“P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It’s Free To Advertise On Facebook” – headline last week

The new age of marketing is great news for college ministry.

Two reasons:

• Advertising is almost completely free
• It’s highly dependent on peer relationships

Every year we spend less and less on traditional advertising.

When I first came on staff with Cru we would spend hundreds of dollars on a single ad in the School Newspaper. Even as recently as 3 years ago we invested thousands on yard signs, facebook ads, and posters around campus.

Now we almost exclusively do free “advertising” on Facebook and peer-to-peer word of mouth.

This graphic does a great job summarizing this new era of Horizontal Marketing. It’s well worth clicking to read the full infographic (graphic via @mcryanmac who tweeted “This has very interesting implications for how evangelism on campus moves forward”).

“Horizonal marketing means creating a remarkable product and story and setting it up to spread from person to perso...

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The latest version of this video is doing the rounds again. One statistic that jumped out at me is that 78% of people trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust advertisements. I often ask people how many of them have clicked on a Facebook ad, or how often they click on a Facebook ad – most people never do. I then follow that up with how many click on links posted by their friends and most do quite regularly. So this statistic backs up the anecdotal evidence I have been getting, and it also makes sense as this generation is more relationally-oriented than previous generations.

The real question we need to ask though, is what implications does this have for how we communicate the gospel online?

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I loved this Superbowl ad. Great marketing. Great branding. Way to go Google.

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