Q&A with Jack Harrington, Paid Social Lead

Joining the Paid Media team is Jack Harrington, our new Paid Social Lead! He took a break from his usual day to day tasks to talk a bit more about himself, his Paid Social experience, and what he gets up to in his spare time.

A bit about me

My first taste of using social media came when I was trying to make a living at university through night club events. I was a promotions team lead for a night club in Kingston Upon Thames, with my main weapons being an A5 flyer and a team of students. To cut a long story short, I thought it was a waste of paper and time; So when I started my own night, I did things differently and focused all my attention on buying Facebook ads without a clue what I was doing, but it worked.

Blinded by the dream of making big bucks I went into recruitment, and again thought harassing people with a phone instead of a flyer was a waste of time. I had a bad month and said enough is enough and got an intern role at a small social media agency called Immediate Future. Since then I have worked for a content agency, creative agency, brand consultancy and performance marketing agency, trying to absorb as much as I can in the process.

Some of my favourite campaigns that I’ve worked on:

Lastminute.com —  Leave or Remain (Winner of the Best Use of Social Media Advertising at the Drum Awards)

As part of a satirical campaign launched by Lastminute.com around Brexit, I planned and executed the £20,000 campaign across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Using multivariate testing of copy, assets and audiences, I achieved an average cost per view of £0.04 across all platforms with more than 1.1 million views on Twitter at a CPV of £0.005.

We exceeded the campaigns KPIs of 1.5 million views by 200K and even reimbursed the client’s remaining budget at the end of the campaign.

Fujitsu – Project Cirrus 

During this campaign, I managed the live streaming and promotion of multiple attempts to beat four wingsuit world records by a Fujitsu employee for the charity SSAFA.

The campaign consisted of daily Facebook live video diary and live footage of the jumps across a two week period.

The campaign attracted wide press coverage in the US and UK, and involved everyone from NASA to the Discovery channel, achieving more than half a million views on social media alone.

Paid Social Philosophy for Honchō

We as marketers care more about ads. The main thing is to remember people don’t go on social media to view ads. Honestly, you are not competing with other businesses, you’re competing with cat videos. For this reason, we need to make sure that our content is either funny, useful or insightful while being hyper-relevant to the consumer in order to achieve efficacy.

Not to sound cliche but we want to be half scientist half artist in our approach to Paid Social making sure that we are making data-driven decisions while not ignoring creativity.

What you do in your spare time when you’re not Paid Social Lead?

Most weekends you find me by a lake in the blistering cold trying to catch Carp, with varying levels of success. In the current climate, I’m mostly purchasing products for my next hobbies which include cycling, building miniature models (Gunpla), wood-working, music producing and trying to become a coffee barista.

Do you have a Paid Social project that we can help with? Fill out the contact form below and find out how we can reach your target audience with bespoke Paid Social campaigns.