It’s the perfect time of the year for Tumblr to be talking turkey.
According to Tumblr CEO David Karp, his company’s platform can best its social media rivals as a place for creative marketers.
The Yahoo-owned blogging platform has recently revved up its advertising efforts and attempts to lure big brands.
Karp recently asserted that, with 400 million monthly active users the company is best placed to “show off the type of aspirational marketing campaigns that have traditionally thrived on television and in print.”
“The whole industry is obsessed with harvesting intent when, if you look at the biggest brands, they want to create intent, to get people to aspire to wear the clothes, drive the car, drink the soda,” Karp argued recently. “Right now there aren’t a lot of places in any of these digital networks which inspire people to become a customer –which they used to do with great TV and print campaigns.”
According to the Financial Times, “(Karp) said the rest of the industry is focused on direct response advertising – when a consumer is looking for a particular product – and narrow targeting, that used data to show adverts to people based on a strict set of criteria, rather than broad interests.”
While Tumblr is still considered in some circles as “being a network for teens to laugh at amusing images and read each other’s creative writing,” Karp begs to differ. More than half of its users are over 34 and 60 per cent are from outside the U.S., he argues.
“Karp said one of Tumblr’s advantages over Facebook, Instagram or Twitter was that people came to the site to consume content rather than communicate with friends or contacts,” noted the Financial Times. “So, sponsored posts were not a “jarring surprise” that took you away from a ‘personal place.’”
Tumblr was purchased by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Part of CEO Marissa Mayer’s revival plan, Tumblr has been operating semi-autonomously and is headquartered in New York. Mayer has said that Tumblr could report earnings by the end of next year, now that more than 250 “top brands” are using the platform.
