The Great Social Exodus (a thought experiment for people who will never actually do it)

A California jury earlier this week found Meta and YouTube liable for knowingly designing addictive products and aiming them at children. These days, the damages awarded — $6 million, split 70/30 toward Meta — will cover the jet fuel needed to shuttle their respective legal teams around (just about).

Their jet fuel bills are about to go a lot higher, though: There are thousands of similar lawsuits still waiting to go, a federal trial this summer and the growing realization across our industry that this is a “Big Tobacco” moment, not for people’s bodies but for their minds.

Snap and TikTok settled before trial. Perhaps they’ve read the tea leaves after Australia brewed their social media ban for under-16s late last year.

None of this, it should be noted, will likely provoke even a flicker of movement in any Q2 media plans. But it does resurrect a question the industry has been passing around at conferences for years now, always hypothetically, always over canapés, and never really with any intention of acting on the answer: If marketers pulled ad spend from social media, where would it even go?

This is just a thought experiment. Nobody is pulling anything (probably). Quarterly targets exist (definitely). But indulge me.

Search would take its customary share, as it does — Google being the financial equivalent of a sofa that swallows loose change, except the change is $200 billion a year. But Search captures demand, it does not create it. Move your social spend into search and what you may have done is bid up the cost of reaching people who were already looking for you.

CTV would make a strong case. Actual attention, actual living rooms, no user-generated content to suddenly make your cereal ad adjacent to something that requires a content moderator. The measurement is imperfect. Still, there is a certain strategic clarity in advertising on platforms that are not simultaneously the subject of lawsuits about whether they were designed to give teenagers eating disorders. One for the next brand safety audit, perhaps.

Retail media would do well, too, though this is a category where it pays to read the fine print on who exactly is selling you what. The proposition — first-party purchase data, closed-loop attribution, ads served at the point of transaction — is compelling when the retailer in question is building a media business alongside a retail business. Walmart, Tesco and their ilk are doing interesting work here. Then there is the other model, in which the retailer is also your largest competitor, your logistics provider, your marketplace operator and now — conveniently — your ad platform. Caveat emptor has rarely been more apt.

The creator economy would get a look, which is entertaining, because it is social media in a trench coat pretending to be something else. The content still lives on platforms owned by the same companies you may be theoretically trying to avoid. The difference is that instead of a 1080x1080 banner, you now have a 23-year-old holding your product up to a ring light and saying, “This is not an ad,” in a way that means it is very much probably an ad.

What about GEO/AEO, I hear you ask? Crawler consulted Mr. Claude (instead of Mr. Crawler) who advised: “Worth paying attention to. If your customers are getting answers from AI rather than a search results page, showing up in those answers matters. The problem is nobody can reliably measure it yet, and most of the current advice is just SEO in a new hat.”

Then again, Claude’s parent company recently took out ads noting that its main competitor plans to sell ads inside chatbot answers — so take the impartiality of any AI-generated advice on this topic with a pinch of salt. Including, presumably, this one.

There are, of course, even more options — audio, podcasts, digital out-of-home, gaming, sports sponsorships, cinema. But sir, this is a Crawler column. I am not paid enough to be your media consultant.

So why won’t it happen? Because social media is the devil everyone already has a contract with, and switching costs are measured not in dollars but in career risk. Has anybody ever gotten fired for buying Meta?

And the performance metrics look great — they really do — provided you’re comfortable with the fact that the platform selling you the impressions is also the one measuring them. There are also, let’s say, structural reasons why certain folks might not be in a tearing hurry to move spend away from the platforms they have the deepest commercial relationships with. But that’s a chat for another day.

The jury in Los Angeles wasn’t ruling on whether social media is effective. It was ruling on whether the product is defective. Those are very different questions, and our industry has spent a long time focused on the answer to the first question only. The verdict suggests the second one isn’t going away.

It’s OK though. This was all just a thought experiment.

Crawler is a satirical take on the biggest ad tech news of the week. It’s penned by editors of The Current, which is owned by The Trade Desk. Have your own take? Reach us at [email protected].