PR Winner of the Week: Eat24

Ever since food delivery site Eat24 posted their hilarious Dear John letter to Facebook, marketers have been waiting for the site to come crawling back to reinsert food photos in between baby pics and your high school frenemy’s mom’s status updates. But that’s not happening just yet. Eat24 recently posted another witty post about life post-Facebook, and it all seems to be just fine.

What those people who are weirdly furious about Eat24’s shunning of Facebook don’t seem to grasp is that Eat24 has not, and is not, suggesting that all brands leave Facebook. They’re just saying that their $1m strategy didn’t work for them. Marketers like to post comments in articles about Eat24 that it must be because their strategy was flawed. They cannot seem to understand that Facebook advertising simply does not work for every brand. We’ve seen that firsthand ourselves. Yes, it takes time. A lot of time. And yes, it takes money. Now it takes a whole lot more money. But the whole point of Eat24’s anti-Facebook strategy is that it’s not the right platform for them, and it’s not the right spend of that money that they clearly have. And that’s totally okay. Relax, marketers, this isn’t indicative of any larger trend and you’ll still get to bill your clients for your strategic Facebookery.

While we’ll still argue that Facebook continues to remain the top platform to reach the biggest audience, it’s not for every brand. The changes to the “algorithm” and the way that fans can now see (or not see, as it were) brand pages means that strategies have to change, and those new strategies might not include this particular platform. Instead of decrying Eat24’s marketers as “not strategic enough,” they should be praised for recognizing, via their own data, that their Facebook strategy is simply not the best fit for them and exploring other ways to engage their customers.

Facebook is clearly not going anywhere. Brand advertisement spends will likely increase due to Facebook’s changes. The big, major brands will keep spending and the upstarts and emerging brands like Eat24 will explore other options. Even if Eat24 does come crawling back to Facebook, it doesn’t mean that their experiment shouldn’t be lauded. They’ve got lots of people talking and their business seems a-ok. They’re disrupting the marketing status quo by going against the top advertising platform without making any absurd proclamations. Their blog posts are funny, never defensive or offensive, in line with their brand identity and engaging their users. And that’s how you do PR right.