GOOD CEOs: Issue 3

There’s been a lot of reminiscing about the mid-2010s lately.

• Uptown Funk on the radio.

• Everyone talking about #SquadGoals.

• Netflix and Chill hitting the mainstream.
 

But crucially (at least for this issue of GOOD CEOs) it was also the period when social media emerged as a serious way to market and build brands.

Laura Tannenbaum was at the centre of this movement, helping scale one of the first social-first creative agencies.

 
That Lot.
 

Our newsletter this fortnight is built around a conversation she and I had for our podcast - the audio sibling of this publication. In the interview, Laura lifted the lid on the ways that social has shifted in the last decade, and offered some secrets to some of her most stunning successes.

• Grew That Lot to 150 people

• Sold it to IPG / Weber Shandwick

• Joined Fabric Social as CEO

Here are a the highlights to look forward to further down the page.

 
The Laura Tannenbaum story.
Putting Fabric Social on the map,
why social got serious and
how she hit 300% year on year growth.
🌱

Predictions (and convictions).
Why organic is in,
how brands are building on social, and
getting ‘janky’.
🥴
 

Let’s get into it.

The Laura Tannenbaum story

Laura Tannenbaum co-founded That Lot with an instinct that social was about to become the predominant way to connect brands to audiences through culture. The other originators were David Schneider*, David Levin and David Beresford. Together they pioneered an approach that put emphasis on just trying things out – and channeling the magic of creativity. 

*“Smell my cheese, you mother!” Alan Partridge fans, IYKYK
 

Maybe most importantly of all: it was the moment when brands started communicating in a more human and authentic way, Laura explains.

“It was a different playbook and for social agencies – it wasn't a super saturated market. Being in that space was quite innovative, and you could just make it up as you went along,” she says. “The algorithm was pretty simple, chronological. was very much still a Facebook and Twitter era. We had comedians and reactive satire copywriters that could just be really funny and add personality to brands who hadn't historically spoken like humans.”

 
Social gets serious

For agencies that moved into this sphere early, it was a moment of zero pressure, maximum experimentation. But when clients started to recognise the commercial potential of communicating on social, things started to get real. As the agency got bigger, and picked up more projects, the founders discovered that keeping creativity as a core focus and preserving culture was key to delivering great work. And the only way to do this was through an emphasis on operations.

“Your operations are really important if you want to scale properly without losing the magic,” she says. “A strong process and ops side creates the conditions for a great culture. And it’s a great culture that enables creativity to flourish.

“If you squeeze the life out of everybody and like operate to 100% efficiency, you're going to kill what makes the magic. People need a little bit of flex, psychological safety, freedom to experiment. Like all of those things need to be intact for, for you not to become shit.”

 
Transformation journey

Laura describes two categories of clients. The ‘shop window’ sort – household names that look great as case studies in a deck. And the less glamorous kind that pay well, but might not set pulses racing in the same way. But there’s something more important than how famous or recognisable a client is, and that’s how willing they are to go on the journey of becoming a social brand.

“Having that shared align is important. It’s an ambition to be on the journey to transform into a social brand. If you have that commonality, then even a tricky or demanding client can become great to work with, because there’s an emphasis on pushing the boundaries. It’s about investing in what the mission is.”

 
Enter Fabric Social

After almost a decade of trail-blazing creative work on social, That Lot was acquired by Weber Shandwick and its parent company IPG. It’s estimated that around 75% of acquisitions don’t end well, but Laura managed to integrate her social agency into a bigger network, and That Lot is still thriving today under new leadership. 

After a brief spell as MD EMEA at New Gen, a creator and creative agency, Fabric Social piqued her interest, with its landmark work with electronics retailer Currys. You know, the “We let Gen Z write our marketing script” one? Where store assistants drop teen TikTok phrases like how certain products were “giving me life”, and how there was “no gassing” about certain things. How can have a "brat summer" at Currys, where offers are “hitting different AF”.

LOL!

 
300% year-on-year growth
 

Yep, you read that right. In the year (and a bit) that Laura has been in charge at Fabric Social that’s been the growth percentage. For an agency model, 20% is very good, while 40% would be incredible. We don’t have a word for whatever 300% is. 

How did she and the team do it?

a) Operational foundations ⚙️
“I know it sounds boring, but it’s so important. Fabric Social was quick and scrappy startup vibes - amazing and super fun. But if you're growing super quickly, that will not scale. It will break. So better processes, better visibility over the data points that you need to be able to make better decisions.

b) Non-negotiables 🙅‍♀️
“Being really clear about who we are, what we're trying to do, what we're trying to achieve. The principles that inform the path of say, what's the right client for us? What are we in the business of? getting all those answers right encourages alignment, speed, effectiveness.”

c) Momentum ⏩
“I think I've been incredibly lucky because Fabric Social was already on a great path. There was a clear ambition that we've sort of stuck with. There was no ripping up and starting again. I don’t need to crack the whip. At least, not too much.”

Predictions (and convictions)

Laura Tannenbaum sits at the sharp end of social. As CEO of Fabric Social, she sees what’s actually happening in feeds and in boardrooms every day. So when we asked her for predictions about the next phase of social, she offered something slightly different. These aren’t distant forecasts. They’re shifts already underway – patterns emerging across the platforms that many marketers are only just beginning to notice.

 
1. Organic is the starting point

2. Brands will be built on social

3. ‘Jankiness’ is in.
 

 
Prediction one:
Organic is so back

There was a time when budgets, or number of followers, determined the reach of campaign content. But Laura reckons that these factors are diminishing in a landscape where organic performance trumps everything else. Algorithms are new designed to boost content based on its own merit – or how people respond. 

“The old system relied on big bursts of investment to capture attention – but it was enforced attention,” she says. “Media spend could artificially amplify content whether audiences really cared about it or not. Now the creative itself has to earn attention.”

 
Bad content = low reach

Here’s a simple thing to remember. Your content needs to be really amazing.

“In real time, the audiences are adjudicating if this is good content, because you can see it from the engagement metrics. And then it goes way beyond your followers into the bloodstream of social, and you can completely win with great organic content,” says Laura. “Reach is only bad if you're making bad content.”

And you just need to behave more like a social brand and like you're really tapped into the ecosystem. And with the right vernacular, I think is also really important. So if you're behaving just like a corporate brand, that's not going to work.

 
Organic is the acid test

Traditional TV advertising used focus groups and audience testing ahead of big campaigns. Organic social represents a more real-time and reactive way of taking the cultural temperature, according to Laura. 

“Organic is the perfect testing ground,” she explains. “You see instantly what resonates - what language people respond to, what formats travel, what actually earns attention. So it's R&D, it's listening to what people are saying about your brand. It's really understanding how your brand is coming to life in the wild. Then you put the money behind it. You boost it, supercharge it.”

Laura uses a catchy term to articulate the difference between one-off viral phenomena versus the more sustainable, strategic stuff that creates more value over time. It’s: “flywheels rather than fireworks.”

 
Prediction two:
Brands will be built on social

There are many components that go into building a brand. There’s the visual element, the origin story, the community of people who love it. If David Oglivy’s definition still holds true, a brand is “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes”. Laura reckons that in the coming years, we’ll see more brand built entirely with social.  

“If organic is where attention is earned, then it’s also where brands are built. The businesses that understand this will treat social not as a channel, but as the engine of the brand,” she says. “It’s about building community, testing your messaging through organic, and creating mental availability - making your brand the first one that comes to mind when its time to make a purchase.”

How would this work? Laura explains: “Imagine you've just finished in the gym and you're really thirsty. What brand comes to mind? It's more about the category entry point now. These can be built in a really subtle entertaining way on social where it doesn’t feel like sales. Instead, we’re creating mental availability.”

 
Dollar shift: classic media to social

For some marketers, Laura’s thinking might sound radical. But more are starting to realise the value and effectiveness of building brands in this way. And it’s evidenced by the budgetary shift from classic and creative media shops to social. But there are teething problems still.

“The tricky thing is when you're in a room with a marketing director and they go, what's the ROI?” Laura says. “And there's no like attribution modeling or last click metric that you really get from social to be able to make the same case as you can for above the line. And social, think, is much more about resonance and like efficacy. Rather than mass reach, it’s meaningful engagements and making people feel differently about the brand. And that just looks very different.”

 
Prediction three:
Jankiness is in

This is a word we hadn’t encountered until our conversation with Laura. Jankiness refers to the look of rough-cut authenticity coming to the fore on TikTok, YouTube and elsewhere. It’s a rejection of the polished, millennial AF aesthetic that was prolific on Instagram in the 2010s. But also, its a departure from the machine-made style of AI. Imperfections - in writing and in visuals - show that a human is responsible for the content being consumed.

“We have amazing designers, but I think we have entered an era where people don't want that polished perfection in social,” says Laura. “And so it is a little bit of a tension, I suppose, because you've got classic marketers who care a lot about how their brand comes to life and how their brand is treated in social. But then you've got the true social brains who are like, no, it needs to feel really human.”

 
Jankiness creates trust

When a piece of content is unpolished, lo-fi or janky, it creates a sense of trust, according to Laura: “It’s the opposite of hyper-produced brand content,” she says. “The slightly rough edges - the quick edits, the imperfect captions, the off-the-cuff tone all signal that a real person made this. People want to feel a human behind the content. A little bit of messiness can actually make something feel more authentic and less like an ad.”