who is yet to watch the show, Emily Cooper is an American who gets sent to Paris to work in a boutique French marketing agency in place of her heavily pregnant boss. Emily is an aspiring digital marketer who forges her way into becoming an influencer in her own right by documenting her time in Paris on Instagram. She swiftly amasses thousands of followers by sharing her antics, finding the beauty in the mundane and bringing the world into her glamorous life in marketing. In fact, that’s a good place for our analysis to begin…
FICTION: There’s a formula for going viral online.
Let’s start by Emily’s own virality. We’re not saying it’s not possible to go viral on Instagram, but the speed in which Emily grows from 50 followers to thousands (the space of a week from the account being started), with the content (and horrendous use of hashtags) she’s posting, this is completely unrealistic. That being said, she does harness many qualities of an influencer. She’s photogenic, fashionable, works in a glamorous agency with well known clients, she’s an American in Paris and she can spot good content a mile off. It’s not too far from the realm of possibility to think that she could make it as an influencer in the “real” world. But not in the space of a week.
Now let’s talk client social campaigns. Almost every client Emily works on, ends up with a viral campaign. The reality of this situation is digital virality is entirely unpredictable. There is no fixed way to make something amass popularity that speedily. And it’s certainly not as easy as the show makes it out to be. For example, in one episode, Emily concocts a spur of the moment campaign idea for her lavish fashion client, Pierre Cadault. She posts a debaucherous photo of one of Pierre’s dresses on the floor of a well known celebrity’s hotel room. The catch is that the room had been trashed by a party and the dress looks like it’s had quite the night. Emily captures the dress on the floor, surrounded by cigarettes, shoes and wine and captions it, “About last night”. The photo swiftly gains over 170k likes organically and is dubbed as genius. The reality is that a campaign like that would need to be supported heavily by other marketing channels - a PPC campaign, SEO landing page, PR etc in order reach that level of virality that speedily.
FICTION: Strategy doesn’t exist.
This one makes us laugh. Out of all the campaign ideas Emily concocts, at no point do they put together a clear marketing strategy. Emily posts content regularly that appears to be entirely disconnected from a wider marketing campaign and largely put together without research and just sweeping assumptions.
Every client at The Doers will start with a strategic marketing session before we kick off. And with good reason. You need to identify who your audience is and make sure you understand their consumer behaviour, pinpoint which channel will be right and agree the best approach to reach them. At no point would you post on social without clear purpose - it must always align with the long term marketing goals.
FACT: It’s always about who you know.
One of the things I can hard relate to Emily on, is her commitment to networking and building genuine, authentic relationships with those in her professional circle. She gets to know the people within the businesses she works with to help understand the purpose of what they do, their vision and what they stand for. In what is a very digital world, and in an industry which is swiftly becoming fraught with AI genericness, these relationships are the difference between being a good marketeer and a great one.
FACT: Harnessing UGC is a great way to build content.
In most of Emily’s campaign ideas, she integrates the importance of getting the end users involved. This is a great way to build mass affinity to a brand. We loved her campaign for Hästens (one of Jess & Laura’s old clients) of positioning their beds in dreamy locations around Paris and encouraging the public to photograph themselves in the beds and post on social media. The reality of this campaign idea is that it would’ve taken a VERY long time to get sign off from local councils on where they’d be allowed to position the beds, the weather is completely unreliable in Paris and they were uncovered and given the beds are exceptionally expensive, you’d have to question if that was the right target market…but hey, it’s TV. We’ll let that one go.
FICTION: Never discuss budgets.
In all the client meetings Emily & her team have with their clients, it’s amazing how budget is never discussed. The reality is that in these meetings, clients often want the sky high ideas but then when they realise how much they cost to run, almost immediately back down to something far more simplistic. The budgets that would be involved for the campaigns Emily runs would be in the multi million zone. Some of the event decor alone would be in excess of £500k, let alone paying influencers, catering, staffing etc. Budget is always a conversation we start with. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to deliver ideas around something unachievable.
This post was written by our Inner Circle member, Jess. If you’re in any need of Brand Marketing advice or help, do be sure to book a 30-minute discovery call.
